What if: The New New York Times
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
For example, when NYT sends a reporter and a photographer to Iran to cover elections, it is of course much more expensive than one Arrington's blogger, who just sits home, drink coffee and muses about whether Twitter is better than Friendfeed or Friendfeed is better than Twitter.
I think, that while a bunch of agile bloggers like Arrington, Scoble, people in Gizmodo or Engadget are able to compete with MSM in Tech coverage, they would hardly compete with general news coverage, since that requires much more.
He never mentions building value or building a company where people matters: 'Ill pay you 200k, but if you dont reach 1 million hits monthly with your stories, you'll be fired'. Quality is barely mentioned and the journalist are evaluated by quantity of followers.
He also never mentions building a company with other mission than making money.
Perharps it's that i'm old fashioned, but I don't think it would be a nice place to work (unless you are for the $$$) and in the long run it wont be an interesting site to read.
If it isn't interesting to read, how will it make money?
Looking at the "most read articles" list, there may be one or two news articles in it at a given time, but there are usually a few snarky op-eds (Dowd or Krugman) and at least a few human interest stories.
The standard for many of the non hard news stories seems to be to weave a story one quote at a time. So, for example, a story about the economic downturn might quote one person who lost a job saying "things have been really hard for the past few months" and then draw some grand conclusions without any quotes from legitimate experts, etc.
This is fine when it's a story about some human interest topic, but I imagine any serious journalist would never even want to write such articles.
The problem for traditional news organizations is that those are the articles people want, not some arcane investigative story.
For an example of this, compare "Most Read" to "Most Blogged" articles. The bloggers are typically focusing on the real news at any given time (a small handful of stories) and are less interested in the popular stuff (which is what they themselves are competing with)...
This is also why most papers run so many AP stories -- doing real journalism is much harder than just whipping up a quick story with a few loose quotes, etc.
Well, I'd say your imagination is slightly misleading, then. ;-) Of course, we may now debate what you mean by "serious journalists" but let's put that aside.
What every journalist wants, usually, is that his stories are read! Even you want to inform people you need them to read your story, first. One method is to write compelling headlines and teasers, for example. Sometimes, that's sufficient.
Another one, as you say, is to start with the "human side". But how you proceed, then, is often up to you: You may get deep into the topic, explore the problem behind the human story, write about pro's and con's, introducing the actors or stake holders, describe their opinions, and so on. Usually, you end by getting back to the human example you introduced in the beginning.
The simple truth is that every story has a human side. Nearly everything affects someone. If it doesn't, it's simply not interesting to anybody. It's not news.
Sure, there's also the common pieces, going after the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. That's the AP stuff. In contrast to want you believe, however, they are easier to write! It's just six questions you got to answer. Follow the Inverted Pyramid format and you're done.
Finding the human side, however, and making it believable and interesting is real work and takes quite a lot of time and experience.
Of course, you can't write every piece like that. Going into all the details of a story all the time would be boring and futile. So, both sorts have their place. But if you have something that's abstract, unexpected or hard to comprehend, starting with the human side is often the best way to go.
Sounds like Techcrunch could use some of those editors.
He is forgetting about is travel expences and a subscription to the AP etc. But his extra 50% buffor is probably not that far off but let's double it and say 34 million a year. That's 34million$ * (1000 page views / 0.25$) / 52 weeks = ~650 million page views a week. Which is probably not that unreasonable.
However, 50 reporters are not going to cover a fraction of what the The New York Times covers.
This is a huge assumption. I disagree with it. I say that journalism is dead. Let me explain...
Turn on any television. Do it 3 or 4 times per day. Surf around the dial 2 or 3 times. I defy anyone to find anything resembling journalism.
Sit down for brunch on Sunday with 3 or 4 Sunday newspapers. Go through all of them for 3 to 4 hours. Learn anything new? I didn't think so.
I bring up these 2 examples because they are my experience over the last 5 years. Television and print journalism are conflicts in terms. They are dead. There's little difference between most newspapers and supermarket tabloids. Heraldo from 10 years ago looks more professional than anything on TV.
Where does that leave us? With the internet. Yes, there's plenty of great writing on-line, but it's buried among all the rest of the crap. Anyone can say anything and they usually do. Readers here know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, but mom and dad and Aunt Millie don't, so they're not getting the news anymore. Most people aren't.
I admire OP's experiment of rescuing the business of journalism. I just wish someone would think of an experiment to rescue the profession of journalism first.
Why should anyone have voted for any of us? The local papers chose not to let the voters find out. That's a major fault of the papers. If they're not going to bother telling the voters what's going on, then who is? If the local papers aren't going to bother covering a state-level race, then why are they still in business (one isn't) and why should we care when they go out of business?
Try the Times, the Scotsman and the Washington post.
that is journalism. And it's not quite dead but I fail to see how they're going to support their reporters, the current businessmodel is failing fast and they don't seem to have any really good plans on replacing it.
Or, "No longer marketable/saleable"?
Hasn't the most really journalist "news" long been subsidized by gossip and "human interest"?
For the small portion of population that values in-depth, analytical coverage, perhaps some mimicking of The Economist's business model may be necessary?
But what TC doesn't get is, that they were successful only in covering the relative small niche of the companies and products related to the Internet. But they didn't prove yet that they could make such breakthrough in general news coverage - nor any other blogger did, even HuffPost is dependent on mainstream media coverage which they build upon.
We are yet to see a "lean" media company consisting of bloggers, who are able to consistently do some heavy reporting like government corruption, war in some African country or life in totalitarian countries, for example. I am curious to see how they will support themselves financially and compete with MSM.
100 at the most, but you can easily run a media company or regional newspage with 10 or 20 employees.