What sort of topics are you looking for in all the noise?
6,666 karma · joined October 18, 2012
https://www.jaredwiener.com
https://bsky.app/profile/jaredwiener.com
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
The article says:
> This particular NFT offered bidders the ownership of a unique, detailed replica of the SMS, which was sent on the Vodafone network on 3rd December 1992.
...
> The message in question was sent by Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old British engineer who used his computer to send “Merry Christmas” to an Orbitel 901 mobile phone.
So is this just a string of characters spelling "Merry Christmas?" It cannot be the _actual_ SMS message -- unless it includes the phone that received it, right? So what IS this??
If any newsroom brass is reading this (or reporters thinking of going independent, especially local) -- I'd love to talk. We're building a platform to help monetize journalism outside of the usual predatory social media/aggregator set up, and with more support than Substack.
jared (at) nillium (dot) com
Still -- a few fine points on this:
- He's covering topics of national interest, which is very different than local when it comes to subscription numbers.
- To that point, "Twitter continues to be the biggest driver of newsletter signups." We've seen that it can be incredibly difficult for local news to trend on social media, namely because -- by definition -- it appeals to a limited audience.
- By being investigative only, it means he can choose what he is willing to cover. Investigative reporting is incredibly important, but it can be very different than replacing local newspapers -- while they can do investigative pieces as well, so much of what they do is covering the events around their coverage area. That takes a team of people, because you cannot be everywhere at once.
- He has a big name. True, he might not have been famous when he started, but the article itself points out that he was able to gain coverage in Wired because what he was doing was such a novelty. Now, the headline of the Substack you linked to doesn't even need to include the name of his newsletter, his own name is so well known.
But then of course, theres the other stuff. Stuff that you might want to know about over the course of the week. The great part of the Internet now is that there doesn't really have to be any delineation between the two; we don't have to go to press. We can post what we need to when we need to, and of course push notifications/etc for the really urgent stuff.
Freemium model: advertisement based, with a subscription fee for some extra content personalization.
> Do you intend to sell or operate personalized advertisements?
Not "personalized" the way that you are intending. At the moment we do fall back to programmatic bidding ads like AdMob by default, but the general idea is local based ads. Since its local news, and we know your locale, we sell to local businesses -- it's essentially the same "targeting" that your local newspaper has been doing for the last 100 years.
> Do you intend to sell anonymized (or not) customer data as a revenue source?
No.
Journalism has a very short shelf life, and can be costly to produce. Remember, what you read as a consumer is only the end product, there were a lot of calls, interviews, etc -- and those can be costly. You could have a reporter sitting at a city council meeting, for example, for four hours - -and have nothing of value to publish. Or a ton. You don't know.
Beyond that, corporate contributors end up looking more like NPR than open source -- while a company might be based entirely around a DLang codebase, that doesnt really happen with news. So there are underwriters, but it looks more like either donations or advertisements.
This is one of the reasons we're really focusing on local first -- unless you're in a handful of American cities that still has a thriving local press corps, the question isn't really who is first, it's who is covering it at all.
Beyond that, we're trying to move away from the traditional formats that somehow migrated from the print and broadcast worlds online. When you write an article, you have to have all of the information together at once; of course, that's rarely how the reporting process works. By posting it as reporters get information, and as they're comfortable reporting that information -- it not only can get to the consumer quickly, but we hope it can also eliminate some of the mystery behind why a journalist is reporting what they are reporting.
We're building a network of local journalists, along with others in national verticals. The incentive structure exists in a way to promote news people want to come back to read, not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes, or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34 year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the traditional forms, like subscribing to a local paper or watching broadcast TV.
jared (at) nillium (dot) com
Still, its the most trusted of the group.
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
I (previously) wrote some thoughts here: https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
at https://bolls.life/WLC/1/1/ -- the beginning of the second sentence is at the right (beginning) of the first line.
We're former journalists who thought the way news works online isnt really good for anyone. We're building something that uses threads instead of articles, and tries to align the reporting with the incentives -- no more clickbait.
Here's a little bit about why we're doing it and how: https://blog.nillium.com/taking-news-forth/
Would love to hear what you think!
“Who gets to decide what’s true?” is the wrong question. We should be asking “how do we determine what’s true?” https://blog.nillium.com/fighting-misinformation-online/
Yes -- prices are down somewhat, and we will be upgrading, though not by as much as I expected when starting to look. And the demand is definitely there -- an apartment we were interested was leased sometime over the weekend.
NYC will be fine.
@BadMedicalTakes (https://twitter.com/badmedicaltakes) is just one quick way to see some of the stuff thats out there.
Can we at least all agree that germs cause disease, there are no nanobots in any of the COVID vaccines, and that masks are not dangerous?