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Hot on the heels of my first post discussing the future of news comes this post from Paul Carr over at TechCrunch. He sums up his thoughts nicely:
Right across the Internet there are countless other sites that employ the same standards for other niches – from music (Pitchfork) to politics (FiveThirtyEight) to farming (I have no idea) – each of which can afford to dedicate more time to their very specific field of expertise than the New York Times could, even if it doubled its staff.
And so if I were the New York Times, I’d realise that in the face of such solid niche competition, my days as a news-gatherer were over. I’d lay off all of my journalists, shut down the presses [...], close the doors and thank God for giving me such a good innings. Then the next day I’d round up maybe 20 or 30 of my best editors and I’d launch a brand new site. A site which [...] would use those skilled human editors to aggregate the best specialist reporting from around the web into one all-encompassing news source.
Yet another interesting business model. I don’t know of any websites that have done anything like this, but it might be a worthy project to spend my time on after graduation if I can’t find a job. Aggregation might not be the most exciting job, but somebody has to do it and, if done right, I think it could pay off. Just like any other aspect of journalism, it is all about trust. If readers KNOW they can 100% trust your content, then the rest of the pieces will fall into place.
