4 ms·

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 organi

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.

jaredwiener 2y ago
My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us -- there's a definite gap in between how important we think news is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly. Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better. It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order. We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.) We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc. Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news https://journalists.forth.news) Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  On local: speaking with a friend who finally ditched their own long-standing subscription to a clearly-walking-dead local paper, the one element most missed was coverage of local arts and culture events. Even a national publication might be able to address that with a few regional editions which focus on events in major cities. For, say, the NYT, covering LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and perhaps Houston or Dallas, might at least give a proxy of regional coverage, and I'm aware that at least some papers do offer a regionalised edition for at least some places. Sounds as if you're doing more news aggregation than news production, which ... doesn't seem to get at the question of how to actually get local news produced in the first place. That's a long-standing challenge. From what I've read of news history local newspapers pretty much always did function as both a local challenge on national/international reporting (usually through wire services) with a gloss of local coverage and advertising. This also meant that by subscribing to the local paper, readers were getting national stories and features. Often stories would run in multiple papers nationally with small elements changed to fit or feature locations or features specific to a local paper's readership. With Internet-based distribution, much of that's disintermediated, as you note. Glancing over your homepage: what I'd like to see is an arrangement that groups similar topics together, rather than a random sequence of stories. See Postman's description of the contextless news wire (I think that's in Amusing Ourselves to Death). And I've dropped you an email, check your spam folder ;-)

jaredwiener 2y ago

My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us -- there's a definite gap in between how important we think news is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly. Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better. It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order. We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.) We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc. Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news https://journalists.forth.news) Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.

dredmorbius 2y ago
On local: speaking with a friend who finally ditched their own long-standing subscription to a clearly-walking-dead local paper, the one element most missed was coverage of local arts and culture events. Even a national publication might be able to address that with a few regional editions which focus on events in major cities. For, say, the NYT, covering LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and perhaps Houston or Dallas, might at least give a proxy of regional coverage, and I'm aware that at least some papers do offer a regionalised edition for at least some places. Sounds as if you're doing more news aggregation than news production, which ... doesn't seem to get at the question of how to actually get local news produced in the first place. That's a long-standing challenge. From what I've read of news history local newspapers pretty much always did function as both a local challenge on national/international reporting (usually through wire services) with a gloss of local coverage and advertising. This also meant that by subscribing to the local paper, readers were getting national stories and features. Often stories would run in multiple papers nationally with small elements changed to fit or feature locations or features specific to a local paper's readership. With Internet-based distribution, much of that's disintermediated, as you note. Glancing over your homepage: what I'd like to see is an arrangement that groups similar topics together, rather than a random sequence of stories. See Postman's description of the contextless news wire (I think that's in Amusing Ourselves to Death). And I've dropped you an email, check your spam folder ;-)