10 ms·

Online News is Broken

32 points by sandimac 14y ago

lutusp 14y ago
The black text on a dark gray background pretty much told me all I needed to know about the site's designer, but when I got to the first gray text on a dark grey background, I bailed. What, pray tell, is wrong with black text on a white background? Or at the very least, personal tastes being what they are, any significant contrast between text and background?
- ExpiredLink 14y ago
  I use the zap colors bookmarklet: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
- onecaseman 14y ago
  It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see. Perhaps it looks different on different computers. I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see. Let's let readers judge for themselves: http://i.imgur.com/6Qtch.png http://i.imgur.com/6Qtch.png That's gray. > Perhaps it looks different on different computers. Yes -- something that's not true for black text on a white background. > I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal. In that case, a more conventional design might be a better choice -- one in which the contrast between text and background is sufficient to render your pages readable. I've always favored sites that set themselves apart with their atypical content rather than their atypical color choices. There are many examples of practical color choices. Everywhere you look, there are sites with reasonable choices. HN, for example. Or visit the most popular web sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites Notice anything? All of them have black text on a white or very light background. No exceptions. More on this topic: http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
- mikestew 14y ago
  Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic, but it seems relevant to me. I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    I agree, this should not be down-voted per se, as its not really an "ad-hominem" atack on the article, given the subject matter. Its a fair critique on readability. "Readability" is central to the discussion for a bunch of reasons: (1) <cost> The "brain damage factor" is relevant tradeoff to consider, if and when present; (2) <information efficiency> or lack thereof is a nother key determinant of success; and (3) <threshold competence> failing to understand (1) & (2) damages credibility ever-so-slightly. Let us not forget the subject: competition, criteria, and selection of optimal media platforms. Finally, this article // is a bit // <Exit through the Gift Shop> // with its finish.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic ... I regularly see HN posts get downvoted simply for being negative, regardless of the topic. In this case, I think the criticism is both justified and constructive. And I see you agree. :) > I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading. I think it's an age thing. There's a certain age at which adorning oneself in dark colors makes one cool, above it all. And designing one's pages according to accepted norms makes one a sell-out. I would be more certain about this were it not for the fact that I am so old that, not only was there no Internet when I was young, there wasn't even FM radio. :)
jeremymims 14y ago
None of these are the reasons that online news is broken. Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content. This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the ads. "Wow, look how much nicer it looks! We're totally saving journalism." They aren't. They don't have to pay to produce content, so they can repackage it inexpensively or for free. The truth is more people are reading the news now than ever before. 16 million people read The New York Times online last month. The print publication peaks at just over 2,000,000 on Sundays. We don't need better social crowdsourcing of stories. We need more ways to pay for great content.
- joeconway 14y ago
  A great example of this working are the Kindle editions where I can take a publicly available blog with an RSS feed and yet still feel completely content paying for issues to be sent directly to my Kindle rather than writing scripts or using services to do the same task.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rsingel 14y ago
  Jeremy is absolutely right here from the perspective of news organizations (which his company OwnLocal is trying help solve). There's a lot of experimentation going on - paywalls, porous paywalls, conferences and events (e.g. Techcrunch and the Atlantic), premium programs without paywalls (Reddit, Ars), sponsored content, syndication schemes, sponsored sections, etc. But as for readers, while there's an evergrowing way to to discover, follow, and comment on news. HN, Reddit, Twitter, FB, among other social sites continue to grow. There's some algorithmic approaches to finding you personalized news (which has been tried MANY times), but there's a few good ones out there including Prismatic and the soon-to-be released Prismatic. (Yes, I'm leaving out those who write for reasons other than direct money, but right now, online tools seem to be doing many of the quality writers pretty well - though I'm sure there are "C-list" bloggers who don't get the exposure they ought to). So, the OP might be solving a portion of readers' problems - the overload and context problem, but Mims is dead-on -- the real problem with online news is how can you make enough money to pay smart people to write great stories in a world where advertisers have millions of other places to put their ads at prices much cheaper than what a news org needs to fund journalism like this: http://on.wsj.com/Qyu1DF http://on.wsj.com/Qyu1DF
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
joeconway 14y ago
It really feels like this person has never gone on Reddit, despite it seemingly being a large competitor. The problems that plagued Digg do not apply as much to Reddit as there is less gaming the algorithms or superusers. Not to say they don't exist, but they are less of a problem. With regards to the inability to 'make it' as a normal user, look at the front page at any time and see how many posts mention their surprise at making it to the front page.
- onecaseman 14y ago
  Yeah, I for space reasons I treated them as more similar than they are. Definitely a weakness of the post. My problems with Reddit are more my lack of ability to use it to filter only relevant content for me and strip out, for lack of a better phrase, the "geek content" that's always on its home page. Just seems really hard for a non-tech guy to navigate/get value out of. My concern is not getting content there, but being able to only read the right content for me as a user.
  - skymt 14y ago
    Reddit's mechanism for filtering content is "subreddit" subscriptions. For example if you're only interested in links about movies and music, you subscribe to the subreddits for those subjects. Of course, as Reddit's demographic is geeky, so is its taste in entertainment, so the best that'll get you is geeky movies and music. The big killer feature that could have helped is user-created subreddits. You could create reddit.com/r/quibb, run it on an invite-only basis, and moderate the submitted content to keep it close to your ideals. Of course, that would only solve the problems of content and membership; it would do nothing to fix Reddit's design. You're right that Reddit does context poorly. Perhaps you should look at Metafilter as an example of how to add context to aggregated news. Take this post for (an exceptionally long) example: [http://metafilter.com/120387 http://metafilter.com/120387] It has a single main link summarized above the fold, with a large amount of historical context and supplemental links below it. Most posts to Metafilter don't go quite that deep, but almost all provide at least one or two extra links on the subject.
    - 14y ago
benologist 14y ago
This conflates two issues. Online news being broken which I agree with emphatically, and online news discovery being broken and solved by limiting your sharing to a specific group of people which I'm skeptical about since I'm not sure how that's different to what existing giants in that space do. Online news need a whole new revenue model that can support and encourage quality journalism instead of chasing ad impressions that encourages or perhaps demands the AOL-ification / Demand Media-ization that makes "news" a byproduct of an SEO and link bait game.
- enfinity8 14y ago
  Watch nwzPaper...the revenue innovation is on the way!
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
The Financial Times has great journalism. It costs me $300+/year. I also love The Economist. It costs $100+/year. They could both probably hike rates without a noticeable attrition is readers. Luckily for me there is a market for premium financial journalism (the recognisable sources cited poll at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of annual cost). For other types of news, however, my willingness to pay for quality is too small a market. In the space left behind we get people cribbing about news aggregators and paywalls.
crazygringo 14y ago
> "news is ... at a fast and furious pace, without a lot of context, and largely filled with what companies want to get out instead of what they don’t want to get out." High-quality news with high-quality context and interpretation can only really be generated by highly-paid, extremely educated and learned journalists. And it takes time to research and write -- you can't get quality analysis and context 2 hours after an event. The best example of quality reporting that comes to mind for weekly news is The Economist. Although there is also some excellent long-form journalism in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, etc. And if we're talking about online, for me the whole point of Instapaper is to bookmark these articles to read later. And I really don't see how crowd-sourced content is the future for news. Most good Wikipedia articles take months if not years to build up. I just don't see how approaching the quality level of The Economist is possible with crowd-sourcing. The kind of people who have the kind of extreme skills and education to write at that level, do it for a living, not for fun on the Internet.
- Kroem3r 14y ago
  The Economist has a distinct and significant point of view. If you can assess their material appropriately, it is an excellent weekly. There are stacks and stacks of excellent periodicals. You've named a few rather "pop" publications; if you want, you could stretch out for The NY Review of Books or Foreign Affairs. Both are characterized by having highly authoritative contributors writing long pieces and great editing.
brador 14y ago
I suggest the next step is crowd sourced expert curation. Some of the most popular posts on Reddit are where an expert enters the comments and lays the article bare for the masses. This is valuable. I'd pay for this. But, and it's a big one, experts aren't cheap and their time is scarce. They're not going to curate content for free all day like Reddits 12 year olds and the granularity of expertise means you'll never cover everything with a small number of experts. Two solutions: volume through scale to fund expert curation or find a way to gather and have them work for free. Maybe the research journal system could be used to provide non-financial incentives?
- petercooper 14y ago
  I don't know if this is quite what you mean but I've been doing something like this for a couple of years now and am bringing in decent revenues doing it. One example: http://javascriptweekly.com/ http://javascriptweekly.com/ .. and an actual issue: http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html .. I have almost 80,000 subscribers to publications like this now and people seem to keep wanting more (so I'm looking for and bringing in expert curators, as you suggest, since I'm close to exhausting my topic range).
  - brador 14y ago
    How do you get subscribers / traffic to reach 80k? Paid ads?
    - petercooper 14y ago
      Initially it was because I run/ran the most popular Ruby blog so the first couple of thousand subscribers came almost exclusively that way - http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-my-foray-into-e-mail-newsletters.html http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-m... - but since then it has been primarily a case of word of mouth and "domino" growth. For example, many Ruby developers are into Rails. And many of those are into JavaScript. So I branched out into a JavaScript newsletter too and had a few thousand subscribers quickly. Nice (and unsolicited!) words from people like Steve Souders and Paul Irish helped with testimonials and it grew from there. The next domino was HTML5 which was of interest to both JavaScript and Ruby people. So that one has grown even more quickly. And so on.. :)
enfinity8 14y ago
nwzPaper.com is fixing it. Setup a journalist profile, publish an article and spread the word. http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4 http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4
- halayli 14y ago
  I will assume you are trolling.
  - enfinity8 14y ago
    For users. This is on topic as nwzPaper just launched the core platform to rebuild the news business. What's the problem, isn't this a place to discuss technology innovation?
    - namidark 14y ago
      Your website is barely usable, half the links don't work or do anything, and there are 3 articles. And you've spammed this article multiple times. You're hardly rebuilding the news business. - An information distributor that is neutral on the content message. Like Google News or any other hundred of news aggregators? - A platform that empowers the journalist to decide what to write, when to publish and makes the journalist subject only to the market forces of his or her subscribers. Like a blog? - A subscriber experience that offers everything in a familiar format, in one place and leaves the choices of who and what to read up to you. An aggregator again? You haven't solved anything that is a real problem (such as how to pay for quality journalism).
      - enfinity8 14y ago
        Respectfully, sir, you don't understand what you are talking about. If you had ever built something from nothing, as in, before the first line of code you wouldn't be speaking with your tone. Arrogance in the extreme! Every link works. There are three million+ locations built into the system to organize content geospatially. When you speak of a broken link, did you get a 404? No! You received no content because you and the other 7 billion people on earth haven't learned what it is and contributed information to your community. nwzPaper is not another aggregator crawling the web for content. Everything a user contributes is published to our system and that's what enables real-time content publishing around the world. It's all nuance that somehow went over your head. The blogs you speak of are toast because of the legal distinction the courts have made between bloggers and journalists. The blogosphere is structurally broken because it has no adhesive beyond a search engine and lacks he ability to have a uniform audit facility for users and their content. Try again. You are the enemy of innovation.
kmfrk 14y ago
I'm so sick of the "curation" discussion - if companies like NYT go belly-up, there won't be anything for Huffington Post et al. to "curate". It's inherently derivative. The clip of NYT's David Carr discussing this in a debate in the documentary Page One is unavailable, but I encourage people to watch it. Clayton Cubitt originally described professionalism versus amateurism very well, but this will do: “Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.h... It bothers me that people equate "news" and "journalism".
- enfinity8 14y ago
  News and journalism are the same information content. Curation is distinct from production and the world will be fine without the NYT. Thanks for the downvote, pal. Empty complaints and no intellectual contribution.
natrius 14y ago
If you agree that online news is broken and want to help fix it, I'd love to hear from you. I'm attempting to fix it by both improving content and improving revenue. It's a fun problem to work on. niran@niran.org

32 points by sandimac 14y ago

The black text on a dark gray background pretty much told me all I needed to know about the site's designer, but when I got to the first gray text on a dark grey background, I bailed. What, pray tell, is wrong with black text on a white background? Or at the very least, personal tastes being what they are, any significant contrast between text and background?

ExpiredLink 14y ago
I use the zap colors bookmarklet: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
onecaseman 14y ago
It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see. Perhaps it looks different on different computers. I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see. Let's let readers judge for themselves: http://i.imgur.com/6Qtch.png http://i.imgur.com/6Qtch.png That's gray. > Perhaps it looks different on different computers. Yes -- something that's not true for black text on a white background. > I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal. In that case, a more conventional design might be a better choice -- one in which the contrast between text and background is sufficient to render your pages readable. I've always favored sites that set themselves apart with their atypical content rather than their atypical color choices. There are many examples of practical color choices. Everywhere you look, there are sites with reasonable choices. HN, for example. Or visit the most popular web sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites Notice anything? All of them have black text on a white or very light background. No exceptions. More on this topic: http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
mikestew 14y ago
Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic, but it seems relevant to me. I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading.
- 001sky 14y ago
  I agree, this should not be down-voted per se, as its not really an "ad-hominem" atack on the article, given the subject matter. Its a fair critique on readability. "Readability" is central to the discussion for a bunch of reasons: (1) <cost> The "brain damage factor" is relevant tradeoff to consider, if and when present; (2) <information efficiency> or lack thereof is a nother key determinant of success; and (3) <threshold competence> failing to understand (1) & (2) damages credibility ever-so-slightly. Let us not forget the subject: competition, criteria, and selection of optimal media platforms. Finally, this article // is a bit // <Exit through the Gift Shop> // with its finish.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic ... I regularly see HN posts get downvoted simply for being negative, regardless of the topic. In this case, I think the criticism is both justified and constructive. And I see you agree. :) > I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading. I think it's an age thing. There's a certain age at which adorning oneself in dark colors makes one cool, above it all. And designing one's pages according to accepted norms makes one a sell-out. I would be more certain about this were it not for the fact that I am so old that, not only was there no Internet when I was young, there wasn't even FM radio. :)

jeremymims 14y ago

None of these are the reasons that online news is broken. Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content. This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the ads. "Wow, look how much nicer it looks! We're totally saving journalism." They aren't. They don't have to pay to produce content, so they can repackage it inexpensively or for free. The truth is more people are reading the news now than ever before. 16 million people read The New York Times online last month. The print publication peaks at just over 2,000,000 on Sundays. We don't need better social crowdsourcing of stories. We need more ways to pay for great content.

joeconway 14y ago
A great example of this working are the Kindle editions where I can take a publicly available blog with an RSS feed and yet still feel completely content paying for issues to be sent directly to my Kindle rather than writing scripts or using services to do the same task.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rsingel 14y ago
Jeremy is absolutely right here from the perspective of news organizations (which his company OwnLocal is trying help solve). There's a lot of experimentation going on - paywalls, porous paywalls, conferences and events (e.g. Techcrunch and the Atlantic), premium programs without paywalls (Reddit, Ars), sponsored content, syndication schemes, sponsored sections, etc. But as for readers, while there's an evergrowing way to to discover, follow, and comment on news. HN, Reddit, Twitter, FB, among other social sites continue to grow. There's some algorithmic approaches to finding you personalized news (which has been tried MANY times), but there's a few good ones out there including Prismatic and the soon-to-be released Prismatic. (Yes, I'm leaving out those who write for reasons other than direct money, but right now, online tools seem to be doing many of the quality writers pretty well - though I'm sure there are "C-list" bloggers who don't get the exposure they ought to). So, the OP might be solving a portion of readers' problems - the overload and context problem, but Mims is dead-on -- the real problem with online news is how can you make enough money to pay smart people to write great stories in a world where advertisers have millions of other places to put their ads at prices much cheaper than what a news org needs to fund journalism like this: http://on.wsj.com/Qyu1DF http://on.wsj.com/Qyu1DF

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

joeconway 14y ago

It really feels like this person has never gone on Reddit, despite it seemingly being a large competitor. The problems that plagued Digg do not apply as much to Reddit as there is less gaming the algorithms or superusers. Not to say they don't exist, but they are less of a problem. With regards to the inability to 'make it' as a normal user, look at the front page at any time and see how many posts mention their surprise at making it to the front page.

onecaseman 14y ago
Yeah, I for space reasons I treated them as more similar than they are. Definitely a weakness of the post. My problems with Reddit are more my lack of ability to use it to filter only relevant content for me and strip out, for lack of a better phrase, the "geek content" that's always on its home page. Just seems really hard for a non-tech guy to navigate/get value out of. My concern is not getting content there, but being able to only read the right content for me as a user.
- skymt 14y ago
  Reddit's mechanism for filtering content is "subreddit" subscriptions. For example if you're only interested in links about movies and music, you subscribe to the subreddits for those subjects. Of course, as Reddit's demographic is geeky, so is its taste in entertainment, so the best that'll get you is geeky movies and music. The big killer feature that could have helped is user-created subreddits. You could create reddit.com/r/quibb, run it on an invite-only basis, and moderate the submitted content to keep it close to your ideals. Of course, that would only solve the problems of content and membership; it would do nothing to fix Reddit's design. You're right that Reddit does context poorly. Perhaps you should look at Metafilter as an example of how to add context to aggregated news. Take this post for (an exceptionally long) example: [http://metafilter.com/120387 http://metafilter.com/120387] It has a single main link summarized above the fold, with a large amount of historical context and supplemental links below it. Most posts to Metafilter don't go quite that deep, but almost all provide at least one or two extra links on the subject.
  - 14y ago

benologist 14y ago

This conflates two issues. Online news being broken which I agree with emphatically, and online news discovery being broken and solved by limiting your sharing to a specific group of people which I'm skeptical about since I'm not sure how that's different to what existing giants in that space do. Online news need a whole new revenue model that can support and encourage quality journalism instead of chasing ad impressions that encourages or perhaps demands the AOL-ification / Demand Media-ization that makes "news" a byproduct of an SEO and link bait game.

enfinity8 14y ago
Watch nwzPaper...the revenue innovation is on the way!

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

The Financial Times has great journalism. It costs me $300+/year. I also love The Economist. It costs $100+/year. They could both probably hike rates without a noticeable attrition is readers. Luckily for me there is a market for premium financial journalism (the recognisable sources cited poll at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of annual cost). For other types of news, however, my willingness to pay for quality is too small a market. In the space left behind we get people cribbing about news aggregators and paywalls.

crazygringo 14y ago

> "news is ... at a fast and furious pace, without a lot of context, and largely filled with what companies want to get out instead of what they don’t want to get out." High-quality news with high-quality context and interpretation can only really be generated by highly-paid, extremely educated and learned journalists. And it takes time to research and write -- you can't get quality analysis and context 2 hours after an event. The best example of quality reporting that comes to mind for weekly news is The Economist. Although there is also some excellent long-form journalism in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, etc. And if we're talking about online, for me the whole point of Instapaper is to bookmark these articles to read later. And I really don't see how crowd-sourced content is the future for news. Most good Wikipedia articles take months if not years to build up. I just don't see how approaching the quality level of The Economist is possible with crowd-sourcing. The kind of people who have the kind of extreme skills and education to write at that level, do it for a living, not for fun on the Internet.

Kroem3r 14y ago
The Economist has a distinct and significant point of view. If you can assess their material appropriately, it is an excellent weekly. There are stacks and stacks of excellent periodicals. You've named a few rather "pop" publications; if you want, you could stretch out for The NY Review of Books or Foreign Affairs. Both are characterized by having highly authoritative contributors writing long pieces and great editing.

brador 14y ago

I suggest the next step is crowd sourced expert curation. Some of the most popular posts on Reddit are where an expert enters the comments and lays the article bare for the masses. This is valuable. I'd pay for this. But, and it's a big one, experts aren't cheap and their time is scarce. They're not going to curate content for free all day like Reddits 12 year olds and the granularity of expertise means you'll never cover everything with a small number of experts. Two solutions: volume through scale to fund expert curation or find a way to gather and have them work for free. Maybe the research journal system could be used to provide non-financial incentives?

petercooper 14y ago
I don't know if this is quite what you mean but I've been doing something like this for a couple of years now and am bringing in decent revenues doing it. One example: http://javascriptweekly.com/ http://javascriptweekly.com/ .. and an actual issue: http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html .. I have almost 80,000 subscribers to publications like this now and people seem to keep wanting more (so I'm looking for and bringing in expert curators, as you suggest, since I'm close to exhausting my topic range).
- brador 14y ago
  How do you get subscribers / traffic to reach 80k? Paid ads?
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Initially it was because I run/ran the most popular Ruby blog so the first couple of thousand subscribers came almost exclusively that way - http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-my-foray-into-e-mail-newsletters.html http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-m... - but since then it has been primarily a case of word of mouth and "domino" growth. For example, many Ruby developers are into Rails. And many of those are into JavaScript. So I branched out into a JavaScript newsletter too and had a few thousand subscribers quickly. Nice (and unsolicited!) words from people like Steve Souders and Paul Irish helped with testimonials and it grew from there. The next domino was HTML5 which was of interest to both JavaScript and Ruby people. So that one has grown even more quickly. And so on.. :)

enfinity8 14y ago

nwzPaper.com is fixing it. Setup a journalist profile, publish an article and spread the word. http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4 http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4

halayli 14y ago
I will assume you are trolling.
- enfinity8 14y ago
  For users. This is on topic as nwzPaper just launched the core platform to rebuild the news business. What's the problem, isn't this a place to discuss technology innovation?
  - namidark 14y ago
    Your website is barely usable, half the links don't work or do anything, and there are 3 articles. And you've spammed this article multiple times. You're hardly rebuilding the news business. - An information distributor that is neutral on the content message. Like Google News or any other hundred of news aggregators? - A platform that empowers the journalist to decide what to write, when to publish and makes the journalist subject only to the market forces of his or her subscribers. Like a blog? - A subscriber experience that offers everything in a familiar format, in one place and leaves the choices of who and what to read up to you. An aggregator again? You haven't solved anything that is a real problem (such as how to pay for quality journalism).
    - enfinity8 14y ago
      Respectfully, sir, you don't understand what you are talking about. If you had ever built something from nothing, as in, before the first line of code you wouldn't be speaking with your tone. Arrogance in the extreme! Every link works. There are three million+ locations built into the system to organize content geospatially. When you speak of a broken link, did you get a 404? No! You received no content because you and the other 7 billion people on earth haven't learned what it is and contributed information to your community. nwzPaper is not another aggregator crawling the web for content. Everything a user contributes is published to our system and that's what enables real-time content publishing around the world. It's all nuance that somehow went over your head. The blogs you speak of are toast because of the legal distinction the courts have made between bloggers and journalists. The blogosphere is structurally broken because it has no adhesive beyond a search engine and lacks he ability to have a uniform audit facility for users and their content. Try again. You are the enemy of innovation.

kmfrk 14y ago

I'm so sick of the "curation" discussion - if companies like NYT go belly-up, there won't be anything for Huffington Post et al. to "curate". It's inherently derivative. The clip of NYT's David Carr discussing this in a debate in the documentary Page One is unavailable, but I encourage people to watch it. Clayton Cubitt originally described professionalism versus amateurism very well, but this will do: “Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.h... It bothers me that people equate "news" and "journalism".

enfinity8 14y ago
News and journalism are the same information content. Curation is distinct from production and the world will be fine without the NYT. Thanks for the downvote, pal. Empty complaints and no intellectual contribution.

natrius 14y ago

If you agree that online news is broken and want to help fix it, I'd love to hear from you. I'm attempting to fix it by both improving content and improving revenue. It's a fun problem to work on. niran@niran.org