4 ms·

I can see where you are coming from with your call for quality content, but lets question this for a minute. I don't see much new in the world now vs 15 years

by ntoshev 17y ago

I can see where you are coming from with your call for quality content, but lets question this for a minute. I don't see much new in the world now vs 15 years ago that would shift the economics to high quality publishing. Technology and the internet can provide a better platform for crowdsourcing journalism or easier dissemination and aggregation of information, but these are different from just creating and consuming high quality content. I think what's new is the ability to personalize the information. One way to think about it is that industrial revolution was all about economical mass production, and one of the first things to be mass produced was written text with the help of the Gutenberg press. No one knows what information revolution is really about yet, but one of the promises is economical mass customization, and the news is a perfect first candidate for this (more distant candidates being economically producing clothes that fit you perfectly, for example). In a related area, Google seems to think they have mostly exhausted the opportunities to improve their search results in the same way for everyone: they have employed IP geolocation for ages and now they even track your search history by default in order to show you different results from what everyone else is seeing.

coffeemug 17y ago
I don't see much new in the world now vs 15 years ago that would shift the economics to high quality publishing. It seems to me that all the content aggregators and time-sensitive information availability via Twitter made news a commodity - there is nothing differentiating a Yahoo news article from a CNN article from an MSNBC article, from Twitter's trending topics feed. So how can a paper differentiate itself but to provide quality content? I think what's new is the ability to personalize the information. I agree, but I think it's only one piece of the puzzle. A "YouTube for value-added written content" would effectively be a publishing platform that connects freelance writers, content production organizations (like newspapers), and guest authors to their audience. Such a platform would have far more content than any given person could possibly consume, so it would need a personalization system (based on search, a data mining recommendation engine, etc.) But before you get there you have to build a compelling enough platform for good writers to switch to. There's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem here, so it would require a lot of seeding work to be done. Of course this is just my view of it. It seems pretty clear to me, but there have been lots of things that seemed pretty clear that turned out to be completely wrong :)
- ntoshev 17y ago
  there is nothing differentiating a Yahoo news article from a CNN article from an MSNBC article 15 years ago you could say the same thing about different newspapers instead of sites. The publishing platform you describe is a compelling vision, but it is important to understand the differences from what we have now: e.g. Blogger.com, or the web as a whole as a publishing platform with aggregators like Digg/Reddit/HN trying to single out the high quality articles from that. If writing for your platform is important, it must provide some tangible benefit, like a way to achieve consistent style or quality or dealing with some metadata not available on the web. Of course everything I say may be nonsense as I am trying to understand the problem space myself.
  - coffeemug 17y ago
    15 years ago you could say the same thing about different newspapers instead of sites. That is true, but it didn't matter than because the publishing technology for newspapers limits them to a small geographic area. So old-style newspapers only compete (and have to differentiate themselves with) other newspapers in the area, not all newspapers in the country. This is what kept them going. It's no longer true today, which is what made news a commodity.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
I think one way to be commercially successful is to further differentiate the market for news based on news viewers. People want to be sheltered from news which goes against their beliefs. Currently, the segregation of news sources does an adequate job of this. Right wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution, left wingers read the NYT and never need to learn about climategate. See also the reddit downmodsquad. But this filtering scheme is pretty weak. I think the next stage in news is pure entertainment and ideological reinforcement. Ignoring ethics, this is what most people want. (The only exception I can see is people who might be punished by the market for incorrect facts and the intellectually honest. But such people are a small minority.)
- ntoshev 17y ago
  Good point. Even without intentionally aiming for this, a good recommendation system for news would automatically drift towards confirming readers' beliefs (because this is what they will say they like). Most people don't hold extreme points of view on any subject though, it's just that zealots are most vocal.
- anamax 17y ago
  > Right wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution Stereotype much? (BTW - There are several "right"s in the US, and only one of them, a fairly small one at that, disagrees with evolution. Others do think that teaching preschoolers how to fist is objectionable, but it's not clear that fisting has much to do with evolution.) It turns out that Limbaugh etc often cite NYT articles. I'd guess that a reasonable number of folks actually followup on such cites. The reverse - not so much. Otherwise "good people" wouldn't assume that "the right" is as cocooned as they are.

by ntoshev 17y ago

coffeemug 17y ago

I don't see much new in the world now vs 15 years ago that would shift the economics to high quality publishing. It seems to me that all the content aggregators and time-sensitive information availability via Twitter made news a commodity - there is nothing differentiating a Yahoo news article from a CNN article from an MSNBC article, from Twitter's trending topics feed. So how can a paper differentiate itself but to provide quality content? I think what's new is the ability to personalize the information. I agree, but I think it's only one piece of the puzzle. A "YouTube for value-added written content" would effectively be a publishing platform that connects freelance writers, content production organizations (like newspapers), and guest authors to their audience. Such a platform would have far more content than any given person could possibly consume, so it would need a personalization system (based on search, a data mining recommendation engine, etc.) But before you get there you have to build a compelling enough platform for good writers to switch to. There's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem here, so it would require a lot of seeding work to be done. Of course this is just my view of it. It seems pretty clear to me, but there have been lots of things that seemed pretty clear that turned out to be completely wrong :)

ntoshev 17y ago
there is nothing differentiating a Yahoo news article from a CNN article from an MSNBC article 15 years ago you could say the same thing about different newspapers instead of sites. The publishing platform you describe is a compelling vision, but it is important to understand the differences from what we have now: e.g. Blogger.com, or the web as a whole as a publishing platform with aggregators like Digg/Reddit/HN trying to single out the high quality articles from that. If writing for your platform is important, it must provide some tangible benefit, like a way to achieve consistent style or quality or dealing with some metadata not available on the web. Of course everything I say may be nonsense as I am trying to understand the problem space myself.
- coffeemug 17y ago
  15 years ago you could say the same thing about different newspapers instead of sites. That is true, but it didn't matter than because the publishing technology for newspapers limits them to a small geographic area. So old-style newspapers only compete (and have to differentiate themselves with) other newspapers in the area, not all newspapers in the country. This is what kept them going. It's no longer true today, which is what made news a commodity.

yummyfajitas 17y ago

I think one way to be commercially successful is to further differentiate the market for news based on news viewers. People want to be sheltered from news which goes against their beliefs. Currently, the segregation of news sources does an adequate job of this. Right wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution, left wingers read the NYT and never need to learn about climategate. See also the reddit downmodsquad. But this filtering scheme is pretty weak. I think the next stage in news is pure entertainment and ideological reinforcement. Ignoring ethics, this is what most people want. (The only exception I can see is people who might be punished by the market for incorrect facts and the intellectually honest. But such people are a small minority.)

ntoshev 17y ago
Good point. Even without intentionally aiming for this, a good recommendation system for news would automatically drift towards confirming readers' beliefs (because this is what they will say they like). Most people don't hold extreme points of view on any subject though, it's just that zealots are most vocal.
anamax 17y ago
> Right wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution Stereotype much? (BTW - There are several "right"s in the US, and only one of them, a fairly small one at that, disagrees with evolution. Others do think that teaching preschoolers how to fist is objectionable, but it's not clear that fisting has much to do with evolution.) It turns out that Limbaugh etc often cite NYT articles. I'd guess that a reasonable number of folks actually followup on such cites. The reverse - not so much. Otherwise "good people" wouldn't assume that "the right" is as cocooned as they are.