Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

Sounds like they have an extremely talented tech team. I'm not sure I find what they are doing to be particularly groundbreaking or interesting, though.

This is interesting considering some of the reaction to the new google news redesign: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=3b7b3632b344057f&hl=enhttp://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=3b7b36...;

Saying that traditional media mostly dies is like saying "Since there's Youtube now, movie studios and cinemas will die off".

(Yes, I get a newspaper delivered every day, and love reading it).

I get the majority of my news from BBC/other TV, news paper etc. For funny, biased news, rumors, hyperbole, mob rule etc I go to the internet.

The thing about technological progress is that the replacement is never just "the old thing, only on computers". When people in the 90s wrote about the Internet and the Digital Library, quite a lot of them were envisioning something like Google Books, which is just a collection of books, only online! What actually happened was Wikipedia. (And a lot of other stuff, all of which further proves my point, but Wikipedia is sufficient.) Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming. The Digital Library wasn't just the analog library writ large, it was something new that an analog library could never do.

Digital newspapers already exist. They are fed by RSS/Atom and do a variety of exciting things. Adding a top layer of formatting driven by a computer to make Google Reader (or your favorite RSS/Atom consumer) look like a old-style paper newspaper is a waste of time, and even worse, a waste of valuable screen space. Especially if you're going to try to write an algorithm to automatically figure out what the "top story" is, which will never be as good as a human. (And as in the first paragraph, there's also a variety of other things, like Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and all kinds of further digital elaborations on the fundamental newspaper template as modified by what digital makes easy and/or possible.)

Trying to replicate the old analog way of doing things is just silly.

News is a funny market. If you say to someone "we'll help you find interesting or relevant news articles" they'll shrug and say it isn't a problem. Keeping informed as to what is happening in the world is a solved problem - by editors.

And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC) aren't perfect they're good enough and this is a tough product to justify to users.

Additionally, changing habits is really really hard. People habitually load nytimes.com every lunch time to see what is happening in the world - and you expect to shift that habit - for a marginal improvement in life? The brand loyalty with publications is ridiculously strong, not only do I trust The Financial Times, I hate the alternatives. "You just called me a Daily Mail reader? I am literally offended."

A lot of people insist that RSS Readers are too complex, and juggling multiple sources without an RSS Reader is too hard. That's true, but in reality most people don't care. If you think about it - people use different destinations for just about everything, so it's tough to imagine why this should be consolidated.

Another small problem with this market is that algorithm aggregators become over tuned. You read six articles about BP and suddenly your newspaper is less of the brilliant news paper and more of a BP quarterly earnings report. So then you down vote a few articles and then you miss the next BP scandal a few months later.

Also with this product - I'm expected to "thumb up" interesting news articles, this hurts emotionally if I'm "thumb up-ing" a news article about six 21 year old american soldiers being limbless in Iraq. "Show me more like this?" I think not.

I think there is significant value in topic communities and curation, an example of this is the Reddit Subreddits, if you want to stay informed in Venture Capital, in Golf, or in MotoGP it's quite hard to scratch that itch and always find cool new content (eg: a few articles a day)

Ask yourself: How would you find up to date content about Fashion? Or Coeliac Disease? Or Graphic Design.

I think news needs a fundamental shift towards social consumption, I think Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have incrementally shifted this towards a social experience - which is exactly what news is about, it isn't about "being informed" per se, it's about "being informed amongst your friends" people want to look like they are in tap with what is happening in the world, and do not like having to ask their friends what they missed.