News site from scratch

What would you do with a blank tablet? What would you do without the legacy business? What do you think would be most important in launching not just a news website but a digital news service with no baggage?

Kevin Anderson, blogs editor for the UK Guardian, writes about a discussion prompted by a question posed by Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media with Al Jazeera, on Twitter.

Journalists, editors and consultants, cited by Kevin, suggest some keywords (in random order):

”Relevance, discoveribility and depth. Syndication, participation, embeddable content, bridges to the flow on the web, mobile access. Story tracking tool, satire, live feed of the newsroom in action, ticker tape of hyper links showing breaking story. Automatic semantic tagging, related links, user-customisable RSS, SEO friendly URLs, Apture-style auto linking, good comments system. RSS at every juncture. pingback in all external linking. Alerts to journalists when people comment on their stories, with time set aside for response.”

With all the respect to these nice features and ideas, I believe there are some other issues to be considered.

Here is my list:

1. A mission, or a reason: why do I launch this site and why should anybody care about it? What would make your site unique?
2. Things to be discovered: what important do I want to learn, or tell the others about?
3. People to be met: whom would I like to meet and talk to? Why others should be excited about these people?
4. Story-telling: how am I going to tell stories about those things and poeple in an attractive and unique way?
5. Design of story-gathering process and quality management: how am I going to find these things and people and how am I going to tell their stories in a way you want? Who will be doing it? As Steve Jobs keeps saying, design is not how it looks like. ”Design is how it works.”
6. Design of interactions: what will be the experience of my reader/user when reading/viewing/using my site? How am I going to involve them in my processes? How am I going to respond to any problems they face? How am I going to help those individuals to play together and form a community? Why people would join it? Why would they fall in love with it?
7. Brand and marketing: what are the keywords? The image I want to achieve? How am I going to do make people understand this image, the brand’s values and my mission? (Here’s the moment I add all the marketing stuff, including the design understood as a layout).
8. Technology, other features… they may be story trackers, live feeds and RSS – whatever suits my mission and brand image.
9. Money issue # 1: who is going to pay for all that, why and how much? How am I going to organise money-raising operation, ie. sales?
10. Money issue # 2: will I make money on it? (It means: am I going to be financially motivated to sustain this site for a longer period that I can afford at a start-up?)

I think all these issues can easily go together with all the features listed in Kevin’s blog. But I think they are ”the most important things to include.”
 
Kevin predicts that ”there will be a site with related services that radically disrupts the news industry”.

Yes, I am sure there will be such a thing. I am just not sure if it will disrupt this industry just because of technology it uses and tools it provides.

Join the debate

What do you think would be most important in launching a news website nowadays and in the future? What is going to be the disruption force: just a technology or something else? What kind of innovation – social, organisational or business one – is needed to make the first ”iPod-style”, or ”MacBook Air” newspaper?

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