Hello.
You probably know or are familiar with my partner, Trevor. So far, I've been that "other guy" he's working with. You may consider this a formal introduction. I'm Clark Fredricksen. In past lives, I've been a writer, journalist, professional jazz trumpet player, Norwegian carrot farmer, aspiring French electro-pop DJ, and chef. Anyways, it's nice to meet you finally.
So. Here's the vision:
The journalism world is in a state of disrepair. Editors, publishers and reporters have mostly accepted the reality that newspapers are not capturing audience like they once did. They know the world-wide-Internets are surely the next medium, if not the current, through which everyone will read the news, though no one seems to have any idea what that will look like. Many journalists of the "golden era" are under the impression that the solution to the newspaper industry's woes is to simply slap together a passable website, post content in a form similar to print editions, and pray advertisers start paying more for skyscrapers, banners, rectangles and other ads. If you haven't noticed, it isn't working.
As Clay Shirky recently wrote: "now is the time for experiments, lots of experiments." Bold experiments have been launched by the more woe-is-print-accepting captains of industry — Arianna's Huffington Post;, John Harris' Politico, Lisa Brown's The Daily Beast — while others, like The New York Times, have spent large amounts of money improving their IT departments and websites. Still, newspapers aren't really sure how to make any money online. There is no successful model for online journalism. If Shirky is correct, we won't know for a very long time what that model will be. Furthermore, we don't know if newspapers — online-only, print, or both — will be a part of the model.
Here's what we do know: There's a new type of consumer in town. And this generation of consumers, my generation, is not our fathers'. We simply consume the news differently. We are a different audience, a new audience, with a vastly different means by which to gather, discuss, digest, and spread information.
We have not yet fully explored nor do we yet understand completely how this new generation digests information. My guess is newspapers won't have a business model until they do understand. What we do understand, however, is this is a generation of Facebookers, Twitters, Googlers, Diggers and bloggers. They buy things on Amazon and sell them on Craigslist. They skip the Super Bowl and watch the commercials on Hulu. They post personal diaries online for varying audiences of one or one million to read. They find the latest SNL digital short and post it in every social networking site to which they belong. They submit stories to Reddit so as to watch it climb up or down in the ratings, with the hope it will reach the front page. They read the New York Times while watching a live-stream of CNBC and downloading a podcast from The Onion. This is a generation of information gatherers, of information spreaders.
That being said, I'm tired of the hectic, Thousand-o-Social sites + Google reader format many of us have succumbed to. I'm tired of the echoing bubble of blogs, the poorly designed newspaper websites, the text-only aggregators, the group-think-prone "vote up if" sites.
This is where Other Peoples' News comes in. We are a social experiment for a new social generation, and the hope is to create a place where we can digest the news a bit easier, from sources a bit more friendly, on a platform that's a bit prettier. And I'm excited to see what we can create.
Okay — it's time for bed. Thursday will be the usual ramen lunch with Trevor for some design sketching. I'm sure it will be fun, as it always is.
