Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/business/media/12carr.html?8dpc

by robg • 18 years ago

40 54 18 years ago

brentr5• 18 years ago

I would be wiling to pay for news if the media produced pieces on things I want to read: science, mathematics, computer programming. Until the media does this on a consistent basis, I will use a tool like HN to weed out the fluff prevalent in today's media and send me to free things.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Well, obviously, you would only buy things you were interested in.

brentr5• 18 years ago

Perhaps I did not make my point clear. The media produces little of substance. The following, in my opinion, is not news: murder, abuse, or celebrities. These topics, however, seem to be what most highly distributed "news" consist of.

jgilliam• 18 years ago

It's called Kindle

justindz• 18 years ago

I get your point, but as a counterpoint let me mention that I did not pay hundreds of dollars up front for my copy of iTunes. Nor can I purchase individual articles, columnists, etc. at a fraction of the cost of a subscription to the whole paper (because I don't give a hot fudge about Sports, Entertainment, Style, etc.).

acgourley2• 18 years ago

Many people paid hundreds of dollars for their iPod.

harpastum• 18 years ago

The issue I have with this article is the fundamental difference between the way the record companies and newspaper companies went about offering their data online in the first place.

The record companies have always charged for their music; getting free music has always been theft.

Newspaper websites (excluding the WSJ) have always been free.

The comparison to the two would only be valid if the record companies had offered music for free at first, then wanted to start charging.

The newspaper organizations have set up a business model that simply doesn't work: they have established the value of a news article to be free. That's nearly impossible to change ex post facto.

The only chance I see of this changing is if some of the major players drop out, making a real shortage of good news stories. That might inflate their value enough that they could start charging effectively.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

>The record companies have always charged for their music; getting free music has always been theft.

But everyone forgets about radio. Disturbingly this gives record companies more ammo to shut down internet radio (which annoys me as its the only radio I listen to now - and I am happy for it to have ads in it).

geuis• 18 years ago

I say this sounds like Marie Antionette begging on her way to the guillotine. I believe you reap what you sow. I find msnbc worlds better than CNN, who just recently cancelled their sci/tech reporting. That being said, I read maybe three stories a week on msnbc. I don't consciously remember the last time I bought a newspaper. If these people would realize their problem is that they aren't reporting on things people want to read about, they might find their way to a paying audience again. They have generalized the public into large segments, while in reality we exist across lots of little niches of interest. I like tech, scifi, some business, Dr 90210, and I occassionally look for topless photos of hot actresses from the 70s and 80s after watching old movies. Pics from then, not now of course. I'm not sure what the answer is 100%, but sense the direction to water in their desert isn't in the form of the same business and reporting structure, but in tablet form.

coliveira• 18 years ago

I guess the problem is that newspapers started in a time when they had to satisfy everyone. Therefore, there is no depth in their coverage. They also invest in topics that are of interest for the "general" population, like celebrities and economy.

For example, I have no interest whatsoever in the latest fight happening in the middle east. However, the TV news insists in spending >50% if its international coverage time telling me about this.

Journalism follows a model from the last two centuries, and it will take a long time to change. Perhaps it will lose relevance completely, when compared to blogs and other web sources.

jonursenbach3• 18 years ago

How about we all finally just move completely to citizen journalism and be done with this noise?

brandnewlow6• 18 years ago

Because much of it is unreadable drivel, compromised by iffy product placement and factual errors.

jonursenbach3• 18 years ago

And mainstream news orgs aren't?

stcredzero• 18 years ago

How can investigative journalism support itself on the web?

How does Drudge make money? (These are two very distinct questions.)

What do people want that they are not getting from the media now?

GHFigs• 18 years ago

No. Contrary to the RIAA party line, people did not stop paying for music when it became easy to obtain for free. The industry was not "decimated" by file sharing, they were surprised and pissed off by it. iTunes didn't succeed because it convinced people to pay for music--it succeeded because it was the nicest way to do so. It's not magic, it's not mystery, it's just building something that doesn't suck. Old media companies still have trouble with that concept. Exhibit A: "Already an NYTimes.com member? Log In Now"

Ugh. The punchline is the same TechCrunch "Apple Tablet" rumor that JUST WON'T DIE. It's like the HN version of a Rickroll.

(edit: The Game)

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

I'd rather have Pandora for news.

brandnewlow6• 18 years ago

Cool as that would be (and hello there, we corresponded a year ago on an alumni list), that's besides the point. Pandora for news wouldn't help out the newspapers as long as the stories themselves are still free and surrounded by add-blocked ads.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Hi there again,

I'm less concerned about the newspapers than the journalists. Pandora probably won't help the music labels, in the long run, but it seems like it helps the artists, who gain listeners from communities that might not otherwise.

johngunderman2• 18 years ago

"Free is not a business model," said Mr. Moffett of Bernstein. "It sounded good and everybody got excited about it, but when you look around, it is clear that is creating havoc and will not work in the long term."

I beg to differ. OSS and GNU/Linux are perfect examples of the contrary.

gsmaverick• 18 years ago

Since when is Linux making enough money to survive as a business? They get donations. So maybe you should think again.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

Probably not quite what you meant, but most of the kernel developers are paid to work on it full time (and by most I mean >90%, last I heard).

Whilst that is not a business in the same sense, there is business around enough to make it worth while.

johngunderman2• 18 years ago

Novell and Red Hat both are real world corporations, and Ubuntu + others are on their way to joining them. Claiming that linux cannot survive as a business is quite frankly foolish. It exists and thrives in a capitalistic market, and with all due respect, it most certainly can make enough money to survive as a business. Note my comment was not specifying the linux kernel in itself, but rather the larger scope of the OSS and GNU/Linux projects. I welcome any counter-arguments.

Jasber2• 18 years ago

“The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.”

The notion that newspapers are still spending money on multi-million dollar presses and bloated newsrooms is what's really idiotic.

gabrielroth• 18 years ago

Evidence that newsrooms are bloated, please.

Jasber2• 18 years ago

By bloated I mean local newspapers covering national news. When small papers have newsrooms with 60 reporters, and 40% of those reporters cover national news--that's a problem.

To see evidence of this go look at your local paper. Mine writes about (not syndicates...writes) national news all of the time.

Small to medium sized papers shouldn't be doing this anymore. They should be focusing on their local communities and dominating that market.

By bloat I mean purchasing multi-million dollar printing presses in 2005 (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-108017775.html) when you should be investing heavily in your local and online markets.

easyfrag• 18 years ago

What I really want is an iTunes for stocks and maybe some other simple securities, something that will allow the really small investor to dabble. I guess there's a whole bunch of regulatory and legal reasons that this can't happen.

danw• 18 years ago

News and music are different. Chances are I'll hear a song somewhere, then buy it and listen to it again and again.

A news article is usually read once then never re-read. How do I know if the article is worth paying for without reading it? And why would I pay for it after I've read it or heard the information?

kenshi• 18 years ago

Some newspapers charge for some (most) of their online content. The Financial Times is the one that springs to mind. If the newspapers need to make money from their content, they should charge for it.

They don't need anyone to 'save them', they just need the balls to ask a fair price for good content. Of course, if most newspapers are just publishing badly written stories with little depth, maybe people wont be willing to pay for it.

aditya2• 18 years ago

A new model for news is definitely needed, but is hard to figure out.

At outside.in we're indexing and organizing local news across the US and have recently started partnering with national news sources (like nbc) to fill gaps in our index and to provide them with the local coverage that they're missing. Along with providing their users a new way to find and read news (by putting it on a map, for example.)

Eventually, it will be a combination of both major media and citizen journalists covering issues that are important. What compounds the problem for the newspapers is that people have stopped consuming news the same way they were doing it 5-10 years ago. The internet has obviously played a big part in this, but so have changing social patterns and expectations on the part of the consumer on news availability.

The bigger shift we're noticing that people are actively searching for topics they're interested in, as opposed to flipping through a newspaper, they want to see things they may be tangentially interested in ('crime', in 'Brooklyn') but had no way to get to earlier.

It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out.

brandnewlow6• 18 years ago

It will be. True. But I fail to see how sites like outside.in are helping.

My concern with what you guys do is that you've spent the last few years "indexing" everyone else's content...without hardly sending anyone to the original sites themselves.

I explained this to one of your biz-dev guys a few months back, so I see no need to do so here but I'll restate a few points.

I added my publication's RSS feed to outside.in several months ago. Since then, my biggest day of referrals from you guys has been 6 visitors/24 hours according to Google analytics. Big whoop.

Meanwhile, how many Google hits did you get from my content? From everyone else's content? Feel free to call me wrong with data, but I imagine Outside.in is an SEO machine and that Google accounts for most of your traffic.

How is this helping the publishers you "index"? It's been very, very clear from day one how it's helping outside.in.

Your business-development guy told me you're hatching partnerships with major newspapers to put "publisher" content on their sites. Will those links lead back to the original publishers? Or will they point back to the summary page on Outside.in?

There are now a handful of players doing this between you, Everyblock, YourStreet...even the Huffington Post with its local channels.

And not one of them sends any actual traffic back to the sites they index. Meanwhile their traffic numbers go up, up, up, the VC money rolls in, and the publishers themselves keep on spiraling down.

People rip on Digg all the time. But I tell you what, Digg actually sends bodies through the door. Same with reddit and other sites like this. Sure, they probably get a lot of Google hits that would otherwise go to the original sites, but they focus on sending people along to the original stories. They profit from the ecosystem of good content and then contribute back to help new sites sprout up.

adrianh• 18 years ago

I can't comment on the other sites you mentioned, but at EveryBlock, we've heard very positive things from publishers regarding the traffic we send to them. One local news outlet (not a blog) gets 20% of its traffic via referrers from EveryBlock. (I'm not sure whether that says more about EveryBlock or about that site, but still.) For at least three sites I can think of off the top of my head, we're the #1 referer -- i.e., we send them more people than any other site does.

Adrian

aditya2• 18 years ago

Not sure why I got downvoted, but we don't actually have any summary pages. We pretty much send all our traffic back to the bloggers, if you aren't getting traffic from us that's very surprising because as Adrian mentioned we've heard great things from most of our network.

The newspaper deals we're doing also send ALL the traffic back to the blogger, check one out here: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/neighborhoods/?neighborhood_id=179...

Two links going back to the blogger for every one link to outside.in!

You started trolling so I had to repsond, but our goal (along with EB and everyone else in our space) is to get the content more distribution, as I said above, there is a huge gap that the major news publishers have in local news and the faster that gets filled up the better it is for both producers and consumers.

ryanmahoski• 18 years ago

I find plenty of quality news in text form. What I want is better stuff for when I'm on the go. Radio fails - it's mostly ads and the banal. Podcasts are better but they're not interactive and I can't un/subscribe until I'm back at my computer. Audio books and lectures from The Teaching Company dominate my ipod in transit - but with these I don't get news or blog content.

Maybe the solution is phone based. What if you could call a phone number and hear the news read to you by a good narrator? By pressing keys you could drill down into Tech, World, blogs etc. It would be an opinionated filter of news, essays, wikipedia. Like this http://audiothink.com/concept1.png. With twilio you could <play> .mp3s. First time callers could maybe get x minutes free after which point they'd pay for their callerID to continue working. Not sure how to handle payments - sending phone visitors to a web page might kill conversion. I think bored commuters with hands-free devices and cell minutes to burn might use such a service.

tokenadult• 18 years ago

I find plenty of quality news in text form. What I want is better stuff for when I'm on the go. Radio fails - it's mostly ads and the banal.

I'm pretty satisfied with Minnesota Public Radio and its all-news nework, exemplified by KNOW FM in St. Paul.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/nis/

I'm still learning about Minnesota Public Radio's availability as a stream on the Internet or as podcasts, but in general that radio network tries to keep up to date with the latest technology. This is, of course, not commercial radio but rather "listener supported" radio that will hit you up with fundraising drives every once in a while.

kleneway• 18 years ago

This article reminded me of a quote I heard a while back: "People pay for atoms, not for bits". Not 100% accurate, but if someone is going to fork over cash, you really, really, really need to make it worth their while. Unfortunately I don't think that individual news articles qualify.

I don't know if this is the solution, but here's one idea I had around this problem that I keep coming back to. It's a way to combine the disciplined process of a traditional news agency with the economies of scale and spirit of the citizen journalism movement: http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/y-combinator-ch...

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

Perfect. Just add daily editions of the new york times to the iTunes store. Maybe even have an audio version so one can listen to news stories. I love the audio books feature of iTunes, where I can download books to my iPods or iPhone. With the iTouch, one can get all the HD space of the iPhone without it being a phone, if one already has an iPhone and just needs more space. The whole iTunes/iPod/iPhone line is one of the greatest business models ever. No, I don't work for apple, so I have no stake in this, I just LOVE my iPhone!

Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News?

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