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Yesterday, Apple started featuring the Newsy app in the ‘New and Noteworthy’ section of the App Store. During the day, the Newsy app climbed the Free Apps list in the News category - - currently the Newsy.com app is ranked # 5 - ahead of The Time, WSJ and Huffington Post apps!
The buzz has been extraordinary — thousands of people are downloading the apps, it has a three star ratings (beating out other news apps like MSNBC’s and NPR’s) and reviews of the app have been stellar.
Over the past year, we’ve been thrilled at how well we timed the launching of Newsy.com with a couple of key trends - 1) the growing perception of a bias in the news and 2) the increasing demand for online video.
Now we’re ecstatic that the Newsy app is clearly meeting the demand for news content on mobile devices. On Friday, in Diane Mermigas’ article ‘Mobile: The New Mass Medium‘, she discusses consumers’ 24/7 love affair with wireless mobile devices and highlights the thirst for news content:
“The number of Americans using mobile devices to access news and other information doubled from 2008 to 22.4 million as enterprise workers perform functions on mobile devices that were formerly reserved for laptops, according to comScore. A survey of 300 Bostonians conducted for Samsung reveals that one-third would rather forgo sex for a entire year than give up their cell phones for that amount of time.”
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In an article for the fall edition of Nieman Reports, ‘Let’s Talk: Journalism and Social Media’, RJI Fellow Michael Skoler questions the notion that the Internet is to blame for journalism’s lost business model. He asserts that journalism began losing its value when it started to become less relevant a few decades ago. The connection journalists had to their communities diminished once news conglomerates took over local papers and stations and cut on-the-ground reporters.
Skoler believes discussions about saving the future of journalism should not be about finding a new business model - the focus should be on how to make news more valuable. After all, people only pay for what has obvious value to them - as Skoler puts it - “every good business plan starts by explaining how it creates value for the customer.”
The Economist and The Week
are two of today’s more successful media outlets. The value these magazines offer is not only in the smart analysis of everything they consider worth knowing – but also in the smart packaging. Smart analysis and smart packaging overlap very closely with Newsy’s vision and goals.
Newsy offers value to consumers by providing analysis on a variety of sources and perspectives in short video clips - we blend context with convenience.
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For the past couple of months, we’ve focused on innovating our content - offering not just a site that aggregates but truly analyzes the key nuances in reporting from media outlets around the world. This difference makes us unique in the online video news space - we’re the only one.
We’ve been rewarded for our efforts - there’s been a sharp increase in the amount of bloggers who are embedding our videos into their sites.
Puppetgov.com is now featuring Newsy videos a few times a week in its ‘
Video News‘ section. In fact, all types of bloggers are embedding a wide variety of our videos - from
politics to
technology to
health to
new media.
We’re pleased that so many bloggers are choosing to augment their content with Newsy videos. It’s a win-win situation - for Newsy, the benefit is distribution - driving traffic and building brand awareness for our site.
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In his post “Drowning Upstream,” Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine argues that businesses seeking to avoid the ravages of the internet are headed in a doomed direction by virtue of the fact that they should be designed to take advantage of the internet in the first place. Jarvis writes,
“I’ve said often that protection is no strategy for the future. An industry whose strategy for the future is built on trying to keep us from doing what we want to do and resist the flow of the internet is an industry that is merely biding time. That should be the lesson they learn from newspapers and music.”
As a person who consumes television solely from the internet and dvds delivered to by mailbox by Netflix, I have to agree that cable television as it is currently sold is a dinosaur on the brink of extinction. Consumers are learning to expect the same media menu offered by iTunes when it shook-up the recording industry by allowing users to buy single songs instead of albums that featured a few hits and a lot of filler.
What Jarvis fails to explicate fully is that audiences are also growing savvy to watching media around their schedules, instead of clearing time for the communal television hours that ruled in the heyday of prime time. It’s not just a channel issue, it’s a program issue. Sites like Hulu and TV.com are appealing because they remove the constraints of the network line-up, but that also means that they effectively remove the bookends of the evening newscasts from the daily television intake of Americans.
Jarvis calls for the unbundling of cable, but does not mention that the value of news programming on cable is met, if not surpassed by the quality of news available solely on the internet. As demand for pick-and-choose cable television increases, so does the need for services that curate the spectrum of digital media found on cable and the internet. I am not referring to the baseless punditry that has become a staple of cable news shows, but a service that scours the internet, cable, and satellite channels to provide a diverse range of credible perspectives on the news stories of the day.
Newsy.com offers a business model that is unique among media companies because they are infinitely adaptable in their curation of open-source content into two-minute online video packages for the internet, cable television and mobile devices. Newsy does not claim to be a comprehensive news provider, nor is it simply a recommendation service like iTunes Genius. Newsy.com takes viewers to the next level by telling the stories among the thousands of headlines returned from a typical search for news on the internet.
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I just typed “busy parents” into the google machine and it spit out over 32 million results. That’s probably a result of our collective guilt and our attempts to compensate for it - or our true desire to find solutions to everyday problems caused by our hectic lifestyles.
I am a proud father of two young boys and can relate to people who consider themselves “busy parents.” Even still, my guys are still young - I can’t imagine what it will be like in a few years when both have basketball practice, homework, music lessons, etc. I often end the day chatting with my wife and watching a little bit of TV - usually some short form comedy like the Office or some kind of sports like the NBA playoffs. Much of the time I end up DELETING stuff I recorded and just don’t have the time to watch, even shows I really enjoy like Charlie Rose
. I also subscribe to Sports Illustrated. Presently, I have a stack of about 20 issues of SI sitting on my desk… untouched. And I REALLY like reading SI.
What does this mean? It means we, as parents, have precious few seconds during the day for information gathering, and sometimes the standard media formats that we love just can’t deliver what we need. The long form interview (Charlie Rose) or the magazine (SI) can take up too much time to digest, but will still long for the nuggets we get out of them.
I wish there was a way to get someone ELSE to look through the media for me and pull out the nuggets I would have found if I had the time. And to top it off it would be great if that someone would find various opinions and perspectives on the things I want to know about so I do not have to scour the universe. Even better, if they introduced me to media outlets I wasn’t familiar with before. Oh, and if they could do it all in video format that I could access on the web and with my mobile device - making it that much more engaging - that would be the be-all end-all for a “busy parent” like me.
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Yesterday we announced our partnership with Mediacom, a cable and broadband Internet company. As a content provider, we at Newsy.com understand the importance of distribution and this partnership effectively enables our multiperpsective video content to travel across the web, mobile devices and now, TV.
Fred Wilson, an excellent blogger, recently posted on the future of TV:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/05/youtubing.html
Recent developments like Boxee are changing the landscape of television and video. At Newsy you have our commitment to deliver you multiperspective news when, where and how you want it.
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You’re busy - we know it. This morning I went to Google News and searched on “space shuttle” - 5,252 results.
http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22space+shuttle%22
That’s amazing but what do I do with 5,252 news results and sources? Better yet, do I just go out and look at sources I am familiar with - how can I tell the differences in how the story is being reported?
That’s what we are trying to do at Newsy.com - give you a variety of sources and perspectives in short video clips - we blend context with convenience to help make you smarter, faster.
Let me know what you think about our stories - delivering an exceptional news service to you is our focus.
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As news has become more abundant, its value has decreased. News consumers, especially Generation Y, increasingly get headlines from various sources online with little or no loyalty to any organization. This shift in behavior has challenged traditional media companies’ business models and left them scrambling to find a path to profitability.
In his excellent post, ‘The Future of News Is Scarcity,’ Nic Brisbourne discusses how a basic rule of economics - every abundance creates new scarcities - can be applied to the news business. The rule is good news for media companies, which are looking for new ways to make money in the 21st Century.
Why? The abundance of has created a new opportunity for providing thought-provoking analysis of multiple sources. Many of today’s most interesting and popular stories go beyond just simply reporting what has occurred – they bring in relevant context.
The New York Times experiments with this concept in its sections The Lede and The Opinionator – other successful news websites with this model include The Huffington Post for politics and TechCrunch for technology news.
Newsy.com is a trailblazer in offering consumers context with convenience - we’re the only online video news site analyzing various news sources and packaging them in one easily digestible package … because multiple sources help you decide the real story.
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Newsy.com is up just in time for the election - we believe the ability to easily access multiple news sources in short video clips will advance your understanding of the increasingly nuanced political coverage.
We feel that Newsy.com is in the right space at the right time given some recent headlines … 75% of U.S. registered votes believe that online video is letting them follow the election more closely, online video ads are surging, and engaged viewers of online video pay more attention to content and ads than TV viewers.
A study commissioned by the Associated Press finds that people aged 18 to 34 are bombarded by news - and are looking for quick delivery and quick-scan consumption of the news. This same age group is increasingly getting their news online and on their mobile devices.
Newsy.com is the perfect solution.
We hope you agree - please provide us with feedback so we can continually improve our videos and site to bring you the best news service possible.
Yesterday, Apple started featuring the Newsy app in the ‘New and Noteworthy’ section of the App Store. During the day, the Newsy app climbed the Free Apps list in the News category - - currently the Newsy.com app is ranked # 5 - ahead of The Time, WSJ and Huffington Post apps!