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YC 2010 startup needs journalists as early users
- brandnewlow 17y agoThey're advertising for journalists on Poynter. That's definitely the place to do it! Well-played. http://careers.poynter.org/jobdetail.cfm?job=3311446 http://careers.poynter.org/jobdetail.cfm?job=3311446
- prawn 17y ago"30 openings. ... while this isn't a paid position, we only earn money if you do. (So the 30K-70K is an estimate, not a concrete figure)." Could be Mahalo or similar based on that text?
- omarchowdhury 17y agoBut the journalists here are doing more than copy and paste.
- marciovm123 17y agoGreat area to work on =)
- rms 17y agoCool!
- p0ppe 17y agoCouldn't find any info regarding your market. Are you launching worldwide right away? Journalism tends to be a fairly local thing, so targeting the right market is of some importance.
- stealthyc2010 17y agoThere isn't anything about our market, because we're not specific to any of them. If you are a journalist, write about what you are interested in. So far, we've had interest from people who write about finance, about tech, about gaming, and lots and lots of local journalists.
- mjw 17y agoSo long as you don't plan on lumping them all together into one big amorphous news website that tries to cater to all tastes but has no real editorial focus or voice. Give them tools to find / understand / build their own audience. Sounds like you're on the right track there though.
- johnrob 17y agoWhy limit the search to journalists? If my understanding is correct, Arrington didn't have any prior experience in the news industry before Techcrunch.
- stealthyc2010 17y agoIts not strictly limited to journalists, but its focus will be news, and we're looking to restrict the authors to high quality writers. While I expect to widen the platform to all comers in the long term, we'll be very careful how we do it. It'll be our equivalent of reddit's search for how to do subreddits well, and Facebook figuring out how to let everyone in.
- brandnewlow 17y agoSo it's a YC version of TrueSlant.com? Could be cool! Good luck, guys!
- stealthyc2010 17y agoYeah, similar alright. We have different outlook. The writers for our site aren't "contributors". Rather, they are the stars and we are providing a service to them.
- morisy 17y agoJournalism: Based on bringing transparency. Secretjournalismstartup: Clouded in secrecy. While this dichotomy has always been present in news media (some ink-stained retches, including yours truly, will protect scoops and anonymous sources to the grave), not knowing who is really behind this beyond people "funded and advised by YCombinator, the people behind Reddit, posterous, and Justin.tv" doesn't encourage faith. Maybe the mystique will make up for it.
- mattlong 17y agoBased on the submitter's username, stealthyc2010, it should be clear that the startup is still in "stealth mode". This is somewhat common in the tech startup world. The veil will almost assuredly be lifted before they launch.
- morisy 17y agoI completely understand that, and tried to make my comment come as a critique rather than a criticism. Two of the most important factors in how much people trust news, however, is a) the source's reputation and b) who is paying for its generation, and how. Asking journalists to potentially sign on without disclosing the latter can be a risky professional move for them, which could have a negative effect on the venture's success.
- ErrantX 17y agoAgreed. I write a reasonable amount of freelance print tech copy and have been looking for something interesting like this to move online. But the secrecy is putting me right off :(. I guess they will give you more insight via email. (getting into serious online journalism is pretty hard btw)
- stealthyc2010 17y agoWe were only trying to be secret to not build hype when the product isn't ready. Backfire! We hope you aren't put off. We are going to be as open and transparent as we can be. (I should point out in that case that I'm only using this name for consistency. I'm pbiggar on HN.)
- brandnewlow 17y agoI'm really interested to see how they'll handle liability. If they want to make a lot of money, I'm going to guess the founders won't be vetting anything before it gets published. However, if they're pushing it on Reddit, writing the checks, selling the stuff to other publishers, I'd find it hard to see a DMCA claim holding up. At that point they're doing a lot more than for their content creators than Youtube or Scribd, making them accomplices in any libel lawsuit that might come up. Will they go to the wall for one of their writers? Doubtful. So do they have a new angle on the legal side of things?
- stealthyc2010 17y agoInteresting question. I'm guessing since you ask about the DCMA you're asking about copyright. Well, we'll vet all our writers, and it should be no problem at all. We'll also delay payment of new writers so that there is no way to do some kind of grab-and-dash. Its also much much much easier to search for copyrighted material in text than in video or flash content. I can't imagine solving this will be a hard problem.
- messel 17y agoCan a centralized source provide all the specialized technical support and services a real web living news agency will need? Alternatively would Huffington Post and Techcrunch be willing to add to their tech team by paying for this service? The only differentiators I can see are: "Lead generation: get tips from your readers automatically get sources for your stories find out what stories people want to hear about, before they know themselves! Collaborate with other journalists." The other services (submit links, show ads) have questionable value. I have high hopes for a model like this though. I was looking for an open source model like a dedicated Wordpress though.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- marciovm123 17y agoany reason to hide that you're http://newslabs.com/ http://newslabs.com/? same phone number on both pages.
- p0ppe 17y agoAnd http://www.replie.com/ http://www.replie.com/
- stealthyc2010 17y agoOur original name. God I hated that, glad its gone.
- ivankirigin 17y agoDon't you think that this lacks courtesy to post a comment rather than just email them? I mean, if there were a reason (and I can think of at least 3) then you just ignored it.
- axod 17y agoFWIW I think most people would google for the phone number. I did. Trying to be stealth is just an invitation for everyone to start googling to find out all they can.
- abstractbill 17y agoYes, but there is a difference between being curious and finding out whatever you can, and posting the results of that search to a public forum - especially when the word "secret" is in the contact email address. It just seems a little unnecessarily unkind.
- ErrantX 17y agoI suspect it never really occured the grandfather - because there wasnt really any secrecy, this is a community that generally scoffs on secrecy as "a bit silly really" and there appeared to be no harm in spreading possibly interesting knowledge. Not deliberately malicious I am sure. I was going to post it too but checked myself at the last minute.
- mjw 17y agoInteresting. I have a few journalist friends (as no doubt do you guys) and pointed a couple of them at this. Sure you've seen this already, but you'll probably find that a lot of your target market (well-trained but under-employed journalists) are quite bitter and resentful that they've been reduced to this. Despite the best intentions of startups like these, ultimately they just want someone who'll give them a honest day's pay on a stable basis to get on with what they love doing, writing well-crafted stories. Not all journalists will necessarily be entrepreneurial sorts, and the ones that are will often be able to seek out geeky friends to help them out online anyway. With that in mind, there are a lot of sites out there on the internet with too-good-to-be-true sounding propositions on how they can help you make money online, build an audience etc. Once burned twice shy with these sorts of operations - often it turns out they pay you peanuts to be a cog in the wheel of a SEO-spam factory which profits them more than anyone else. Even with the best intentions just to offer people better tools on a win-win basis, it's hard to avoid coming across as scammy or profiteering when dealing with people who're feeling unemployed and vulnerable career-wise. So, I guess what I'm saying is you might really want to make sure you stand out from the crowd of "join our SEO-spam-factory and make pennies on the dollar for page impressions while we hoard pagerank" borderline-scams, both in the eyes of geeks and in the eyes of journalists who might not be able to tell the difference but just feel wary. Would need branding and marketing that really speak to journalists in their own language, not in the language of the smug social media consultant telling them what they need to change about the way work THIS week in order to carry on making a pittance online :) (edit: not that you appear to be doing that at all) (Also, speaking as a geek whose helped out journalists in the past, if the tools being offered lock you inextricably into some company's hosted ecosystem, I'd be a bit skeptical - I'd want tools I could use with an existing website where i have control - take google analytics for example - but I may not be your typical audience) Anyway hope that didn't come across too negative, I'm glad more people are taking on what's such a tricky problem!
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- robryan 17y agoProblem is journalists looking for a stable income from a high quality operation won't jump on this because it's unproven but to prove this concept you need these quality journalists. An area like this probably requires a large initial investment to give journalists who do join some job security while the site looks to build up readership.
- burtherman 17y agoI have founded a group called Hacks/Hackers at http://hackshackers.com http://hackshackers.com bringing together journalists and technologists -- sounds like a good fit with what you're doing. Let's get in touch -- also glad to hear from anyone else here interested in this space!
- ig1 17y agoI'm no expert on this area, but from what I've seen ad revenues are nowhere near high enough to pay for decent journalism. If they were we wouldn't have the pay-wall debate. Affiliate links tend to be a huge no-no because of conflicts of interest. Publications generally only buy articles if they have first right of publication. Suggesting someone can earn 30K-70K on the above basis seems over-optimistic to the point of being misleading.
- stealthyc2010 17y agoYes, we'll be working on the ad revenues. They certainly aren't high enough to support a massive media organization. They should be high enough to support a low-overhead one-man journalism show. There are other revenue streams, too. It remains to be seen which is the best for us.
- yumraj 17y ago<JOKE> How nice of them: you focus on the content. We handle making money </JOKE>
- brandnewlow 17y agoThat's the bitterness that the top commenter here referred to. The journalists I know are largely resigned to being crapped on by whoever they work for. They create all the value (similar to a programmer at a startup run by biz-ev guys) while someone makes the money and then gives them a small piece of it. They're use to getting crapped on like this. That said, they're really picky about who they let crap on them. Someone might let the HuffPo crap on them so they can share space with celebrities and get lots of hits on their story. Someone might let the NYTimes crap on them, because, it's the New York Times! So if this startup's going to run the same game, they'll need to have a good reason for journalists to want to get crapped on by them.
- stealthyc2010 17y agoNo-one is being crapped on here. I've updated the CFJ to hopefully make that a lot clearer.
- greyman 17y agoI think you nailed it. Essentially, what they are up to is to automate the content production, because that could make them (not those journalists) rich. Demand Media did it with how-to articles using SEO, now these guys wants to do that with journalism. Much harder task, IMHO. Good luck...
- stealthyc2010 17y agoThe YC motto: make something people want. Journalists do not want to be exploited for pennies, so that is not a product we would be involved in. I would not be happy getting rich by exploiting others, and newslabs won't be involved in anything like that.
- stealthyc2010 17y ago
- stealthyc2010 17y agoHi folks, we're NewsLabs (pbiggar and nchong on HN). We never intended to use secrecy to hype stuff up, just to be a bit quiet until we had more built.
- wyclif 17y agoThe are too many sites which are generic content repositories trying to eek ad revenue from google searches. We are a place of quality journalism. "Eke", you meant? Since you're "a place of quality journalism", you may want to fix that. P.S. As you can see, I'm not only a quality writer, but a quality proofreader as well. Feel free to get in touch.
- stealthyc2010 17y agoDone, thanks. Who needs spell checking when you have HN :)
- wyclif 17y agoI'd also capitalise "google". I know it can be a verb, but you're using it here as a noun.
- ananthrk 17y agoLooks like you are addressing problem [3] as explained in "Startup ideas we did like to fund" (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html). Excellent!