Yes, we'll be working on the ad revenues. They certainly aren't high enough to support a massive media organization. They should be high enough to support a low-overhead one-man journalism show.
There are other revenue streams, too. It remains to be seen which is the best for us.
Yeah, similar alright. We have different outlook. The writers for our site aren't "contributors". Rather, they are the stars and we are providing a service to them.
Interesting question. I'm guessing since you ask about the DCMA you're asking about copyright. Well, we'll vet all our writers, and it should be no problem at all. We'll also delay payment of new writers so that there is no way to do some kind of grab-and-dash.
Its also much much much easier to search for copyrighted material in text than in video or flash content. I can't imagine solving this will be a hard problem.
Its not strictly limited to journalists, but its focus will be news, and we're looking to restrict the authors to high quality writers.
While I expect to widen the platform to all comers in the long term, we'll be very careful how we do it. It'll be our equivalent of reddit's search for how to do subreddits well, and Facebook figuring out how to let everyone in.
We were only trying to be secret to not build hype when the product isn't ready. Backfire! We hope you aren't put off. We are going to be as open and transparent as we can be.
(I should point out in that case that I'm only using this name for consistency. I'm pbiggar on HN.)
There isn't anything about our market, because we're not specific to any of them. If you are a journalist, write about what you are interested in. So far, we've had interest from people who write about finance, about tech, about gaming, and lots and lots of local journalists.
We are aiming to get journalists a fair wage. We aren't promising payments of 30K-70K, but we needed numbers to put in the box on the Poynter site, so we put in our targets.
Do email us, you sound interesting. I'm paul [at] newslabs.com or paul.biggar [at] gmail.com.
We have many people interested. I haven't triaged them all, but there are high quality people in there. We don't need people to jump - there were 8000 journalists laidoff last year, and there are many many freelancers out there. The people interested are mixes of both, and some full timers who want to make money on the side, and are looking to jump online in the future.
I would love to pay out of investment, but we don't have it, so I'm not sure what we can do there.
> I have a few journalist friends (as no doubt do you guys) and pointed a couple of them at this.
Thanks for doing that. I hope you'll point them at this comment too.
> [...] you'll probably find that a lot of your target market quite bitter and resentful that they've been reduced to this. [...] they just want someone who'll give them a honest day's pay on a stable basis to get on with what they love doing, writing well-crafted stories.
Yes. We talked to a ton of journalists before we got to this. Everyone had the same story (many bitter) that you outlined above. We are honestly not trying to screw anyone. We should have outlined the financials a bit better: 80% of all revenue goes to the content producers. This is a platform for journalists to earn a good living, not for us to exploit anyone.
We want to provide a good living to people who write good content.
> Not all journalists will necessarily be entrepreneurial sorts, and the ones that are will often be able to seek out geeky friends to help them out online anyway.
We're trying to add value for both kinds, not just the ones who can't work the internet.
> With that in mind, there are a lot of sites out there on the internet with too-good-to-be-true sounding propositions on how they can help you make money online, build an audience etc. Once burned twice shy with these sorts of operations - often it turns out they pay you peanuts to be a cog in the wheel of a SEO-spam factory which profits them more than anyone else.
We have come across a number of these - we dont want to name names - but we are the opposite. I guess the fact that we were trying to keep on the down-low made it seem sinister. Just the opposite - we are open sourcers and believe in transparency. It will be trivial to calculate how much revenue your content has brought it: multiply by 1.25.
> Even with the best intentions just to offer people better tools on a win-win basis, it's hard to avoid coming across as scammy or profiteering when dealing with people who're feeling unemployed and vulnerable career-wise.
Right, this is an important point. We'll work hard to make it seem like we aren't scammy at all (cause we aren't!).
> So, I guess what I'm saying is you might really want to make sure you stand out from the crowd of "join our SEO-spam-factory"
Noted. We had hoped the YC brand would make us stand out from spammy-bastards, but I guess not.
> [...] if the tools being offered lock you inextricably into some company's hosted ecosystem, I'd be a bit skeptical
[...]
We are wary of this. We will build tools to automatically move off our platform. It wont be our first priority of course, but if people want to move off we will help them do it.
> Anyway hope that didn't come across too negative, I'm glad more people are taking on what's such a tricky problem!
Positive people won't tell you that you may be coming across as a spammy bastard :) Thanks!
Hi folks, we're NewsLabs (pbiggar and nchong on HN). We never intended to use secrecy to hype stuff up, just to be a bit quiet until we had more built.