The Original Idea for Pillar (It Might Evolve)

We have all known that news is biased. We all know it makes you sad. We all know that most of it is clickbait turned out by underpaid english majors.

And that was fine when it was just politics. A drama can be trumped up (no pun intended), and you can still get an idea of what is going on. (Hence the rise of "news" in the form of comedy shows.)

But I was personally pushed over the edge with the recent pandemic. You might have heard of it. Now the news was publishing and promulgating blatantly incorrect info that was at best naïve at worst downright negligent.

I have always thought that reporters were supposed to sort through sources and interviews so that I wouldn't have to. So why am I having to do it about every single thing. Comparing news outlets' stories for bias and then having to track down their sources to check for legitimacy. (Most of the time I find an undergraduate paper that was published on a blog with a sample of 20 people about how chocolate will cure cancer)

Why is it so screwed up? Why is news terrible?

Easy. The news is not the product. You are the product. Every news service in the world is supported by ad revenue, almost entirely. Even in the old days your newspaper subscription just paid for the paper. The advertising pays the salaries.

In the advertising supported model the content is just there to attract you long enough to show an ad. The content has no obligation to you, the reader. Its only obligation is to the advertiser. Hence clickbait to shallow articles that make you mad.

The news is not news. It is entertainment. It is designed to toy with your emotions so that you keep coming back. And it must inundate you with the crap so that they can turn a $0.10 click into real money.

Here is the solution I have come to. Turn the content into the product. Crazy right.

Let's look at TV as an example (which for some reason is further along than print even though it has existed for a fraction of the time). On TV you have channels that are supported by advertising. So you have ads every 10 minutes. But you can buy HBO or Showtime and get ad-free content. So the model exists and works (Go on into netflix, and disney+, and even the WSJ, and NYT)

"But People don't pay for news. It is free." Sure. That is a problem and used to be the issue when the news sources were trusted. None of them are now. The world has changed. Free news from aggregators like Google News is not good enough and people know it. Every piece of news is suspect because oddly, no news source has a brand of trustworthiness and unbiased journalistic integrity. For this reason I think that print news is ready to be disrupted by something crazy. Just good news.

Here is what we are going to do with Pillar News.

• Create a website. Cuz paper is dead. And Expensive. Duh.

• We will hire 10 of the best journalists in the country. Or whatever you can afford for $100,000 each yearly salary (Average pay is 25k-71k yearly). That will eliminate the random HuffPost bloggers that write one crazy thing that goes viral and ruins everyone's day with another idiot in your feed. User generated content is not news. Just scalable content for advertising.

• Each Writer would each be required to write 1-5 good articles per week. This is about 10% of the normal expectations. We do this because we want to give the news time to settle so our readers can get the whole story. Not just an "update." No one needs live news unless the Towers are coming down. It will also give our reporters time to appropriately research and write.

• Don't inundate the Reader. the 1-5 articles from each of 10 writers also limits the content. A subscriber should be able to be fully educated on the events of the week from that. And not need a newsfeed of 100's of articles to sift through. We do the sifting. We do our job.

• Format the articles into headline, bullets, facts (i.e. sequence of events as recorded), then commentary where both sides are reasonably presented regardless of personal feeling of the argument. And we if we really bold we will post to articles from other sources about the topic (Remember we are trying to build trustworthiness. If we are the best why can't we share our competitors so people can see how much better we are. Also the links help to build the sites relevance in google search)

• Extremely editorial. The editor is there to sniff idiot bias. Bias is fine. The earth is not flat that is not up for debate. But party bias before all is stupid. The editor is there to make sure the reporters are being critical thinkers and presenting the whole story.

• Only World and US News, Business, and Technology. These are the only things that affect the lives of everyone and can impact a vote. Consumers don't need Hollywood drama. A scientific discovery is not widely relevant unless it impact one of these categories. And no one does sports better than ESPN (though the gabebentznews could expand into that in the future.) But ultimately we are a news source not an entertainment center. Our job is to inform a voting member of society.

• Charge $10 per year to access most content. Not monthly. With this pricing there is no financial excuse to not subscribe. (only about 10% of our content would be free for people to try). Also all salaries and cost are paid with just 100,000 subscribers, that is the subscriber count of a mediocre Youtube channel.

• Create a Scalable Business. Good news always runs into an issue of not being a great business because it is not scalable. Advertising is the only way to grow the business. More content/more advertising = annual growth. I disagree. Subscription is fine. 138 million people voted in 2016. We can assume that most of them have read the news, at some point, and care. With our pricing that is a market of $1.38 Billion in the US. And since we are creating a good quality digital product. We still just need 10 writers to give the news to a subscriber base of 100 thousand or 100 million. I think that is very scalable.

The news media is very broken. It has been badly incentivized to not create a good product due to advertising. I think there is a chance now for better news to be created and distributed very profitably.

Create a News Site who's core is not to serve an ideal except that of creating truly useful content. A goal of elevating the country that it is in, rather than seeking to break it down.