The Future of Journalism: De Scriptorum – Your Personal News Summary
Prologue: This is the idea I applied to Y Combinator’s 2010 winter funding cycle with. It got rejected, rightly. As I am currently finishing my Ph.D. in law and have a law/econ background, I am still just adapting to the entrepreneurial mindset. But going out on my own is something I strive to do in the future, as working for others only makes sense for so long. Ultimately, I want to create something. Alas, I just don’t have the time to follow up on this specific idea at the moment. I might after my Ph.D. is done. Feel free to take this idea and shape it into something you can be successful with. I would love to see journalism change in interesting ways.
I am deeply interested in the future of journalism. I think one aspect of Y Combinator’s take on this is spot-on:
What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?
I think the best way to make money is to tailor the content individually to each user. News and journalism (i.e. essays, op-eds, original reporting etc.) are abundant. But why should you care what the New York Times thinks is relevant about what’s going on in the world? You may be interested in a lot of different topics or you may be very deeply interested in a single topic.
One-for-all just doesn’t cut it anymore. People crave personalized experiences.
Ever more people need to stay on top of what’s happening in the world or in business. But with a growing amount of news, it gets more difficult and more time-consuming to do so. I think people will pay to have an accurate filtering mechanism pre-determine what they need to consume.
To shorten the amount of time they need to get and consume (eventually) all the relevant information they need, they will pay. It frees considerable time otherwise spent browsing websites or paper editions of the world’s newspapers and magazines.
The end result is a daily executive summary of the world’s news and information, compiled and provided individually for each user. It is tailor-made, medium-independent personal content, presented as an individualized summary with links to all relevant content. That’s enough buzzwords for now.
There are two takes on this I thought of:
1. The “easy” one, or the premium market: GetAbstract for news. Users can subscribe to summaries of any number of newspapers and magazines they want. They get spared the time needed to browse and read the content themselves and instead are provided with an abstract / a summary of the major articles. Users can choose from different options, i.e. different topics may get special coverage or more or less depth of the summaries. There are legal and scaling problems with this idea and it’s not very ground-breaking, but I think there is enough value for it to sell. Obviously, this only makes sense for users who value their time financially high enough to warrant paying for such a service.
2. The “futuristic” one, or the mass market: A daily summary of the world’s news, fully automated – like your personal reading assistant. It’s a combination of several mechanisms which, individually, have proven to work but which, each on their own, are very very hard to get right: (1) Amazon-like recommendations (liked that article about Nancy Pelosi? What about reading on Harry Reid?); (2) delicious-like content recommendations by your friends or social circle, this may include a voting mechanism to not miss what’s popular right now; (3) content selection based on data (keyword) analysis of what you previously liked; (4) content selection based on categories / keywords you provided. All of this should you compiled into a single summary for each user with links to all relevant content. I am no coder, so this is just a conceptual idea with no clue on technical feasibility. It’s just something that I think would be totally awesome to have. Because I read religiously, and I would love to have something like that. I might even pay a little bit for it.
That’s it. Here is the preliminary descriptorum.com. Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment, mail me or further journalism on your own!
