4 ms·
Ask YC: Whatever happened to "The Future of News" RFS?
Whatever happened to "The Future of News" RFS.
http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html
Did any startups do serious work on this?
These two articles today reminded me about it:
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/21/read-all-about-it-great-american-newspapers-headed-for-oblivion/?iid=A_F_News
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/21/news-aggregators-score-a-big-win/?iid=A_F_News
- ianterrell 15y agoNewsTilt (formerly NewsLabs) was shut down fairly quickly. Here's the deets: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/ http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...
- ashraful 15y agoI was working on an idea for this RFS myself. Basically it was an itunes model for news. Users could purchase a single news item (called a newslet) and by doing so you would get access to all published and unpublished information that are associated to that news topic. Unfortunately, the only dev working on this with me left for greener pastures and so I'm left working on this alone. I am a web designer with limited coding skills, so I would not expect this project to launch anytime soon. Here's a sneak peek at it though: http://i.imgur.com/1Ltoz.png http://i.imgur.com/1Ltoz.png
- salman89 15y agoI think the problem is that internet users have generally become accustomed to the idea that written content, especially news, on the internet should be free (supported by ad revenue). When ad revenue cannot support high quality writing, the quality of journalism generally goes down (compare the news you can read at AOL vs a print issue of The Economist). The challenge is to create some value proposition that internet users will pay for news content - I will be very interested to see how magazine subscriptions perform on the iPad (and other tablet formats). Obviously magazine subscribers would be the best market to go after as they are the users who already are paying for written content.