Journalism Isn't Dead: More Journalism Projects Getting Funded
from the ain't-dead-yet dept
Last week, in yet another post about old school journalists complaining about the supposed "death" of journalism, someone complained in the comments, saying that the "utter lack of interest" from venture capitalists concerning journalism startups should disprove that there are others out there who can build such a business. That seems like a ridiculous criteria (venture capital interest is hardly a barometer of what works and what doesn't). But, even if we assume that you need to see VC interest, well, then that commenter is wrong also. Someone anonymous pointed us to the recent launch of Patch, a company that is hiring full-time journalists and building hyperlocal community sites and is funded by Polar Capital. And that's hardly the only one. In the last month alone I've had conversations with three different VCs looking at journalism startups and exploring whether their models made sense. Once again, we're seeing that if there's demand for a product (journalism), there will be businesses that will figure out ways to supply it. Not all will succeed. In fact, many will fail. But from that we'll certainly come up with models that work.
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Filed Under: funding, journalism, startups
Companies: patch, polar capital
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Agreed
It wasn't until the last two years or so that news sites started to even allow commenting, and an even smaller amount actually have noise filtering. Commenting on massive traffic sites without proper noise filtering is useless, as Youtube and Digg exemplify over and over again. Top discussion sites are tinkering with karma and expertise as factors in their algorithms -- these newspapers are so late to the game it's astounding.
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Patch should be federally investigated
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