Show HN: Forth – Rethinking (and improving) News

5 points by jaredwiener ↗ HN
Hi HN --

After a thread a couple of weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866242) got more attention than I expected, and someone even suggested doing a Show HN (thanks wanderingmind)-- so, here goes:

We're building a network of local journalists, along with others in national verticals. Our incentive structure exists in a way to promote news people want to come back to read, not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes, or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34 year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the traditional forms, like subscribing to a local paper or watching broadcast TV.

It's still early stages; but we're proving out the concept. Newsrooms are infamously understaffed, so asking them to take on another platform is usually a nonstarter. Instead, we offer free, proprietary communication tools to help the staff communicate (https://www.nillium.com/newsrooms) and that syndicates updates out automatically.

As we're onboarding traditional newsroom partners, we're also pushing forward with college students (see Ithaca, NY: https://www.forthapp.com/locale/6174d42a63b3f0d8dbef92dc) and also automatically publishing White House Pool Reports (https://www.forthapp.com/dl/whitehouse) which are public, but difficult to obtain if you aren't in the media.

I'd love to hear what you think. And as an aside/shameless plug, if you work for a newsroom or cover local news, please reach out -- we'd love to have you on board -- jared at nillium dot com.

4 comments

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Replying on your other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28869067) > Freemium model: advertisement based, with a subscription fee for some extra content personalization.

Have you also considered integrating with pre-existing web monetization models? I'm thinking mostly of Coil, but also Brave Rewards/Flattr/...

Definitely thinking about this stuff, but we're being very careful about what we're incentivizing. Tying income with pageviews on a specific story leads to clickbait and "7 celebs without makeup" kinds of stories. We want the app to be where people choose to go for news, not just clicking via social or aggregators.
I couldn't agree more! I'm working at https://readup.com/, we're making a general-purpose reading app where reads-to-completion are the basis for monetization as opposed to clicks or views. Together with reader ratings it really helps to reduce (even eliminate) clickbait.

I think our missions are quite aligned! We're mostly trying to incentivize & monetize the deep reading of medium- & long-form stories on the web. If that's something Forth is also going into (next to streams of shorter updates?), we may be able to collaborate!

We've been working on the shorter side of things -- but I'd love to talk more -- lets see if we can find a time? jared (at) nillium (dot) com