4 ms·

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 aggregator

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.

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.