Jeremy. Becoming a paying subscriber because of this post. This is what the journalism world needs - solutions. Not just more of what we have. (I also don't use Twitter, btw, and never ever will) Make sure you aren't leaving out people who don't use Big Tech stuff. We are many.
Hi Jeremy! I've been following your blog since you launched it (I think). I don't use Twitter, so I have to leave my comment here -- hopefully you'll see it. I just wanted to say that I love the idea of an online forum for participatory citizen journalism, and I'm excited to see where your project goes! I'm not sure if you're familiar with Aaron Swartz (he was a legendary programmer in the Internet's early heyday, and later became a hacktivist and advocate for open information). He did some interesting research into who writes Wikipedia, and the ways contributors contributed to it, that might be helpful while you're developing the site. Here are his blog posts about it:
Another bit of useful history would be early Vox, which obviously didn't try your bounty system, but otherwise seemed really close your ideals. They focused on background-heavy "explainers" which appealed to the already-curious, and built their custom "card" system to handle continuously-updated stories. Many of the writers shared articles on Twitter, and the front page had enough traffic that just bumping articles to the front page with a new card in the stack was a useful signal boost for news. They were unabashedly center-left, partly I think because that's where they perceived the market for this kind of journalism to be, in addition to the obvious backgrounds of Matt, Ezra, and other main figures.
My understanding of what happened, according to the dribs and drabs of information mentioned by Matt, Ezra, and Vox's explainer on why they started a merch store and donation page, is that traffic never developed the way their VC-backers hoped, with Buzzfeed taking the low end (free site distributed by social media; obviously a massively more attention-hack approach) and the NYT the high end (more resources for deep reporting, good i-apps which is where the deep-pocketed readers were spending their time: see Stratechery for more on the NYT's biz model changes https://stratechery.com/2021/publishing-is-back-to-the-future/). Another factor, of course, was that after 2016 the market for center-left reporting contracted drastically (see again some Stratechery analysis https://stratechery.com/2020/twitter-responsibility-and-accountability/).
I think there are some important lessons from that history:
1. Who are the already-curious-but-underserved population you want to reach, and how does your intended editorial alignment fit with theirs? Bearing in mind, of course, that editorial alignment is more than just in-story slant, it also controls what counts as news.
2. Who is going to fund everything, and what kind of growth trajectory do they expect? Are there ways to significantly reduce your costs, like giving bounties for timely updates and corrections to wiki articles, relying on existing wiki mechanisms for dispute resolution, and just tweeting out the wiki updates, or having some kind of automated alt-frontend for wiki that foregrounds the updates (seems like this is the kind of thing GPT-3 could do).
Jeremy. Becoming a paying subscriber because of this post. This is what the journalism world needs - solutions. Not just more of what we have. (I also don't use Twitter, btw, and never ever will) Make sure you aren't leaving out people who don't use Big Tech stuff. We are many.
Hi Jeremy! I've been following your blog since you launched it (I think). I don't use Twitter, so I have to leave my comment here -- hopefully you'll see it. I just wanted to say that I love the idea of an online forum for participatory citizen journalism, and I'm excited to see where your project goes! I'm not sure if you're familiar with Aaron Swartz (he was a legendary programmer in the Internet's early heyday, and later became a hacktivist and advocate for open information). He did some interesting research into who writes Wikipedia, and the ways contributors contributed to it, that might be helpful while you're developing the site. Here are his blog posts about it:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/swartz2006
Another bit of useful history would be early Vox, which obviously didn't try your bounty system, but otherwise seemed really close your ideals. They focused on background-heavy "explainers" which appealed to the already-curious, and built their custom "card" system to handle continuously-updated stories. Many of the writers shared articles on Twitter, and the front page had enough traffic that just bumping articles to the front page with a new card in the stack was a useful signal boost for news. They were unabashedly center-left, partly I think because that's where they perceived the market for this kind of journalism to be, in addition to the obvious backgrounds of Matt, Ezra, and other main figures.
My understanding of what happened, according to the dribs and drabs of information mentioned by Matt, Ezra, and Vox's explainer on why they started a merch store and donation page, is that traffic never developed the way their VC-backers hoped, with Buzzfeed taking the low end (free site distributed by social media; obviously a massively more attention-hack approach) and the NYT the high end (more resources for deep reporting, good i-apps which is where the deep-pocketed readers were spending their time: see Stratechery for more on the NYT's biz model changes https://stratechery.com/2021/publishing-is-back-to-the-future/). Another factor, of course, was that after 2016 the market for center-left reporting contracted drastically (see again some Stratechery analysis https://stratechery.com/2020/twitter-responsibility-and-accountability/).
I think there are some important lessons from that history:
1. Who are the already-curious-but-underserved population you want to reach, and how does your intended editorial alignment fit with theirs? Bearing in mind, of course, that editorial alignment is more than just in-story slant, it also controls what counts as news.
2. Who is going to fund everything, and what kind of growth trajectory do they expect? Are there ways to significantly reduce your costs, like giving bounties for timely updates and corrections to wiki articles, relying on existing wiki mechanisms for dispute resolution, and just tweeting out the wiki updates, or having some kind of automated alt-frontend for wiki that foregrounds the updates (seems like this is the kind of thing GPT-3 could do).