4 ms·

For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup for news. (More on that below.

For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup for news. (More on that below.) But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably did pay for news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc. The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it online and advertise against it? That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators. These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great! Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit. There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news homepages -- because the links go to articles. Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw the same number of ads, and they had value. Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize. They cannot monetize if you don't click. If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes the story -- you give the user little reason to click through. There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most newsworthy. Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard. They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the shoeleather reporting, they just type. -- As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people doing the reporting.

throwadobe 2y ago
It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John Doe on Twitter. I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!
dredmorbius 2y ago
You're actually addressing a few points I'd not covered in my piece, key being how people access news. I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1] That said, my practice is probably not typical. I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most. It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits. I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.) I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid? What's success look like? Failure? ________________________________ Notes: 1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.

throwadobe 2y ago

It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John Doe on Twitter. I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!

dredmorbius 2y ago

You're actually addressing a few points I'd not covered in my piece, key being how people access news. I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1] That said, my practice is probably not typical. I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most. It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits. I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.) I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid? What's success look like? Failure? ________________________________ Notes: 1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.