For this inaugural posting I'm going to link to a comic titled "The Future" that I stumbled upon while slurping down a tasty burger at Clarkes, a Mountain View burger joint. This comic sums up the challenge for the traditional news media. In pursuit of being relevant and profitable they're tossing out the baby with the bath water by firing the very people that generated content for them. At the same time, its easy for the un-initiated to come to the conclusion that much of the user generated content available online today is just junk.
We started NewsForWhatYouDo to try to create a future where news doesn't become the caricature in the comic. We never had much love for traditional media either, even though we consumed alot of it. News delivered on media where page inventory was limited had more than a few problems, even before online media started eroding their business model. Their content was not relevant to what I was interested in, and many of my friends shared that thought. Traditional media manufactured interest rather than actually created relevant content. They had to, because they had limited space to print the news on and a limited staff to create it.
The internet removed both of those limitations. But now there's a new problem - too much content produced by millions of users. Sure, much of it is garbage. But if you know how to sort through the garbage, there is actually much gold to be found. Far more high quality content exists today online than ever existed in traditional media, and its getting better every day. Whether you're a lawyer, a chef, a plumber, a software developer, or a hedge fund manager, (OK, maybe not plumbers) there are thousands of bloggers who are experts in those fields. They are writing thoughtful, informative pieces that provide information you can use in your job, your hobby, or just your life. Because these bloggers are practitioners in their field, they have far more insight than the reporters of old in their respective subjects. Even more importantly, you can now have a two way conversation with your peers online, further opening up the opportunities learn, to hire, to get a job, and to educate.
NewsForWhatYouDo brings you this content in a way that's relevant to you, by leveraging the power of community in discovery, sorting, and ranking online content. At a high level this is not a new idea - Digg, Reddit, SocialMedian and many others do similar things. These sites work okay if you're interested in general interest news, but ultimately fail to deliver if you want news that's relevant to what you do, from sources you trust, and with a high signal to noise ratio. In the old media realm, the type of news we're focused on was called business news or trade news and populated by the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Eweek, and innumerable trade pubs. I don't know about you, but I've always felt that they failed to deliver news that was timely, relevant, or even accurate. The core problem with both the new and old media is that most of the people contributing (users and reporters) are for the most part not knowledgeable about what they're writing about. So the first step is to create a community of actual practitioners in each respective field, and let them be the source of content and content ranking.
NewsForWhatYouDo is focused on solving this problem. Try it out, and let us know how we're doing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment