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Scott Karp: Aggregating the power of journalists
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I'd love to present the model we are developing, where journalism is funded by a news aggregator power by journalists, which shares revenue robustly with journalists and news orgs (unlike every other aggregator). Google has proven aggergation is worth billions -- if journalism could get it's share, it could provide billions in new revenue.
As Bill Grueskin summed up it nicely <http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-would-google-do-about-newspapers.html> : ...people used to buy newspapers to get disparate chunks of information (sports scores, movie times, local-government coverage, weather forecasts) that papers provided, yet those readers were effectively subsidizing the entire newsroom. By atomizing content, the Web makes each story instantaneously and ubiquitously accessible, meaning newspapers have gone from the profitable front end of the distribution chain to the unprofitable back end.
Our model is to put news orgs back in the profitable front end of distribution (something pay walls likely won't do).
There's a great story of all the news orgs in the North West collaborating to create a regional newswire:
http://newscollaboration.ning.com/ http://publishing2.com/2009/01/09/networked-link-journalism-a-revolution-quietly-begins-in-washington-state/
Would also be interesting to play out this debate with the Journalism Online folks: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/04/tale-of-two-very-different-journalism.html Our model is based on the proven economics of the web (rather than speculating on new economics).
