5 ms·
Svbtle is hiring to build the future of news and opinion on the web
- petercooper 14y agoWe’ve completely severed the relationship between content and revenue It's a bold claim/goal with, in my experience, a dearth of successful precedent (in cases where there is non-trivial revenue, of course) and tells me the business model will certainly be interesting.
- loceng 14y agoI assume they're expecting to get free content creation from their curated selection of blog posters, and part of to keep 'quality' up offer editorial services. I see some flaws in what they're doing so far. Will have to see how they navigate it all. Certainly be interesting is right.
- tptacek 14y agoYou don't think that when they say they're looking for people to write long-form journalism, they expect to pay people to write long-form journalism?
- revelation 14y agoIt's really hard to tell if they want to be the future PandoDaily or The New York Times.
- tptacek 14y agoIt's really hard to understand what this comment means, as it boils down to "it's really hard to tell if they want to be the worst of online journalism or a rival for the best of it". Is there some cue in the writing on this page that suggests that they're hoping to suck?
- revelation 14y agoThe one has a clear focus on tech and startups, the other has a broad network of correspondents spanning the world. In retrospect, PandoDaily would probably make me jump to "terrible journalism", too.
- tptacek 14y agoI see the conclusion I jumped to. You were just saying, "tough to see whether they're launching a tech news site or a global news site". I hope it's more like the latter! I think sites like PandoDaily have a problem similar to the one CNN has: they have a mandate to produce more news content than there is to report. In CNN's case it's because they've commandeered a 24/7 cable channel and entered into a ridiculous competition; in the tech/trade press, it's because they've got such a narrow scope --- and again, because they're in what they perceive as a winner-take-all competition with each other.
- antidaily 14y agoDustin designed PandoDaily's website. (just kidding)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nobody_nowhere 14y agocan i short this company?
- tptacek 14y agoNo, but if you'd like to make a bet on it, and are happy to lose money, I'm probably happy to put $500 on the line, winnings to charity (mine's Partners In Health). What would you like the terms to be?
- nobody_nowhere 14y agoSure! 36 months to deadpool. I'd do $200 to NGLTF.
- tptacek 14y agoYou're on. My contact info is in my profile. When I inevitably win, I'll match your dollars, because PIH is awesome. :)
- petercooper 14y agoI've totally added this to my calendar for July 2015 and will be calling you guys on it! ;-) BTW, congratulations are in order for you topping the 100k!
- phaet0n 14y agoAre you you assuming they won't pivot if necessary?
- nikcub 14y agoyou guys should set a more realistic target. it probably won't deadpool since it can be run on a very small amount of money. a target such as cumulative pageviews, or that the aggregate svbtle website will not become a major source of tech opinion (and will not break into the techmeme leaderboard[1]) [1] http://techmeme.com/lb http://techmeme.com/lb
- bslatkin 14y agoWe've completely severed the relationship between us and reality
- tptacek 14y agoI know it doesn't feel like it now, but I promise it will wear off. Next time don't take so much.
- danielpal 14y agoGreat job ad. Journalism is historically a career were people are very unhappy. This is due to many many facts, which are hinted in the post. I bet theres a lot of great journalist that will read this and would want to jump into such opportunity.
- gunter69 14y agoCool another propaganda network
- SCdF 14y agoSo I'm just a simple country lad who doesn't understand the big silicon valley city, but I really don't get svbtle. This is coming from someone who is (I imagine) part of 'the masses' who has been linked posts from there but otherwise has no involvement. It's.. a curated collection of blogs? Why can't you just have a blog? I've probably been linked a dozen or so blogs inside that network (always from HN, I've never noticed traction anywhere else), but at no point has there been any cross promotion, so the fact that it was inside svbtle barely seemed to matter. On 'barely': so far the fast majority of posts that have come out of svbtle have not actually been very good, and the curated 'we are the cream of the internet crop' pretentious feeling you get is not that positive. Basicially, for me, a blog being inside svbtle seems to have negligible effect, and that effect is a negative one. Maybe I'm missing the point though.
- natural219 14y agoI actually came here to post the exact opposite comment. I love all of the writers on svbtle, especially the ones that are linked often on HN (dcurtis, caldwell, etc), and I love the design.
- SCdF 14y agoSo that's cool, different strokes for different folks and all that, and I didn't want my trace-negative (it really is very small) opinion to be the main point. My question to you is, has the fact that it's on Svbtle changed anything about it? Do you know follow everyone on that network because you presume they will be good? So: if I was a great writer and I made a site that looked as nice would I be better or worse off compared to if I was under Svtble's umbrella?
- elithrar 14y ago> So: if I was a great writer and I made a site that looked as nice would I be better or worse off compared to if I was under Svtble's umbrella? It's a judgement the individual has to make: do the potential discovery/cross-promotion benefits (which do not seem to be clear just now) of Svbtle outweight the potential issue with getting buried amongst a sea of other great writers?
- wmf 14y ago"make something noteworthy" — interesting choice of words. Nothing is noteworthy until Svbtle chooses to take note of it.
- marcamillion 14y agoErr....what? Am I missing something here? While I know Dustin is a "design genius"...did he raise some money or is there some monetization plan (in the short term) that I am not aware of? I mean, I fully agree with the premise of the current state of journalism. This solution does seem awesome - it's one of the reasons I love The Economist. But as a potential writer, I am not keen on necessarily jumping into something where I don't know what the future might look like.
- Zaheer 14y agoBeautiful format and great bloggers. I love the sheer simplicity of the site and focus on quality content. Every time I'm linked to Svbtle blog I am really genuinely interested on what the writer has to offer because you've done a great job of maintaining quality. Looking forward to these new writers!
- mvzink 14y agoBased on Curtis' explanation of Svbtle[1], I took "the essence of blogging" to be more in the graphical design sense. I wonder what Curtis (and who else is behind Svbtle?) imagines "the future of news and opinion" looks like, and whether he's/they're thinking about it in the socioeconomopolitical sense as well as the graphical design sense. [1] http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle
- mvzink 14y agoOn another, unrelated note, I'm excited to see a company whose first hiring post on HN is for writers and reporters, not engineers. Interesting times!
- vipervpn 14y agoLove the design of the blog. It's brilliant. So swish. The problem is they all look the same, and it kills the branding aspect of it. Still, there is a very clever plan unfolding and it's pretty cool. Look forward to seeing more.
- malandrew 14y agoI get the impression that Svbtle is more trying to be the TED network of blogging (with a focus only on the T and not the ED right now), since most of the people who've been invited to participate are accomplished in tech some way.
- trevorturk 14y agoI'll stick to 9rules.com, thank you very much
- pbiggar 14y agoWhen I read this, I see my old YC2010 startup NewsLabs/NewsTilt. I maintain that was a good idea, but I wasn't the one to do it. My lessons are at http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down, and it looks like Dustin has a handle on most of it. Dustin has a lot that we didn't - a good sense of design, a large following, writers already contributing, and from the look of this, some cash. We had writers too, but they were checking out the latest fad, not actually writing for their own purposes. We didnt have the followers/brand awareness to bootstrap traffic - I think svbtle does. I think he's doing some of the things which for us were mistakes, but they might not be in the context of svbtle. For example, we also made our own CMS instead of using wordpress. That was definitely a mistake for us, but I'm not convinced it is here - could go either way. He's making the branding all about svbtle instead of about the journalist. That was definitely a mistake for us, again I'm not positive it is a mistake here - svbtle actually has a brand (even if some people think its a pretentious one). He's making it about journalism instead of about blogging. I think that's a mistake. Journalism is a horrible niche to be in and I would hate to be a journalist. It has expectation of journalistic purity and a hypocritical hype machine around traffic. Better to be a blog network - I think it's closer to what svbtle is now and I believe that has the potential to be bigger than just journalism. We werent motivated by journalism - I've never heard of Dustin being either. I think he made svbtle to be a better blog, so why not focus on that? I could be wrong here - I dont know Dustin well at all. I think they're aiming for the right level of writer - definitely those who want to make something for themselves. We didnt: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/#worse-is-better http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down... Anyway, this looks like it might work. I cringe when I read about it because it brings back the awful memories of a failed startup, but I could see this succeeding. Best of luck Dvstin!