The basic idea is to make news and information in the long tail available to those who are interested in it, while its fresh, by systematic use of journalistic methods to filter the news and information streams.
Today it takes a great effort to feel up-to-date on news regarding you, your profession, your hobbies, your nearest and dearest, and your interests. I haven't found any web service that in a useable way filters the news and other fresh information on the web, and delivers it to my web browser without me doing a great deal of work first.
News media cares for themselves
And the traditional media doesn't help. They want people to read their stories, and if their competitor has a better story on the same topic, they'd rather borrow (read: steal) the story and make their own version. Oh, and if they remember, they'll provide a link to the competitors site.
I don't rely on a single local online news media to bring me all the stories from the area I live in. I have to check them all. This takes time. It's the same with national news media online, as well as international niche media.
Even RSS takes a lot of time
RSS-feeds can be helpful. But even they require a lot of work, and some web skills. RSS is not for everyone. On my iPhone, my Macbook and my PC I use the free RSS-readers from NewsGator. They synchronize the feeds through an online account, so when I change reading device the program knows which posts I've read. But they require some web skills to configure, they might be time consuming.
Copied news stories on RSS fool me
And theres another thing: Media that only cares for themselves (and not their readers) mess up the RSS-feeds. Let me explain how. I am based in Norway, and I read both national an international news, mainly tech and web related stories. Often these stories originate and develops in American news media. After the first media has published a story on the web, the competitors publish the same story, maybe with a different title and a slightly different angle. Then the European and Norwegian online news media translate the story to their language, and they again copy each other, but choose slightly different angles - just enough to fool me. The result is that open every single story and read the first lines, before I realize they're all variations of the same story. This is frustrating, and takes a lot of time.
The long tail of news is hidden
I'm currently reading Chris Andersons revised and updated version of his successful book "The Long Tail". Andersons expression is described in Wikipedia.org. The Pareto principle, or the 80/20-rule, suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"):
The phrase 'the Long Tail' was, according to Chris Anderson, first coined by himself. The concept drew in part from a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality", which noted that a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them.In the online news production in mainstream media this principle is clearly evident. And so it will be as long as news production is fused by the number of hits on the stories on the front page. It seems like most economically successful online news sites are tabloid in one way ore another. The compose their front pages to make sure that everyone will find something of interest. News which appeal to a niche, with only a few tens of thousands of potential readers (on the international sites), or a few thousand or hundreds of readers (on regional sites) hardly ever make it to the front page. And if they're published on the front page for an hour or two, you have to scroll to find them. If we use the Pareto principle, this means that 80% of the news, which would have had dedicated and interested readers, are nearly hidden or at least very hard to find.
Filtering through web communities also takes time
Another filtering service is collaborative web communities like Digg, Mashable and Delicious, where its users gather, share and vote for links they find interestering. But these services also require some effort from me as a user. First I have to use them for some time to really understand the concept. Then I have to configure my account to filter the stories. And I can't rely on the service to give me all the stories I would have found relevant and interestering, at least not when it comes down to my local community in my part of the world. Normally I'm interested in the local news first, but hardly anyone "diggs" them.
The solution is good old journalism - in a brand new way
I believe we need services on the web that saves a lot of time for us, like the newspaper did before radio, TV and internet. The saved time we can spend on more web surfing, or doing something completely different. These services must also provide news and information of better quality than today, and correspond to our interests.
In my opinion, the only way to this properly, is to put journalistic principles to work in the filtration process. We can't leave it all to the machines (like Google). The reason people still want to pay for quality news (at least on paper), is that they are comfortable with the idea of paying journalists for doing the job of gathering, filtering and rewriting information for us. This saves a lot of time for us, as long as we trust the journalists to have us in mind when they write their stories. Thats why I want to add 50% journalistic filtering in the automatic news distribution:
We must take back control over the automated searches and filtering engines, not to be dictated by them to publish and distribute only the news that receives click traffic, but use them to distribute the lost news to the people they were intended for in the first place.
And that's what this project and this blog will focus on, and try to solve. How and when it will be solved, I don't know yet. But at least it's a mission, and we'll find a way. Let's use Google and other fantastic search systems, but let's add man power. Then we can brag about having created the worlds second best web service. At least.
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