It would be interesting to see how that pans out for social media, since they tried with Google News and that, if I was correctly informed, hurt local publishers rather than helped.
I'm interested to see where the local news initiative goes. Big outlets have plenty of room to innovate with or without Facebook's help, but newspapers outside of state capitals seem to be in a difficult position of falling subscriptions and no way to replace that revenue online.
Shameless plug, but this is something we are working on right now.
Social media is a terrible medium for news. Aside from the ability for anyone to post anything, which can easily lead to misinformation, it also sets up the absolute worst incentives. If news organizations are expected to share their reporting for free, and only be able to monetize when someone clicks through to their page -- you end up with clickbait.
It also means that virtually all local news is silenced. Almost by definition, local news appeals to a narrow audience, which doesn't lead to the scale social algorithms favor.
We're trying to take the convenience and brevity of social news updates, but use them to build a new platform that helps reporters and surface trustworthy, local news. We make tools for newsrooms that then syndicates out to the consumer platform, before an article or video is ever even made. (We are to news what OpenTable is to restaurants.) And through rev-shares, our partners succeed when we do.
well I am not saying it would make them any more likely to survive, but they could just create access to external links just like Pulse and other newsreaders to it to all of them or like Google News kind of did.
In some ways that is what Facebook is doing right now and why they are gaining more and more ground on the news-front. It's also why Twitter is kind of struggling because it's only external things leaving twitter as a protocol rather than a news service.
The whole trick IMO is to find a way to construct a whole story so i might read some stuff from NYT but then get access to more in depth on some sub subjects other places.
But this all kind of assumes that one is buying the relevance of newspapers moving forward which I am not, but thats just me.
I’m glad they were able to figure that out, and now the question that arises in my mind is whether there is any hope for finding a model that props up local investigative journalism. Even if all those local news organizations became non-profits and had access to a very effective digital media platform that made it effortless to produce online content (including mobile-friendly functionality), and maybe even charge micro-payments for some of the individual articles, would it be enough? Or would it not work? Can they only survive if they do real news while selling other stuff?
I briefly worked at a startup that was trying to build this. It's technically possible in a lot of different ways, but the business culture is so far removed from this approach that it seems impossible right now. The sites that are still successful are all convinced they are on track to own the entire online news media market and won't do anything to give up an absolute iron grip on their experience and readership, especially if it might mean acknowledging the existence of a competing news source. The smaller regional and local news sites are all basically zombie companies now anyway. They buy an off-the-shelf newspaper CMS tool, add in every possible monetization plugin they can possibly cram into the tool, an AP feed, and hire like 3 part time journalists to add in just enough shallow local flavor that nobody cares about so that they can try to get some clicks in their local market. They aren't motivated to participate in systems that let you buy content, because they don't actually make any content.
It is going to bot created I am afraid to say. My city has good local coverage, a wee bit biased but it is local people in a School Board meetings and City Meetings at least.
Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
While this is generally a positive step by Google it will fall short in revitalizing the news industry for a simple reason. In a world of near infinite content options, most people can no longer justify having any single news subscription.
A better solution is a fractional subscription model where subscriptions are tiered to one's reading needs. This is what my company http://CivikOwl.com is working on. Hope to make a positive contribution to this important issue facing society.
Yeah you are totally right, this wouldn't work for Twitter, FaceBook, etc. But it would help with the likes of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc, who would all hold broadcasting licenses. It could help to build a core set of news providers that are held to a certain standard in my opinion.
My first thought on reading this was that it would be a product that would enable journalists to setup their own media agency really quickly, allowing a fuckton of more local, digital native media to replace the print media that was killed by Facebook/Social Media.
I think there are a couple interesting angles on this.
The two websites I linked above are donation based, and both are growing. I think this is a reasonably viable model for larger metropolitan neighborhoods and wealthier suburbs. Although frankly, I'd like to find a way to spread local news to all parts of the country.
The second angle would be some sort of aggregation play around local desires (e.g. a riff on Ben Thompson and Aggregator Theory). Google/Facebook allow you to target ads by geography and interest, which obviously eviscerates a lot of local ad revenue. But could there be another way to bundle & slice interests plus content? For example, you do local, irl interest (cycling clubs? garden walks?). Or perhaps you do an emphasize on privacy + irl experience? I don't have a great idea here (yet?) - but I refuse to believe there isn't something.
In other news, CEOs will use an AI to send press releases. We already have AIs writing articles anyway, so at some point it will become useless to check the news as its all gonna be corporate b$. What are we gonna do then? Rediscover local journalism?
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