Welcome to JStartup news, a place for news people to discuss, rate, and share news and commentary about journalism startups, new business models for news, hacker journalism and anything else that falls along these lines.
JStartup has a twitter account at http://twitter.com/jstartupnews. The account will automatically tweet out the latest submissions to this site. If we get swamped with submissions, I can always change it.
Anyone can vote on, discuss or post to J-Startup News. No registration required. By creating an account, though, you can help people identify your words with who you are. You can also accumulate karma points based on how people rate your posts and comments.
The template for JStartup news is a site called Hacker News. It's a social news forum very similar to this one, for technologists, programmers and entrepreneurs. Over the last 2 years it's grown into a buzzing hub of smart people having smart discussions about important topics. My hope is that JStartup News might become something like that for news people who are interested in new forms of journalism, business models and taking the entrepreneurial path. I hope this becomes a place where startups announce their projects, ask for help and post job openings.
Another handy thing that JStartup News will do is create a central place for the best news from all the folks covering the industry on blogs and pro sites. For the last few months I'd been wishing for a site like this to give me all the best links right now in one place. I am morally opposed to RSS readers so social news sites are how I find stuff I want to read. There wasn't one for news people who want to read about "the new news." So now we've got one.
My name is Brad Flora. I'm a journalist working on a startup news aggregator and blog network in Chicago called The Windy Citizen. You can reach me at windycitizen at gmail.com or on twitter at @bradflora.
As a publisher/creator, I support myself from online advertising. When I read something in a feed reader, I'm getting that info without "paying" for it by being exposed to the advertising.
I can't run ads on my own startup if I'm not willing to look at the ads on other people's sites. It's the same reason I don't and won't run an ad blocker script in my browser.
I'd add that I enjoy seeing the actual designs of the site's too. Reading everything in one place seems so boring.
Hey, just dont put the full text into the feed! I keep tabs on tons of sites that produce their own content, as well as aggregate or link to others by RSS, and usually find myself clicking the links, visiting their actual websites in their full glory and sometimes, may even find myself checking out an ad too. ;)
anyway, you offer RSS for this site, not much to discuss really. if you dont want to use it yourself, then no reason to argue otherwise!
But ads are available in RSS. There are plenty of companies that offer this service. It's only because companies haven't sold the service that there aren't ads. I don't see a moral quandry here. If anything, greater use of RSS will encourage sites to sell RSS ads.
Do you have links to these services? I've not seen any that offer non-basement CPMs or that will accommodate small publishers. I've tried to work out how to do this with feedburner, but it appears all you can do is run adsense, which is less than ideal.
You could even, GASP, roll your own RSS feeds that have ads. That small technical limitation hardly seems to justify a moral opposition to a wonderful technology.
Please explain how someone without a programming background can roll their own RSS feeds. If there are services out there that people don't know about or tutorials they could learn from, that would be a service to everyone.
Maybe you should pay someone with the expertise to build or implement RSS ads for you? Seems funny that there is a moral opposition to having your potential vistors read your content for free (even though it is being shared by choice and is monetizable), but for some reason paying for programming help doesn't seem to be on your mind.
Hi Adam. Welcome. First, I had no idea this would be the topic du jour. I just don't enjoy using feed readers. They make the web generic and I prefer to read stories where the publisher intended them to be read. By the same thinking, I rent widescreen DVDs (so I can watch films the way the director envisioned them) rather than pan and scan versions of films.
And yes, I could always hire someone to build a custom RSS advertising system. When bootstrapping a startup though, you've got to pick your battles.
Okay, so you're only opposed to feed readers to the extent that the opportunity to monetize your content is worse in them than it is on your site on a CPM or CPC basis? A richer value proposition, in other words, would satisfy your moral obligation?
Loss of sense of destination is the other qualm I have. I like that every web site has its own look and structure. Why turn the web into one big list of headlines?
You know, I used to have that feeling--that news is better read at the destination than in an rss reader. I still certainly believe that's true for much of what I want from many sites, like discussion in the comments. But I found over time that, for many news sites, including blogs, the *words* were sufficient. The author's voice comes through. The intelligence, insight, humor, honesty--most of that survives the transition to an rss reader. That's what I've found for myself, at least.
It's also worth pointing out that this very site is building conversation around other people's stories....still, you've got to click on the link to head over there...
That's right. Different contexts serve different purposes. Ideally, I'd love the discussion about my post "Why I dislike micropayments, don’t mind charity, but have a better idea" to happen at my blog, but I don't really mind at all when people want to have that discussion in a more suitable forum. Still, if I had ads on my site--which I don't because I plan to benefit *because* of blogging, not *from* it--I'd be losing precious pageviews.
Welcome to JStartup news, a place for news people to discuss, rate, and share news and commentary about journalism startups, new business models for news, hacker journalism and anything else that falls along these lines.
JStartup has a twitter account at http://twitter.com/jstartupnews. The account will automatically tweet out the latest submissions to this site. If we get swamped with submissions, I can always change it.
Anyone can vote on, discuss or post to J-Startup News. No registration required. By creating an account, though, you can help people identify your words with who you are. You can also accumulate karma points based on how people rate your posts and comments.
The template for JStartup news is a site called Hacker News. It's a social news forum very similar to this one, for technologists, programmers and entrepreneurs. Over the last 2 years it's grown into a buzzing hub of smart people having smart discussions about important topics. My hope is that JStartup News might become something like that for news people who are interested in new forms of journalism, business models and taking the entrepreneurial path. I hope this becomes a place where startups announce their projects, ask for help and post job openings.
Another handy thing that JStartup News will do is create a central place for the best news from all the folks covering the industry on blogs and pro sites. For the last few months I'd been wishing for a site like this to give me all the best links right now in one place. I am morally opposed to RSS readers so social news sites are how I find stuff I want to read. There wasn't one for news people who want to read about "the new news." So now we've got one.
My name is Brad Flora. I'm a journalist working on a startup news aggregator and blog network in Chicago called The Windy Citizen. You can reach me at windycitizen at gmail.com or on twitter at @bradflora.
Wow, can you flesh out your moral opposition to RSS readers?
As a publisher/creator, I support myself from online advertising. When I read something in a feed reader, I'm getting that info without "paying" for it by being exposed to the advertising.
I can't run ads on my own startup if I'm not willing to look at the ads on other people's sites. It's the same reason I don't and won't run an ad blocker script in my browser.
I'd add that I enjoy seeing the actual designs of the site's too. Reading everything in one place seems so boring.
Hey, just dont put the full text into the feed! I keep tabs on tons of sites that produce their own content, as well as aggregate or link to others by RSS, and usually find myself clicking the links, visiting their actual websites in their full glory and sometimes, may even find myself checking out an ad too. ;)
anyway, you offer RSS for this site, not much to discuss really. if you dont want to use it yourself, then no reason to argue otherwise!
Welcome. And I agree with your points. I just don't like or want to get my news that way. Others are welcome to.
But ads are available in RSS. There are plenty of companies that offer this service. It's only because companies haven't sold the service that there aren't ads. I don't see a moral quandry here. If anything, greater use of RSS will encourage sites to sell RSS ads.
Hi, Steve.
Do you have links to these services? I've not seen any that offer non-basement CPMs or that will accommodate small publishers. I've tried to work out how to do this with feedburner, but it appears all you can do is run adsense, which is less than ideal.
You could even, GASP, roll your own RSS feeds that have ads. That small technical limitation hardly seems to justify a moral opposition to a wonderful technology.
Please explain how someone without a programming background can roll their own RSS feeds. If there are services out there that people don't know about or tutorials they could learn from, that would be a service to everyone.
Maybe you should pay someone with the expertise to build or implement RSS ads for you? Seems funny that there is a moral opposition to having your potential vistors read your content for free (even though it is being shared by choice and is monetizable), but for some reason paying for programming help doesn't seem to be on your mind.
Hi Adam. Welcome. First, I had no idea this would be the topic du jour. I just don't enjoy using feed readers. They make the web generic and I prefer to read stories where the publisher intended them to be read. By the same thinking, I rent widescreen DVDs (so I can watch films the way the director envisioned them) rather than pan and scan versions of films.
And yes, I could always hire someone to build a custom RSS advertising system. When bootstrapping a startup though, you've got to pick your battles.
Okay, so you're only opposed to feed readers to the extent that the opportunity to monetize your content is worse in them than it is on your site on a CPM or CPC basis? A richer value proposition, in other words, would satisfy your moral obligation?
Loss of sense of destination is the other qualm I have. I like that every web site has its own look and structure. Why turn the web into one big list of headlines?
You know, I used to have that feeling--that news is better read at the destination than in an rss reader. I still certainly believe that's true for much of what I want from many sites, like discussion in the comments. But I found over time that, for many news sites, including blogs, the *words* were sufficient. The author's voice comes through. The intelligence, insight, humor, honesty--most of that survives the transition to an rss reader. That's what I've found for myself, at least.
It's also worth pointing out that this very site is building conversation around other people's stories....still, you've got to click on the link to head over there...
That's right. Different contexts serve different purposes. Ideally, I'd love the discussion about my post "Why I dislike micropayments, don’t mind charity, but have a better idea" to happen at my blog, but I don't really mind at all when people want to have that discussion in a more suitable forum. Still, if I had ads on my site--which I don't because I plan to benefit *because* of blogging, not *from* it--I'd be losing precious pageviews.