YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
ycombinator.com
YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#2I've asked all my j-school (USC, Columbia, UNC, Berkeley) friends and they don't know. Most are just switching focus into media (ie, broadcasting) studies.
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#3I'm interested in the opinion of HN readers: PG says 'start from how to make money'; should j-startups be starting from advertising, or paywalls, or something else entirely?
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#4This sounds very similar to what my company already does:
http://hubpages.com
Google Knol has not done well in this space: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757287
America Online seems to be shooting for something similar: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/29/aol-newsroom-now-has-wo...
There's also squidoo and mahalo. Mahalo has recently done quite well in terms of growing traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/mahalo.com
It will be very interesting to see what startups emerge from this!
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#5This is particularly interesting as a RFS because Paul Graham's support will get you publicity from the beginning, and if there is a social aspect to your new news model, it will be able to get around the chicken-and-the-egg problem of being able to attract initial users.
Best of luck to the takers, but I would guess that the future of journalism looks like TechCrunch: organized by topic rather than by location, not particularly unbiased, and much smaller in terms of both number of employees and size of profits.
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#6I'm interested in the opinion of HN readers: PG says 'start from how to make money'; should j-startups be starting from advertising, or paywalls, or something else entirely?
Information, when properly applied, yields a competitive advantage. The next Bloomberg.
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#7Sounds like subscription-only reddit wherein some algo flags trends and topics of interest for which the staff writer(s) then crank out quickly-researched / fact-checked summaries (possibly also scanning other aggregators / twitter / etc for discernible trends and dispatching a human to investigate + summarize, also).
If that's what it is it seems like a poor investment; hopefully it's something better.
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#8I wrote about this briefly a few weeks back. Got no karma love, but I don't think I was far from what YC is looking for.
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#9check out http://www.pegasusnews.com/
Their founder really gets it and they're doing well. (Acquired already too, with the founding team still committed to success).
Re: YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
#10Aside from crawlers, aggregators, CMSs, etc., I don't see how a small team of programmers without any kind of editorial insight can really do anything innovative for journalism. The real problem lies in the content, not the distribution channels or monetization models. Technical solutions that ignore what readers want won't succeed.
Look at Drudge Report for case in point: Drudge Report is one of the most successful news websites out there, and it is completely powered by editorial vision. Also, The Washington Post, WSJ (online), and The Economist are doing well because readers value the content. They aren't doing anything drastically different in terms of business models or distribution methods.
All the newspapers with poor content are going under for a good reason IMO. Let it happen, no one needs to save them. A handful of programmers from YC aren't going to shape the future of journalism, journalists will.