I think funding mass media is less interesting than finding a way to have sustainable investigative journalism, both at the local and national levels. Investigative journalism, especially at the local level, has been hit hard by local newspapers getting shut down and the media forced to either pull out of unprofitable areas or focus on money-making ventures. Most media outlets are not the New York Times or Washington Post; they can't afford to send reporters out for months to put together enough evidence to run a long-form story. The end result though is that most media outlets focus on what attracts viewers and makes them money: partisan commentary, stories that spread FUD, and feel-good stories. The end result is that government and business officials can run amok without anyone holding them accountable.
Let mass media focus on general-interest stories and slowly become reality TV for reality. If we instead focus on investigative journalism, we'll have a way for journalists to provide unbiased content without depending on the mass media to provide the funding to do so.
So long as journalists are paid with ad dollars, content will always trend towards the lowest common denominator.
This applies to all media in general; but there really needs to be a better metric for quantifying impact than clicks. If writers, etc. are rewarded for advancing knowledge, then many many more people would be enabled to do so.
Hell, perhaps we don't even need a new metic, and instead just subsidize everyone with UBI. Those who provide long-term value will outweigh those who only consume.
It's a good question, and really, the crux of the whole issue. I don't have evidence, just belief... The value of incremental knowledge, and of lives lived without scarcity consciousness, when measured across large enough time-scale, could have exponential impact on humanity (snowball effect). Whereas the cost of UBI, while large, is relatively linear.
Hopefully, some of the experiments on UBI can start to provide the evidence.
I suppose what I'm asking is are there are enough resources to allow UBI right now with a major chunk of the labor force (and subsequently tax income) disappearing?
Sustainable investigative journalism is most likely going to solve itself by technologies and access to information and so it makes little sense to want to focus on that as a business category IMO. Making it sustainable is a byproduct of the technologies, tools and legislative work we develop.
In fact one of the best tools is already here we are using it right now. It's never been as cheap to do as it is right now.
> Sustainable investigative journalism is most likely going to solve itself
This sounds like your saying the business model for investigative journalism is obvious and easy.
> People in general don't pay for investigative journalism and so it's never going to be a business category in itself
This shows that you actually don't think it's solvable / there is no business model. If it's being done as charity or thankless hard work then I don't think that's solved.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough so for that, I apologies.
So what I am basically saying is that investigative journalism IS already sustainable it's just not a business.
It's if anything a process or a number of very loosely defined processes if even that.
The process is going to cost whatever it cost to investigate whatever it is you want to investigate and the only way to make it "sustainable" (cheaper) is through the development of other areas which has nothing to do with that process.
The link I reference shows a pretty simple, cheap and powerful form of investigative journalism (he more or proved Theranos was not working).
If you want to break into the US military and steal their secrets it's going to take your whisteblowers to get the information.
So trying to put it into a business context is misleading as it's just really a broad area of snooping around hoping to find some dirt.
It's a very interesting problem. Look, for example, at the large and provocative studies of Herman and Chomsky [1,2] and trying to remove the bias that exists in mass media, especially the self censorship. There must be many studies of these problems that are more recent [3] and include the role of the internet.
I can only see tax dollars funding this approach - the BBC is the clear up on a pedestal example of this, and sometimes you have to say, the market sucks at fixing some issues.
Exactly. Everyone in the U.S. gets taxed a couple bucks a month, and it gets apportioned among independent (not advertising supported) content creators based on page views, ratings, and whatever other factors. This is probably the only way to fix the problem.
State run media is actually very good at solving the problems you find aggravating.
99% of useful news has nothing to do with the things you imagine state run news will be bad at informing you about. It is a world without sensational click bait. The 1% of the time some journalist goes missing, well thats what WeChat is for.
The Voice of America RSS feeds [1] are mostly clickbait-free. It's officially the position of the US Government, but has a long tradition of being neutral to the point of blandness. To try to drum up more interest, there are now some more tabloid-like feeds, such as "VOA Fast Five".
The VOA's judgment on what's important is a lot better than most of the US media, where click-through rates seem to determine placement.
I agree 100%. I actually have worried about this problem for a long time and I have come up with quite a lot of clever ideas (well I think they are clever) to solve this problem. Pity I don't have any time :(
The ideas are a bit too long for a post here on HN, but if people are serious about wanting to pursue a startup in this area then get in contact with me [1].
I know there are lots of people wanting to start a startup who feel they don’t have any good ideas so if this is an area you are passionate about then I am happy to talk. I am in the lucky position of having the financial resources to fund a new startup, but because I am busy running my own business, I just don't have the time to do it myself. When I was younger I had lots of time and no money, now I am older I have the lots of money and no time :(
1. I am pretty easy to find and do a background check on.
I'd be very interested! This is a field that I recently became extremely interested in and even met up with my lawyer earlier today to discuss a bulk FOIA research project. I left a comment on your blog with contact info if you're interested in talking. :)
I've constantly racked my brain on the Underserved Communities and Social Services: my dad is a Vietnam vet and my mom (while we were growing up) fit that single mother middle-class type...how does technology help them?
Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (i.e. does technology even solve this problem?).
The other problem is revenue/profitability...this population is inherently cash-strapped, so trying to create a technology solution that likely lies in the Tech-meets-Consumer Discretionary industry, well, who among these people can (and will) afford such services?
It frustrates me to no end...because I want to help, but I can't seem to find a viable solution whenever I build something out.
It's further a problem because it doesn't follow the general YC/Paul Graham rules for creating solutions - solving your own problems. Most techies aren't also veterans or single mothers, so while it was a problem I experienced second hand growing up, it's not something I live with today, other than my innate desire to help others. It's very hard to solve a problem you can't experience first hand.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve these kinds of problems? Am I approaching it wrong?
Make blue apron for food pantries. One summer I volunteered on a kind of food pantry truck; twice a week, we'd load up this box truck with whatever the local supermarkets had donated-- pallets of turnips about to expire, pallets of bread, cucumbers, whatever--and we'd drive to some designated areas, set the food out on tables, and people would line up to collect a share of it. We had to limit based on availability; maybe two loaves of bread, three cucumbers, as many turnips as you want.
The donations we got were usually either past their best or unpopular or both. When food expires, there's a period when it's still fine to eat, but it's best not to leave it too long.
So if you're a single parent working two jobs, and you get home at 7:30 to make dinner and you have a turnip you need to use tonight before it goes bad, what do you do?
Wouldn't it be great if someone with great logistics skill and insight into the stocks of all the area food banks could scrape allrecipes, find the most efficient use of the stock as ingredients, and maybe move some things around so that the people waiting for the trucks could get meal kits with online instructions, rather than just bags of turnips?
Just a thought.
Edit: The cool part of this might end up being the supplier side. I imagine that a supermarket has to work much harder to donate to a food pantry than to just throw out stuff. How could you make it easier for them to donate what was really needed? Could you have finders who go around to stores, enter the stuff to be thrown out into your system, decide what it would be worth it to take, take it, and keep track of yearly donations for the retailer for tax purposes? Could you cut their waste disposal costs and save them taxes and build goodwill?
The bigger idea here is that just because the consumers of your service aren't very focused on new technology doesn't mean that technology can't drive and enable your business model. There are probably many kinds of businesses that provide services to the underprivileged that would benefit from technology in the back office even if technology isn't their product.
I actually had an idea around that - neighborhood cooking. There is definitely some widow grandmother on my block who would love to make some extra money cooking her awesome meals for her neighbors. And I'd love to pay for that service. Unfortunately state regulations for what is defined as a kitchen and cooking for others has huge health code implications, and never took off.
This, what you're saying, is more of a logistics and resource allocation problem, all needing to be done in real time. Very smart, but would require quite a bit of up-front innovation. I'll ruminate on this idea for sure!
I love this idea. I think bringing the idea of blue apron to a lower income market would be amazing, especially if it could take advantage of government incentives. One of the hardest things about cooking healthy is doing all the meal planning.
> I've constantly racked my brain...Am I approaching it wrong?...
I don't think so and I have a similar problem as you. Certain problems have already been solved by other methods and wont yield to digitization. What is needed is simply a transplanting of existing tech to under served sectors.There are many businesses that are profitable without the need for extreme tech innovation.
My peeve for instance, is that in my part of the world certain kinds of farming (rice, oil palm)yield decent and more or less assured profits (>500% over a decade) and there is no need for new technology other than that which already exists. This could logically fall under agriculture. The main barrier is relatively small amounts of capital (<200k - 1M usd) but try telling that to unicorn obsessed VC's looking for the next Snapchat.
Regarding the agriculture you bring up, the real issue here is contracts. Suppose you lend a bunch of Kerala palm oil orchards $1M, hoping to make $5M over a decade. Do you really trust the Communist government of Kerala to enforce your contracts and transfer wealth from poor local farmers back to the rich (likely foreign) capitalists who made them loans?
That's the problem to solve. If you can solve it I don't see a reason why anyone wouldn't fund you.
I would argue that solving the problem of contract enforcement is beyond the scope of any entrepreneur.
However I do see your point and appreciate its merit. By the same token, if YC was unduly worried about that, they would never be able to fund (tech) companies that operate principally outside the west because the problem you allude to has never really been solved satisfactorily.
But here's my point: as YC becomes larger and looks for growth outside its traditional areas, its model must evolve.
Right now it does seem a bit scattershot. Is it a VC or an Angel? What is the place and relationship of charity and the entrepreneurs it sponsors? It claims to invest in founders predominantly over their ideas, but everyone I know who applies, does so with the thought at the back of their minds, that the de-facto situation is one in which an idea which cannot be a billion dollar company is best left at home. Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M?
I guess what I mean to say is: for the larger mission YC espouses, the funding model is broken; indeed the mission itself is unclear. For those like me who aspire to be funded this creates much frustration
Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M?
Nothing is wrong with doing such a thing. It's just not the business most Silicon Valley VCs are in. VCs are in the business of taking on large risk in pursuit of a large return, not taking on small (or medium) risk in pursuit of a small (or medium) return.
You don't get mad at a butcher because they're in the business of selling meat and not vegetables. Same thing here.
...they would never be able to fund (tech) companies that operate principally outside the west because the problem you allude to has never really been solved satisfactorily.
That isn't really true. If I build a SAAS based in Singapore, or almost anywhere really, I pretty much expect that I'll get paid. You pay me, I switch on your service, and I switch it off if you stop paying.
In contrast, loans involve giving away money and hoping it comes back. The potential for default is a lot higher.
I don't have anything against agricultural financing - I think it's something the world should have. I just don't know how to solve it. If I did I'd be pursuing it, though probably not via YC.
The first step is to articulate specific problems.
The link does a little bit, but people with minimal savings don't actually care that they are unbanked; paying Walmart $3 to cash a check isn't that terrible a deal (Even if it isn't a great deal).
> Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (i.e. does technology even solve this problem?).
> The other problem is revenue/profitability...this population is inherently cash-strapped, so trying to create a technology solution that likely lies in the Tech-meets-Consumer Discretionary industry, well, who among these people can (and will) afford such services?
Maybe we should be looking at a different "group" as the users of the services we could provide.
For example, the government. Governments spend billions on social services, so perhaps we could be creating technology that could improve their efficiency and reduce their costs, which in theory would lead to more/better support for undeserved communities. Not saying that's much easier, but it's another way we can try help.
> Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve these kinds of problems?
Redistribute advantages, using that term in a broad way. That's what the underprivileged actually need. The US government will likely never solve it, so the best I can imagine is a platform that connects the poor with successful, wealthy people who meet with them semi-regularly and actually give them money upon completing plans that they design together. If a successful person was willing to enter your life and give you money if you worked with them to achieve some goals, you would be in a significantly better position. At scale it would change society.
My first thought on that entry was a way of distributing earnings more frequently than weekly or fortnightly. Are people more inclined to blow their paycheque on entertainment if it's a bigger lump sum? And maybe a way of automating a certain type of withholding to build an emergency fund, or pay for bills.
We grant concessions for retirement savings. Maybe the same for certain types of saving for essential bills? Water, gas, etc.
I don't really trust many services not to fleece their customers though.
I'd be really interested in this as a concept - a regressive pre-tax deduction for basic utilities. As you say, the issue will be for utility companies not to jack prices to take advantage, but offsetting some tax revenue from income would lead to an increase (potentially) from VAT/sales tax because of more discretionary income?
I agree that it's harder to solve a problem that you're not experiencing, but, by the same token, underserved communities will tolerate an even lower threshold of quality as long as you're helping them :)
For the approach on how to solve their problems, the main goal is empathy.
Look at the Design Thinking theory: first step is to emphatize.
When I was taking a marketing course, they told us to shadow a consumer. You have to "walk a mile in their shoes" For example, I've been very impressed by the use of artificial impairments to simulate the experience of people with real disabilities.
Once you -really- understand their problems, I'm pretty sure any sharp mind here will come up with interesting solutions.
HOW to empathize
To empathize, you:
- Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives. As much as possible
do observations in relevant contexts in addition to interviews. Some of the most powerful
realizations come from noticing a disconnect between what someone says and what he does.
Others come from a work-around someone has created which may be very surprising to you as
the designer, but she may not even think to mention in conversation.
- Engage. Sometimes we call this technique ‘interviewing’ but it should really feel more like
a conversation. Prepare some questions you’d like to ask, but expect to let the conversation
deviate from them. Keep the conversation only loosely bounded. Elicit stories from the
people you talk to, and always ask “Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can come
through both short ‘intercept’ encounters and longer scheduled conversations.
- Watch and Listen. Certainly you can, and should, combine observation and engagement.
Ask someone to show you how they complete a task. Have them physically go through the
steps, and talk you through why they are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s
going through their mind as they perform a task or interact with an object. Have a conversation
in the context of someone’s home or workplace – so many stories are embodied in artifacts.
Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.
Empathy might help you find and understand their problems; the problem seems to be how to finance the solution. When selling to a well-to-do middle-class professional, you're probably competing for cash that would otherwise go to purchase some toy or extra night out. When selling to the working-class, you're often competing against rent and food.
Essentially, how to sell to someone who has no discretionary income?
I grew up in an underserved community and in poverty, so this is a situation that is near and dear to my heart.
I am also an advocate of internet privacy and against big companies selling my data to 3rd parties, but I believe a trade off is needed here.
Google and Facebook are free, but they sell your data to advertisers and 3rd parties in exchange for your usage, I would imagine that a startup that caters to those without discretionary income would need a similar business model, at least in the early stages.
Maybe, but who has a particular desire for the data of people without discretionary income?
The advertisers that buy Google/Facebook data (or more accurately consume that data when buying ad space) are trying to target potential buyers, typically those with disposable income.
I fear that the businesses that would want the data on lower income earners would be payday lenders and the like which is not an appealing prospect.
> Maybe, but who has a particular desire for the data of people without discretionary income?
That's the big question, maybe government agencies and other non-profits who want to connect with these underserved communities, unfortunately, I'm not sure how feasible that is.
We try to do this at Blue Ridge Labs. Our incubator just closed it's applications for 2017. We'll be opening applications for the fellowship, meant for individual engineers, designers, product managers and experts to do the research, interviews, focus groups, prototyping and testing to develop new tech products that fight poverty.
Farming is an interesting one, particularly with regards to the quoted statistic of 40%.
From a technological perspective this has already been largely solved. Developed countries typically have 1-3% of the population working in agriculture. This is only possible because of large scale efficiencies, that allow 1-3% of the population to feed the rest.
So am genuinely curious: what are you envisaging? How to market this technology to the world or make it more accessible? Or make agriculture even more efficient and even further reduce the number of people in farming?
It's kind of a common misconception that farming in its current state is working. Farmers who run a factory model basically live on government subsidies. The ecological destruction that accompanies this model is also entirely unsustainable. Soil dies, water is polluted, species go extinct, crops and animals are highly vulnerable to pathogens (which leads to antibiotic resistance), greenhouse gas emissions are through the roof, etc. Also, it encourages a horrible diet of cheap grains and meat. Diet-related disease is the number one cause of human death; where we simultaneously have obesity and starvation. And flavor sucks.
So I imagine YC's goal in adding this to the RFS is to promote companies exploring sustainability, quality, and fairness in food. Btw, this is the focus for my application.
this. The thing is that we've designed these systems (of governance, regulation and technology) that appears to have solved the problems of food, but we really haven't- bee population loss, inefficient subsidies, free-trade and over-protectionist trade, soil degradation, pollution, food contaminations, hunger, etc., etc. are still big problems.
The thing is that the system is inordinately more complex than we had originally thought (not just about input/output sheer production volume of commodities, i.e., pork belly, orange juice concentrate) -it's about a system that is sustainable and non-exploitative in the big picture.
I see the different factions currently working against each other for goals that should be synergistic.
-decrease hunger => increase crop yield with industrial farming tech
-non-gmo => grow only organic crops, anti-big business
-fair-trade => crop specialization for export to 1st world
But there's no reason why any and all of these groups couldn't be more aligned, and I think some of it is a question of scale and vision- no one has yet described to me the Elon Musk level vision of what a humanistically designed food system should look like and what all of humanity should be shooting for.
There's a lot of misinformation campaigns from the "anti-GMO" companies and crowd who get in the way of an "Elon vision" for the industry. Most anti-GMOers don't even realize that transgenics occur in nature, while making their signs that foreign DNA is food = frankenfood.
GMO is not inherently bad, but the goals of most companies working on GMO seeds are profit over all else. This means they select for compatibility with pesticides, fertilizers, and monocrop annual planting. Perennial wheat, for example, could be an incredible ecological success for GMO. But it wouldn't have the built-in annual demand for seeds. The concern over GMO is misplaced--people should be debating the accompanying practices that are pushed by the industrial system. When Bayer buys Mansanto, that should be a huge f*cking red flag.
The big vision for the future doesn't need to be entirely novel. The great cuisines were born out of a conversation with nature. Highly local, distributed, diverse farming systems < 50 hectares with an emphasis on soil health should be the model. We just need to make it easier for people to collaborate on these kinds of projects. Entrepreneurs and farms on this scale are mostly constrained by up-front resource requirements. Once ecological systems mature, they are far more profitable than the factory model.
I don't think the big vision of production needs to be novel, but I could envision, if not GMO, then genetic analysis / breeding to start re-localizing what kinds of crops are being grown. I think there are plenty of ways you can take old-fashioned seeming systems and practices and modernize them, maybe with more careful data collection to help it along.
I do think that if this system will ever really work on a larger scale then a big vision will be needed to reimagine the kind of distribution system you would need to efficiently bring the product to the customer; Getting rid of the cold chain and reducing the amount of food waste on the way. A lot of the assumed ways people buy and eat food are shifting with gen x/y/z. The supermarket is a dead zone of product placement kickbacks and corn. What comes after that?
You're spot-on about bringing genetic analysis into breeding and re-localizing. [Steve Jones][1] is an awesome breeder who is doing this in Washington's Skagit Valley.
I see there being a higher participation in local food production. There are already people who want to do it but can't afford the upfront cost. As really good food becomes more available, I think it will drive more interest in growing. It was only 8 generations ago that participation in farming in the U.S. was 90%, and now it's down to 1%.
For the people who don't grow or collaborate directly with growers to get food, I see the responsibility falling to chefs to insist on working with local ingredients. Maybe self-driving cars will also usher in a new system of delivery for getting ingredients from local farms to households.
Hm this is interesting. One question would be if any of these approaches is scalable outside a single climate / area- exportable into a repeatable system that will help breed crops given the inputs of a specific local ecosystem.
I hear some good stuff coming out of academic style research but nothing that goes beyond small studies for a given local climate, nothing disruptive/commercial. Maybe it's just unsexy and doesn't have that 100x potential, but it's sometimes hard to understand why monsanto et.al have such a monopoly going.
I'm sure they do, but their mo seems to be vendor lock in / price fixing vs. open ecosystem. Nothing wrong with making a profit, but I feel that plenty of their practices are criminal / actively harmful. One of the powerful things about the Elon narrative is that some of the underlying motivations are humanitarian. Monsanto may claim to be interested in feeding the world but it's clear that they don't really have any real interest in doing this beyond making good PR.
I believe it's totally possible to be profitable in some of the areas monsanto works in and not be so... evil
I agree. In underdeveloped countries however, the number of people working in agriculture is much closer to 90%. The tech clearly exists to improve productivity in these countries, but the problems are (mostly) political and economic. In particular, dumping from the US distorts local commodity prices. This makes investment in new technology impossible for local producers. This is an area where lots of technologically advanced people have been working for a long, long time. If the advantage that YC/SV can add to ag is software and sensors, things are actually pretty advanced in that field (self-driving tractors have been around for 10+ years), just the perception is that farming is still low-tech. If YC believes a startup can provide new ways of thinking about some of these non-tech problems in the space, then there might be an opportunity to make significant improvements, especially in developing countries.
Another unmentioned issue: if we brought farming technology rapidly to underdeveloped countries and increased efficiency to western levels, how would these countries handle 80+% of the population being effectively jobless?
Increasing efficiency to western levels won't happen overnight. It still takes time for the market to develop, and there would be several cycles of commodity prices collapsing which would squeeze out less efficient participants.
On the mass media side of things, I am listening to the Audible version of "Algorthms to live by" (excellent)
In it he comments on the explore/exploit trade off, when to stop exploring an area / industry / string of lovers and when to settle down.
He suggests that the vast increase in derivative works in Hollywood cinema suggests a switch from explore to exploit - and may indicate the industry recognises it's time is limited.
With absolutely no data points, I would like to conjecture "mass media" is similarly placed. In a world where a chatty guy with a Xbox gets ratings of 10billion views on YouTube, mass as in centralised broadcasting is dead.
Mass as in watched by many is probably going to get a lot more massive (another 3 billion viewers to be born soon)
So I don't think fixing mass media as in somehow improving the ownership incentives at NBC or BBC matter. What matters is giving small organisations and individuals tools to speak easily- we will discover them and they will become massive if we want them to.
So focus on editing tools, creativity tools and weirdly, better search and ranking algorithms
We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kardashians still get them and people who want to read about conflict in the middle east get theirs. No more editorializing based on the current trendy group think, no more editorializing based on what their rich billionaire owner thinks their next crusade is.
The reason the media is so bad is because of economics, people have this bad habit of wanting to live in houses and feed themselves.
I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media.
A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism.
The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good for the society" for people to write and read. You can't fix it with technology that optimises based on market economics.
Some of the ways newspapers financed deep journalism in the past were classified ads (now split into separate businesses like craigslist) and the inability to track the readership of individual articles. Now that each click is tracked, it is obvious that a Top 10 List article costs $10 to write while bringing in more revenue than a $10000 months-long investigation.
So to "fix" it, you first have to decide that you are going to deliver people journalism that is "good for them" rather than what they want, and then find a way to subsidise producing that content above its natural market value. I think that a "rich billionaire owner" willing to lose money to earn reputation as an owner of a serious newspaper is actually a more promising funding model than spotify for media.
The reason why it solves clickbait vs investigative journalism is because its an apportioned revenue share. click bait is easy to write and has more competition if a user reads loads of clickbait the revenue the author makes from that user will be low per article. On the other hand if you have a user who reads "investigative" high brow content its more expensive so there is less of it so you would expect the per user revenue would be much higher per view.
Imagine if spotify paid artists based on minutes listened apportioned based on each users listening habits instead of a fixed rate of N cents per listen.
So one user listens to Nirvana exclusively all month on spotify you would expect 100% of the 70% rev share to go to the owners of that nirvana content.
How do we decide that "high quality" content gets more per view than "low quality" content? We would need a human who makes subsidy decisions. Or if it's just an equal split of each user's monthly payment, then:
* I'm not sure that readers of "high quality" content read fewer articles in total,
* I'm not sure that they completely avoid clickbait, maybe just read a bit of "high quality" in addition to the "low quality" ones. Often I just read comments on HN or browse pictures on reddit instead of a long thoughtful article, because after a long day of work that feels more relaxing,
* The number of people who click on those articles is still going to be a small fraction of the whole population.
So, this can finance a small number of national or even global sites with sufficient readership. Just like the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, etc still survive on advertising revenue today.
But how do we make sure every small 20k population town weekly paper can afford similar articles on local issues? How do we encourage or guide people to actually read them instead of looking pictures of cats? How do we make a "good for you classical music collective" get paid 10x more than Nirvana when everyone wants to listen to Nirvana?
Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising.
So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue.
If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional.
If you think you're going to fix the "problem" by changing what people want, you're even more delusional. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can deliver people journalism that is "good for them", but you can't make them read it.
This is why I put the "problem" in quotes - I'm not sure if it can be called a problem. If we believe in people's freedom to choose what they want to read, then it isn't.
When people talk about bringing back the good old days of journalism, they dream of the time when cigarettes were unfiltered and you could make a living researching a single story for three months. Or this Request for Startups talks about making mass media write stories that are good for the society (as opposed to people's immediate reading preferences).
I don't see any good technical solutions for achieving these goals, because these goals require changing people's preferences, and require funding that goes against people's preferences.
I also wish YC gave more details about what they mean when they talk about improving society. What's the metric?
I'm not really sure about the relevance of the concept of "mass media" today when people get their news from more and more fragmented sources.
And the idea that the polarization of media is bad also seems highly questionable. In fact, one of the leading researchers on the question of media bias showed that competition between media (which leads to polarization) could reduce bias (http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/BiasReputation.pd...).
Are there Spotify success stories? Not as advertising for concerts or merchandise, but musical groups that make a decent living via it and its similar competitors?
Check out Blendle. It's pay-per-article news from all the big sources. NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist, etc. I use it a lot, paying between $0.09 and $0.59 per article.
And at the bottom of each one is a "refund" button that's no questions asked.
I really like Blendle and think it's great for people like me that consume a lot of high quality journalism and are willing to pay for it. The big question in my mind is how it will, or if it intends to, achieve mass appeal and bring high quality journalism directly to all as it does to us.
Paying per article would appear to me to be too much friction, I want something where I pay $10 a month and say 70% of my subscription is apportioned among the articles I read and maybe even a supplement patreon style addon or something in this vein.
The trick to keeping me paying is to make me forget I am paying once you have convinced me.
"NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist" big journalist engines like these are part of the problem, even with this new style market place we wont fix the real problem until the service is cutting cheques directly to the authors.
That would be more along the lines of Patreon of media (which already kinda exists) vs. Spotify, which is most definitely not direct payments to creators.
The problem with Patreon style is you have to convert every single transaction between Author and User. By direct payments I mean, Platform -> Author not Platform -> NYT (99% of the profits) -> Author (salary)
Isn't an existing newspaper or media company doing that already to some extent, aggregating different types of media for a common fee? You can read the sections of a newspaper you want, and the company apportions salaries to content producers based on what seems to get the most interest.
We've talked about "following the news" far longer than following anyone on twitter, but when I read an article that's clearly part of an ongoing story, there's no way for the author to send me updates. There needs to be a feedback loop between newsrooms and readers that's more substantive than click counts and more scalable than letters to the editor. Combine this with a newsroom that takes itself seriously as the first draft of history and 1) cites its sources better 2) compete's with wikipedia for those controversial topics that break wikipedias editor model.
This is similar to "editors picks". I think this is one tool that is not out there yet - a means for journalists / editors to say "this is worthy of interest" in a maintainable, curated manner of link pages (aka HN) and in producing their own work.
I suspect this will look a lot like modelling software - as in this is how much trade is going between these countries in a nice graphic, but the raw data can be modelled / interpreted to show the editors world view.
At some point in time - I would love to build a news site which had each article broken into facts & points of view (left, center, right). Ideally classifying/auto-linking to politicians statements/voting history automatically with machine learning.
My favorite news app of all time was Circa which was broken into bite-sized facts. You could even subscribe to story and receive notifications when a new bit of information arose.
Unfortunately they never charged money and it disappeared about a year ago :(
I'll be fascinated to see what Mass Media ideas come through YC. It's pretty obviously a problem, but I've honestly got no ideas at all about how to solve it (although, to be fair, there's a non-zero chance that the media has always been a problem of this magnitude, but the internet/echo chamber culture has simply exposed what was lurking all along).
It's not going through YC, but Purple (https://getpurple.io) has done a good job, IMO, of having good coverage in a novel way (through facebook messages)
An idea for mixing AI with healthcare, using Tensor Flow with a huge image database of skin conditions so the user takes a pic on a phone and it determines the illness and the cure.
The societal challenges will be a devil to defeat. FYI I actually quit my Wall St job several years ago, did something similar with diagnostic imaging, built a working classifier that is doctor-level sensitive (low false negative especially). For us it was near impossible to succeed in the US because the US healthcare system is designed from all directions to be inefficient.
Our tepid success came from moving overseas temporarily and proving out the system in a smaller country with a forward-looking healthcare system with less conflicts of interest. We focused on a local problem (Tuberculosis.) Even then, I'm almost two years in and ended up acquiescing to a premature acquisition because the healthcare system is so difficult to navigate. My lockup is almost complete, the next startup, I'm going to focus on something easier like world peace.
I don't mean to discourage you, but you would likely be a lot more successful if you have some "in" with a hospital system willing to work with you. IMHO, in healthcare, the technology is the easiest part.
Incidentally...yes...we've built it on TensorFlow! And if you do wish to talk tech about this idea, feel free to reach out to me.
I'm doing this right now actually. The risk with using ML - in particular NN methods, in health care is that you have to be able to explain and support your conclusions.
Also depending on the training set used you can get some VERY bad results.
I've looked into this. There are actually a couple of attempts that use basic heuristics for detecting melanoma such as color, symmetry, and size. However, it's harder here in the US since you have to get approved by the FDA in order to make a "diagnosis".
Yeah, we (FarmLogs) did YC in Mountain View and realized that needing to get on a plane every time we wanted to visit a customer was just not worth it. We picked up and moved back to the Midwest after YC to be near our customers.
You can either commit to getting on an airplane often, or find ways to test in simulated environments instead. My guess is you will need some combination of both.
For Underserved Communities, there are social aspects that also need to be tackled.
Many many many many organisations target these kinds of communities to try and help them. People are often suspicious of the help, because there are also many many many organisations that try to exploit them! Misleading terms, much higher hidden fees, etc, etc. Many have almost no access to high-quality services, just misleading ones.
Tackling this trust issue is essential to any success. In particular, I think that a 1099-style service like Uber is a bad fit for building trust. Though there are other ways to help someone apart from 'make them your employees'.
I have worked on two of loosely related projects. Both of them are very close to my heart. Since I am heading another (3rd) project that has become a funded startup, I would like to share those ideas and see if anyone is interested in pursuing them. Would love critical feedback on these as these are my life goals as of now.
1) Food and Farming - iPlantTrees. The idea is to set up a platform where two kinds of people meet. One without the resources or knowledge but have a place to plant. Other side of people or organizations who have knowledge/resources to plant. I came up with the idea because when I moved to CA, we bought a house with an Orange tree. It gives amazing oranges so we no longer have to buy from the store. It would have been great if I could also get some Apple or other trees too but I have scant knowledge of finding -> planting -> maintaining plants. I could spend years doing so or someone could plant them for me. You could make money by partnering with Nurseries etc. In the end everyone would know a lot more about food plantation and have fresh home grown food to eat.
2) Path to middle class - FillSkills. My understanding of the problem is the barrier to entry to jobs. Which is being brought down tremendously by the internet. Even now though I meet people all the time who would like to become a Software Engineer or a Data Scientist or a Business Analyst etc but have no idea where to start. FillSkills would take a look at all job postings, show which jobs are in in demand or expected to be in demand. Think of a stock trading app but for Job data. So you can really see what is going on in the job market and make life choices accordingly. In addition it will be able to tell you specifically what you need to learn to get the job profile you like. Companies should also be able to post jobs directly with a string of challenges (courses, exams, interviews, projects etc using whatever tools) that if passed by a candidate, guarantees a job or at least an in person interview.
Knight Foundation's single focus is media and journalism. For example, MapBox came out of a $200k grant they provided. I'm sure there are a lot of developers and start-ups they have or are currently are funding who can use more support. You might want to talk to them about what people are doing in the field.
Agreed, when I lived in Miami (last year) knight was funding so many awesome ventures. I wouldn't say they have many developers but they are very receptive to having people come in to pitch an idea and they also host many events to come in and request funding.
"What can we do to bring up the baseline and make the vast majority of our mass media better?"
I see Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com) as taking this problem on pretty directly. It's a tool for crowdsourcing the strongest arguments on a given topic. These arguments are presented in a format that is easily digested and encourages iterative improvement. Sequiturs can 'bring up the baseline' by serving as a reference for discussions to turn to, to gain clarity and avoid reinventing the wheel when considering the in's and out's of an argument. This includes serving as a reference for journalists, in informing the articles they write and the questions they ask of those in power.
Disclosure: I'm the creator of Sequiturs--and would love to know what you think of it!
> This population has to navigate a world with substandard services, low quality housing, overcrowded schools, and crime in their neighborhoods. They are often unbanked and living paycheck to paycheck.
Tiny houses, tiny schools, tiny cops and tiny banks can solve their problems, but there are legal hurdles.
Why focus on "mass media"? As opposed to just "media"?
It seems incentives are the key problem in an age where there are no real gatekeepers to "mass media."
I'm curious the request isn't more like this:
"What can we do to bring up the baseline and make the vast majority of our media better? Incentive systems that reward polarization, misinformation, passivity, and fear, are not improving society. We’re looking for ways to bring the average back up and improve media quality."
(original: "What can we do to bring up the baseline and make the vast majority of our mass media better? Media outlets that rely on polarization, misinformation, passivity, and fear, are not improving society. We’re looking for ways to bring the average back up and improve mass media.")
Don't think flavor matters as much as yield -- at least not from the farmer's perspective. Plenty of flavorless vegetables and fruit everywhere, because they're mostly sold by weight, not by flavor or other qualities.
It should be though -- flavor is a signal for nutrition, it almost always signals ecological health in it system of origin, and it makes life more interesting. We already produce 50% more food than gets eaten and huge portions go to livestock. We don't have a yield problem.
I'm really happy to see YC putting attention toward the (increasing) market failure around media quality. It's a serious problem, with IMHO imperils governance and stability worldwide.
I'm exploring a way to improve this dramatically, and fairly rapidly; essentially creating a stronger market for trust & quality, with resulting ranking rewards from FB, Google et al. If you are interested in learning more and perhaps being involved, let me know (yc@aviv.me). Experience with news organizations, partnerships, platform companies, moderation systems, or machine learning are all especially helpful.
Definitely like the food and farming addition. Basic sustenance is still a very important issue for a significant portion of the human population. Worth investing resources into.
RE: Programming Tools
"What comes after programming languages?"
I think that this is the wrong question. How about these other questions instead:
How can we encourage the spread of existing best practices?
How can we lower the barriers to entry for people wanting to make safe and reliable software at scale?
Can this be done in a way that is commercially sustainable?
This is the problem YC should be solving. Instead, YC is still patently and openly biased towards the Ivy League class, which is really just a bias against poor people. It's been a decade and still nothing predicts YC acceptance like the Right Background and Culture Fit.
So get on it! Raise a billion dollars and fund every decent team founded by people from poor backgrounds. Stop giving money to people that don't really need it and don't really appreciate it.
This could change the entire world.. Poor children could grow up knowing that someone would fund them if they try to make something of themselves. Initial funding is the roadblock.
A simple proxy for "poor" in this case can be anyone who did not have parents who could buy them into a fancy school or send them around the world.
Pointing fingers all the wrong directions. Hope it feels good to get it off your chest at least.
A more productive discussion is methods for capital formation and how some methods can reduce inequality better than others. Judging from what you wrote, it doesn't seem like a search query you would ever have run yourself. There are some interesting things going on around the world on this issue.
Feel free to disagree with any of what I've said. I think my suggestion for YC is far bigger than anything else being suggested. It may be controversial to say they're doing a bad job right now but that's what I think the truth is.
YC is in the unique position of being able to fund thousands of poor people and yet they choose not to. Why? They don't believe poor people can be successful? They don't want to help poor people? What is it?
Almost every poor person who got rich had some rich person's help. This is a fact of history going back thousands of years. There are very few exceptions.
Trump had his father's help.
Steve Jobs had Mark Markkula's help.
Paul Graham had a rich lawyer's help.
Sam Altman had Paul Graham's help.
So what do poor people need to lift themselves and their families out of poverty? Help.
How would YC know if someone is poor when they apply? Just by what school they attended? I don't know the stats but I'd be shocked if the majority of YC's most recent accepted class were from ''Ivies'' (a very tiny population).
I went to school with many brilliant but ''poor'' kids on full-ride scholarships. From my perspective the biggest barrier to them becoming entrepreneurs wasn't that nobody would fund them but rather that the immediate salaried incomes available to them upon graduation were life-changing for them and their families and ''too good to pass up'' in their personal risk-adjusted calculus.
FWIW I tend to agree with you though I might phrase it differently. YC has done a great job so far and maybe we are expecting too much from what essentially is a venture capital(?) business.
Yes, RICH Bill Gates had his father most powerful lawyer in Seattle. Larry Ellison had the CIA/NSA's full backing.
If you want to be over $100M company, U must be involved with the GOV ( real secret shadow gov, not the public circus )
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Helping poor people to be entrepreneurs is not what they really want, I think they have other priorities.
If U study 'richest man in babylon' you can see that in all human history it's 2-3% of all men who always get all the money, its just human nature, a 'real' entrepreneur first and foremost must be a member of that genetic 3%.
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YC is a VC firm, their job is to get 100X return for their, and their clients ROI, that means they must find good investments and convince young-in's to sign over all their rights to the lawyers.
I'm a firm believer in boot-strap startup, so that when the game is over, U own it all, 100%, otherwise you just waste your life for other people.
``Stop giving money to people that don't really need it and don't really appreciate it.``
There are more than enough monied people who think this way in SV but they dont seem to be throwing angel money at people in this predicament why do you think that is?
