[lacker]

This is particularly interesting as a RFS because Paul Graham's support will get you publicity from the beginning, and if there is a social aspect to your new news model, it will be able to get around the chicken-and-the-egg problem of being able to attract initial users.

Best of luck to the takers, but I would guess that the future of journalism looks like TechCrunch: organized by topic rather than by location, not particularly unbiased, and much smaller in terms of both number of employees and size of profits.

[ntoshev]

It's not Techcrunch that PG has in mind though - they have nothing to do with data mining.

People paying directly for content suffers from another flaw - externalities. It makes no economic sense for any individual to sponsor public well being, so the Nash equilibrium is they don't do it.

I guess you'd need data crunchers to either 1) figure out how to make ads work, or 2) do market research.

Ads don't work in the context of general news, but they may work in verticals. Market research may not be big enough right now, but there is a general shift towards data-based decision making and if market research is cheap enough, more and more people would use it.