NEW BUSINESS vs. OLD BUSINESS – Welcome to newser.com
January 28, 2010
From Steve Jobs’ latest invention to Obama’s last night speech, including Brangelina’s breakup rumors and the rest of the most important issues occurring in the world – you get it all at the newser.com, but the charming difference is that authors of this extremely popular online publication give their info in 50 to 120 words rather than writing long “boring” stories.
“Read less, know more” was the motivation for Michael Wolff - a Vanity Fair columnist and a CNBC contributor who founded newser.com in 2007 and turned it into a profitable business – in less than a year.
During his interview at the CNBS, Wolff was accused of being a reason for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal getting out of the business but in his defense, author of the infamous “Burn rate: how I survived the gold rush years on the internet”, brought up some interesting arguments.
…It is clear that new business is replacing the old business….. You don’t need to read only New York Times to be well educated person, you have to read all the other sources as well.
The structure of constructing news for newser.com is simple – they take the daily news from over 100 sources, shrink them into smaller more “quick to read”, handy, semi-articles, add pictures or if available – videos and put them out to the world.
Obviously, such a form of not creating but recreating news got critical approach from the professional colleagues – for instance Portfolio magazine has been critical of Michael Wolff specifically for that reason.
On the other hand we must admit re-invention is something not everyone can afford. All the media outlets have to re-invent themselves to adjust to the future. What is wrong with the fact that in the era condemned to the – quick, fast, rapid – you will have to spend less time, but still know it all.
Freakonomics.com calls the newser.com one of the best new models of journalism, and I cannot agree more.
