I'm working on something that you might like - though it's not released yet.
It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.
For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.
The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:
- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change.
- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
- I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic.
Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of things happening with explainers for everything they could easily link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining an event and provide context for experts and normal consumers.
e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they're interested in it.
Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they had to fit in the article format even though they had big plans for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren't articles is difficult.
[This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein's Vox Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox and why they ended up where they were]
I was thinking about building something that sounds very similar when I was working at a news site. For me the main benefits of organizing articles into sagas is, that you can easily start reading up on something only once there is actually sufficient information there and to follow stories over time.
Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story.
The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.
This sounds very useful. The quality of sagas would matter a lot. This is from my personal experience of trying to build a news site in my past life which cuts the clutter and focuses on facts. The problem I faced was in how do I decide which link to choose without biases. This turned off a lot of people who did not conform to that view. Even on clear topics. For instance most people agree racism is bad but there would be diverse opinion on where to draw the line and what actions constitute racism.
However there are quite a few topics where you could be objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.
Basically they would distill an article down to facts with links to the original source of the facts. Users could subscribe to a story and it would update you when a new substantive fact was added to the story.
This is very cool, especially the assembling news into units of longer duration, it would be great if you also expanded on that with design and make the overarching sagas visually distinct.
Interesting, how are you planning to collect articles for the news "sagas", and how often do you want to update information? I'd say articles written on the same day as some event will always have more noise than summaries written later.
This resonates with one idea I've had. A email-only service: I subscribe to your email and get notifications when you find something interesting in the internet and post a link to the service.
Interactions with the service don't need a website. You literally send a email with a link to news@foobar,com, the service sees where the email came from, adds the link to your newsfeed and distributes it to your subscribers.
Ideally, you wouldn't even need to setup an account, just send a link from any email and your account is that email. Subscribing to someone's email could be as simple as sending a "subscribe to joe@schmoe,com" to the service.
All hard-to-argue with pain points that could be addressed in a novel way. There’s a lot of unsolved problems in the new media morass and it would be great if a couple of new white hat firms emerged in this space to cut through the noise and the bullshit.
But identifying what’s wrong and even getting an MVP together is one of the easier problems.
The burning question is how do you monetize your efforts without giving into the ad cartel? Will people pay a premium for a link tree? Unless this is more of a civic minded volunteer type thing?
Either way, best of luck. There’s a sack of coins somewhere in here.
> Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
Omg, so true. A while back i found out about Axios and thought they were really cool. A nice way to skim news, keep up to date... but the lack of sourcing made the information worthless to me. Difficult to tell what is opinion, reality, how they got to a summary of a quote, etc.
Axios has the right idea for me, but they need to pair it with detailed sources, quotes, etc to drill into. Reality is often too strange these days to trust a summary, i need sources.
I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. I am desperately searching for a (preferably lightweight) site that would offer important world news, limited updates on that story, and be willing to be quiet when nothing is going on. The site I linked is way better than most, but still is full of low-value updates, and it tends to miss stories of real significance. In the past I have used text.npr.org, but it is worse yet about missing stories and giving low-value updates.
The problem with this is question is that it all comes down to how you define "relevant". What is very relevant to one person is not the same as another, and news orgs are in the business of sending out as many updates as they can.
I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
As a counter-anecdote, I have been inundated with the Russia/Ukraine story every day for weeks since the US intelligence report.
Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments.
Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”.
I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
I didn't know about the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border[0] until half way through because I wasn't paying attention to the news in Hungary (a very pro-Poland and anti-"migrant" country) and then was surprised by it when I went to Germany and randomly picked up a newspaper.
Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts.
Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot.
In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it.
I am very specific about the news I read. So, I aggregate news (particularly opinion features) from an easy to scrape news portal. Than I latex-format that to a pdf document using Pandoc and read it offline.
I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources.
What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth.
Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.
It's a nice summary if you read the whole thing, but the alphabetical ordering (both by category and by title) is not great for a quick skim. If there is no 'priority ordering', the most important article is on average going to be buried somewhere in the middle.
It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small international section, where it takes the most important important, almost always long-form articles per day and translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and better than most English language publications (in curation, not sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander:
I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person.
Answer: I misunderstood the submission prompt, thinking my comment would be attached to the post and not lost below. I linked that as a halfway-there example of what I want, and also because I'm a slave to SEO and HN ranks posts higher if they have a link.
No, I don't think so. I've answered elsewhere in this thread: when making the submission, I thought my comment would stay with the initial post, and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the submission. The linked page is a decent page, and a halfway-there example of what I'm looking for.
I love the idea. It would be nice if events (Miss Universe, Tornado outbreak) would be put on a timeline, and there would be a separate section for ongoing things (Covid, russian troops).
I've briefly worked on an idea that was "pandora for news" when pandora was the hot music app. The app would learn from your votes and cater news/aggregations based on your preferences every day to your news dashboard. I was in love with the idea but never pursued it. Is there something like this now?
It's not a "site" per se, but I have been thoroughly enjoying winno https://winno.app. It's news that you subscribe to based on very specific topics and/or categories.
Winno is fine but it has few feeds. The few feeds are almost all US-centric and most of them have a small left-of-center bias.
Since I live in the Middle East the only one relevent to me is the iran-us feed, but even if I was interested in European news there are almost none there
Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the relationship between the material and the consumer. You would have to know something about me in order to provide me with relevant (to me) news.
Even if a media tries to make a guess as to what you view as relevant they might not get it right and the internet will go banans and claim that the site is suppressing relevant stories.
Relevant can better judged in hindsight. I’d try to find an outlet which publish stories once a week, or less. That filters out the less important stories.
Or you could just have a tag-like approach to news. If something new interests you, subscribe to a tag. If it ceases to interest you, unsubscribe from that tag or snooze it for some months. You discover new tags by seeing them referenced in stories from tags you already follow.
That's pretty similar to what Reddit does. And it doesn't even need much user data, other than the user expressing what they are interested in.
Winno is an iOS app that I’ve been using and it’s amazing. They don’t have a web app, however that is in the pipeline. For now you can join their discord server and there is a bot that posts summaries. (Unfortunately the read-more urls are only available within the app)
The only downsides I’ve found is that the only way they make money is buymeacoffee. I haven’t looked into their privacy policy as well.
You're right, I didn't define 'relevant', though I appreciate the Congo story. Examples, since you asked:
1. I don't care about Miss Universe (one of the stories in the link).
2. Sports are low value except for championships.
3. I want Covid stories batched where I can look at them if I want to look at that, but where they otherwise don't clutter everything.
4. The Midwest tornadoes are relevant, but human interest stories about one of the deceased candle workers are not.
I guess "relevant" depends on where you are in the world (and/or where you're from which might be different to where you are currently) :)
It's also a tricky thing due to interconnectedness: I generally don't care that much what happens in the US, but clearly there are important things happening there, which can have knock-on effects the world over...
BBC news is the closest to “just the facts, ma’am” to the extent that the app shows me (untouched, unbumped) months old news stories for categories that have had no recent updates. Their articles have a “news only with a narrative” main section and then any opinion is separated by an hr with the name of the person and their take on the news.
[+] [-] gpm|4 years ago|reply
It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.
For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.
The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:
- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change.
- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
- I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic.
Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
[+] [-] 0xCMP|4 years ago|reply
e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they're interested in it.
Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they had to fit in the article format even though they had big plans for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren't articles is difficult.
[This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein's Vox Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox and why they ended up where they were]
[+] [-] smoe|4 years ago|reply
Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story.
The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.
[+] [-] indogooner|4 years ago|reply
However there are quite a few topics where you could be objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.
Good luck. Hope to see it on Show HN one day.
[+] [-] stevesearer|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circa_News
Basically they would distill an article down to facts with links to the original source of the facts. Users could subscribe to a story and it would update you when a new substantive fact was added to the story.
[+] [-] artembugara|4 years ago|reply
https://newscatcherapi.com/news-api
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouc|4 years ago|reply
Would it be user-submitted links & tag based?
My imagination takes me to something like: the overall #covid-19 saga, plus the sub-sagas: "#covid-19 #delta", "#covid-19 #omicron"
Super curious what your approach will look like!
[+] [-] phgn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akomtu|4 years ago|reply
Interactions with the service don't need a website. You literally send a email with a link to news@foobar,com, the service sees where the email came from, adds the link to your newsfeed and distributes it to your subscribers.
Ideally, you wouldn't even need to setup an account, just send a link from any email and your account is that email. Subscribing to someone's email could be as simple as sending a "subscribe to joe@schmoe,com" to the service.
[+] [-] RONROC|4 years ago|reply
But identifying what’s wrong and even getting an MVP together is one of the easier problems.
The burning question is how do you monetize your efforts without giving into the ad cartel? Will people pay a premium for a link tree? Unless this is more of a civic minded volunteer type thing?
Either way, best of luck. There’s a sack of coins somewhere in here.
[+] [-] lijogdfljk|4 years ago|reply
Omg, so true. A while back i found out about Axios and thought they were really cool. A nice way to skim news, keep up to date... but the lack of sourcing made the information worthless to me. Difficult to tell what is opinion, reality, how they got to a summary of a quote, etc.
Axios has the right idea for me, but they need to pair it with detailed sources, quotes, etc to drill into. Reality is often too strange these days to trust a summary, i need sources.
[+] [-] Vivtek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remram|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbihl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|4 years ago|reply
I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
[+] [-] goblin89|4 years ago|reply
Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments.
Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”.
I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
[+] [-] biztos|4 years ago|reply
Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts.
Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot.
In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_bo...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ
[Edit: it's debatable whether this was a "refugee" crisis so I removed that word.]
[+] [-] anyfactor|4 years ago|reply
I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
[+] [-] nojito|4 years ago|reply
That's pretty unbelievable. It was on the frontpage of all major western news sources.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] idiocrat|4 years ago|reply
There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources.
What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth.
Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.
[+] [-] avandermeulen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judofyr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|4 years ago|reply
It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
[+] [-] wheels|4 years ago|reply
https://www.spiegel.de/international/
[+] [-] galfarragem|4 years ago|reply
I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person.
[0] https://slowernews.substack.com/
[1] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
Looks like a decent site.
[+] [-] tbihl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] als0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbihl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
This one is pretty on the nose. It's from PRX/PRI. They have web and audio.
But "relevant" is not easily measured. It's obviously pretty personal.
[+] [-] tjansen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arasx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iso1631|4 years ago|reply
There's very little news that I need to change my approach to the day for.
[+] [-] barkerja|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharikous|4 years ago|reply
Since I live in the Middle East the only one relevent to me is the iran-us feed, but even if I was interested in European news there are almost none there
[+] [-] omarhaneef|4 years ago|reply
Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the relationship between the material and the consumer. You would have to know something about me in order to provide me with relevant (to me) news.
[+] [-] mrweasel|4 years ago|reply
Relevant can better judged in hindsight. I’d try to find an outlet which publish stories once a week, or less. That filters out the less important stories.
[+] [-] selfhoster11|4 years ago|reply
That's pretty similar to what Reddit does. And it doesn't even need much user data, other than the user expressing what they are interested in.
[+] [-] divbzero|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/
[+] [-] u2077|4 years ago|reply
The only downsides I’ve found is that the only way they make money is buymeacoffee. I haven’t looked into their privacy policy as well.
https://winno.app/
[+] [-] theelous3|4 years ago|reply
Also... what does relevant mean? This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant.
[+] [-] tbihl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berkut|4 years ago|reply
It's also a tricky thing due to interconnectedness: I generally don't care that much what happens in the US, but clearly there are important things happening there, which can have knock-on effects the world over...
[+] [-] masterof0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benbristow|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI
https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK
Bite-sized news headlines with sources in the replies if you need them, and the standard Twitter discussion thread.
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|4 years ago|reply