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"From the beginning, newspapers have prospered for one reason: the trust that comes from representing their readers' interests and giving them the news that's i
by jsz0 17y ago
"From the beginning, newspapers have prospered for one reason: the trust that comes from representing their readers' interests and giving them the news that's important to them"
I'm not sure that's how it works anymore. Who trusts the media these days? According to Sacred Heart University's polling in 2007 19% of Americans implicitly trusted the mainstream media. Down 8% since 2003. More alarming is that 87% felt the mainstream media was trying to manipulate them. Polls and statistics may not actually prove anything but again let me ask: Who trusts the media these days? Do you know anyone who feels that way? Maybe the extreme ideologues who are simply looking for some rah-rah cheer leading action and don't actually care about truth or facts.
The point of delivering news that's important to readers is much more valid but still very flawed. You get much better results aggregating together content from different sources or, better yet, discovering content from people you have a personal relationship with. Friends, family, co-workers. That all becomes very difficult behind a pay-wall. In this era there are less mainstream sensibilities about news. Everyone has a different weird mix of news they want to see. If you're going for a personalized delivery system you absolutely need social networks, crowd sourcing, and free access so people can discover new topics of interest.
As for quality... He's assuming people can appreciate quality when compared to stories about music stars kissing each other or golf players crashing into tree's with their luxury SUVs. I don't believe for a second that quality matters to the vast majority of the mainstream news audience. The average news paper is written to be consumed by people who struggled through junior high school English class.
- forensic 17y agoYou can aggregate without it being free. Imagine a website that does news aggregation. To access the website, you have to pay $10 per month. For this $10 per month, you have the right to read all of the news posted on the website. The website allows individual freelance writers to put their articles on it. Now here's the catch - the $10/month that each user pays actually gets distributed by that user to writers whose articles he appreciates. So everytime he reads an exceptionally good article, he gets to assign some of his $10 to that article, as much as he wants. At the end of the month, whether he assigns the money or not, he loses the 10 bucks. If he assigned all $10 to writers, that's fine. If he left some over, that goes to the website and is used to pay for editors, servers, hackers, etc. This creates a situation where people are paying for aggregated content (you'd have a plethora of social networking, commenting, and rating systems tailored in whatever way is determined to be optimal) and the writers who are most appreciated by the readers are getting paid. At the same time, the readers get to try out as much writing as they want for free, so stuff is NOT hidden behind a paywall. They can read the article first and if they find it useful to them can award their dollars. If not, they don't. This encourages quality and also encourages a wide readership. Anyway I would totally pay $10/month for a system like this. I think you would actually see the case that many people would voluntarily choose to pay more than $10/month just so they can contribute more to their favourite authors. The whole "Radiohead Rainbows" effect. Feel free to steal my idea and make it a Y-Combinator startup.
- Psyonic 17y agoNo way to vote for things you like more than others. Will degrade into a least common denominator system quickly.
- forensic 17y agoWhatWhatWhat?! I thought I made it clear you could assign as much money as you want to particular articles. And the amount of money assigned would obviously be used in some algorithm as a kind of sliding scale vote?
- Psyonic 17y agoEven if that was the case, people want things as cheap as they can get them, so even if they CAN vote with their dollars, they won't do it at an unnecessary cost to themselves.
- forensic 17y agoI think that is true for the great mass of men, but I think there is a minority of people willing to pay good money for high quality, ad-free content.
- joe_the_user 17y agoHe's assuming people can appreciate quality when compared to stories about music stars kissing each other or golf players crashing into tree's with their luxury SUVs. Do you know what papers Murdoch publishes? (aside from the WSJ)
- jsz0 17y agoYes, that's a fair point. I wouldn't wrap dead fish in the NY Post. So disrespectful to the fish.