What a way to launch!
Byliner debuted today with an 89-page (pdf!) exposé by THE Jon Krakauer on Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson. The article is making the rounds. Haven’t cracked it, yet. Looks good, but it’s not what I’m primarily interested in.
I am most interested in: Who and what is BYLINER.com?
Well, don’t expect the site to tell you. There’s no “About Us” link. A little snooping around (read: Google) however, lead to me John Tayman, editor of Techland, Time Magazine’s technology blog, who takes credit for Byliner on his personal site (which looks like a Tumblr, but sadly is not).
The Byliner homepage promises stories by William Vollman, Bob Shacochis, Anthony Swofford and David Rakoff at “proper length.” It does not come right out and say that you’ll have to pay for them, but the suggestion that all proceeds from Krakauer’s story will go to charity suggests that a paywall is coming.
I am intrigued. Paying for long-form has a lot of potential, but format is a big concern. It makes sense in the rush to get something up that the site would rely on PDFs—they’re cheap(er) to produce and you have complete creative control—but I wonder if that is their long-term strategy. You can’t categorize PDFs. You can’t keep people from sharing them. It’s harder to make them interactive—obviously versus something designed specifically for a tablet (like what Atavist is doing), let alone something designed specifically for the web, ie no comments, share functions, related links, etc.
But I get a head of myself! The name of the game is to get something up, right? And not only has Tayman done that, he’s made a splash. People will be talking about Byliner, which means investors will be talking about Byliner. So what are you going to do about it, John? I’m curious to find out.
Street Fight launched yesterday. It’s founded by some smart people (I happen to know one of them) in Brooklyn who promise to “cover the business of hyperlocal news, information and advertising.” Incidentally, the site has no advertising, but it looks like their model is shaping up a bit differently then the sites and businesses they cover.
At first, we will be primarily a news analysis site with emphasis on the individuals and personalities of the industry. We’ll expand to offer essential, proprietary research on this rapidly evolving field. We’ll also launch events, to bring together individuals working in this area in an effort to help foster idea exchange and collaboration. And, in our aim to be a central resource, we’ll soon bring you a job listings section.
Sounds good! But no need to wait. If today’s offering about “Groupon Guilt” is any indication, the site’s already a good read.
I thought this post was going to be about a new startup, but it evolved into something wholly different once I started looking into ChipIn, a widget that allows people to collect donations toward a particular goal and have them sent to their PayPal account. In this case, the family of Emilie Gossiaux, a young artist who was hit by a mack truck while bicycling in NYC, is raising money for her rehab. I learned about her story via RadioLab.
ChipIn, it turns out, is a relic. It’s no longer under development and its creators no longer provide customer service. In fact, the story of ChipIn ends two years ago, when the company created and launched Sprout which launched AdVine which begat Esau … just kidding! It raises a somewhat interesting question for this dreary Tuesday morning: How many stepping stone startups are floating out there in the ether like defunct satellites orbiting the Earth?
Ed Barrientos, chief executive of Brazen Careerist, who has invested $4.5 million in seven companies based in the Washington area since the mid-1990s, according to this piece about the burgeoning tech scene in Washington DC.
Who knew that real estate and start ups had so much in common? Okay, maybe everyone but me. Still a good point!
Choire Sicha in a story about new entrepeneurs in Details.
Sicha calls this the antidote to the too big to fail mentality. It’s not only startups that should be learning from their failures, but the bigger companies (ie publishers), too.
[found via Langer]
What do Instapaper, iPad apps like the Daily, Nomad Editions and Gourmet, and premium aggregator Ongo have in common? They’re all betting on user experience. For all of these startups, the quality of the content is not at question, but how users will access it. All of these startups believe there is room for improvement on the browser-based reading experience and they’re making huge bets on this assumption.
This is the gamble most news publishers are reticent to make and this is why they’re letting apps like Instapaper drink their milkshake. Publishers, anchored to their old business model, first fixated on advertisements and pageviews to the detriment of the reading experience. Now, they’re obsessed with paywalls—and maybe they’re right to be, but maybe they’re charging for the wrong thing. All this time the focus has been on content. Maybe, if you take the new focus on user experience seriously, it shouldn’t be.
That’s where publishers have gone wrong. They’ve fixated on the content, when they should have been fixating on the experience. Perhaps therein lies the solution: Give the content away for free and charge for the experience. What would that look like? Maybe the free Times becomes a glorified RSS feed with ads. Let the “free” world share your content and promote it via Twitter and Facebook. Let them sort it and spread it. Then the publisher can spend their time focusing on creating the ideal reading experience in whatever format the reader is willing to pay for it in: web browser, iPad, Kindle, et al. Could that work?
Seems like a lot of people (including David Carr) are talking about Pop Dust, a new site from the former editor of Billboard about pop music for people who really care about pop music. What I like about the site, photos of Justin Bieber in nerd glasses notwithstanding of course, is its use of illustration. Similar to what’s done on Capital, the site intends on rotating into their background new illustrations. It’s a neat little idea that adds some variability and depth to the site design. Whether or not the site’s content can do the same, I’ll leave to founder Craig Marks:
“Music is generally covered in two ways on the Web. Bands either play live or they show up in dreadfully dull interviews. Both of those things are pretty played out,” Mr. Marks said. “Hopefully, the magazine experience I have taught me a few tricks about packaging stuff about this kind of music that will give people another look at the people who make it.’”
Good luck!
Chirpstory joins the ranks of Storify and ScribbleLive as a third party publication tool that helps publishers assemble content out of curated Tweets, photos, and other social media. The big difference between Chirpstory and the other two is that Chirpstory has tied its fate directly to Twitter, which ultimately could backfire.
The advent of these types of third party tools are the first forays into the world of perfect packaging that Scott Karp believes will become more important in 2011—or at least I assume that’s what he has in mind—and reveals some of the gaping holes in modern content management systems that have been discussed recently.
As design moves toward a new level of clarity, as too will content. The tools that help editors make sense of it all, that allow Web publishers to not only more intelligently package and curate their content, but position it in the larger context of the nowness of the Web—perhaps even separating their content from their iPad cousins—will become very popular.
[via niemanlab]
We’ll be publishing a new genre of long-form journalism and nonfiction, direct to your iPhone, iPad, and other tablet and e-readers.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, this is happening.
Atavist stories aren’t static: Some may evolve in response to our readers, or simply expand and change as new facts come to light. Some may even involve the readers in the story itself.
Interesting. I’m intrigued. Tell me more, please.
The model: You’ll be able to purchase each Atavist story from inside the free Atavist app, which is available in the iTunes store for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. We’ll soon be available on Android devices as well. For Kindles, readers can purchase a text-only version of each story. All of the proceeds are shared between The Atavist and the author. You’ll be able to comment on the stories, and share them in a few different ways.
This has the makings of a very smart idea. Train readers to consider each article as its own individual piece of purchasable content. People can browse and pay for what they want. It opens the door to quality, serialized work. It’s a good way to keep price points down and lower the barrier to entry. Also, it’s a novel idea to have the author share directly in the sales of their work. Attaway to represent, Brooklyn.
Start-ups appreciation
Congrats, Capital! Well deserved.
So The Business Insider put us on a list of the “Hottest Journalism Start-ups of 2010.” It’s an honor to be among great company like TBD and The Awl’s new sister sites Splitsider and TheHairpin.
We’d like to shoutout some other journalism start-ups and new media types we’ve got our eye on for 2011:
DocumentCloud (more like a tool than a new media start-up, but we like it!)
Any others you guys are interested in?
