Your News, Your Way.
NewsCloud and Newsvine are a study in contrasts, and the future of online news.
The turf battle over readers and revenues that rages on between the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer, is so, well, yesterday’s news. The real contest that is brewing over the future of news in Seattle is happening in cyberspace. Both entrants in this fight let you read, rate, rant, write about and watch all kinds of news from around the corner and around the planet. What’s more, you may even get paid for doing it.
Both Newsvine and NewsCloud feature news from a variety of sources including wire services, RSS feeds and original content from fellow users. Both encourage readers to vote-up their favorite stories, and carry forth a spirited dialogue in their personal journals and provide on-site, integrated blogs. Both are run by extroverted Net media geeks with heavyweight creds. But that’s where the similarity ends.
In one corner, you’ll find Jeff Reifman, a bona fide social activist (in the best sense of the word) who produces the NewsCloud site as a superhuman, one person effort. “I work on NewsCloud from local coffeehouses and pay my office rent in soy lattes and muffins,” he says. Reifman is no wheat bran brain though. He helped start MSNBC as a Group Program Manager, founded GiftSpot.com (later acquired by GiftCertificates.com), and, since leaving Microsoft, manages a sizable nest-egg as a social infopreneuer and angel investor.
In the opposite corner, you have the venture-backed Newsvine ($4-$5 million from Second Avenue Partners) led by Mike Davidson, a new media and product development pro from ESPN and the Walt Disney Internet Group who carries a business degree from UW and graduate credits from Oxford. Davidson’s personal blog, Mike Industries, has been mentioned by the NY Times. Reifman’s blogging is also prodigious. He created his own community outreach platform called ActionStudio Online Advocacy for citizen’s groups working to turn social issues into CRM campaigns.
The two personalities resemble the kind of Web architecture each has created. While both sites allow readers to create personal blogs right on the site, NewsCloud is open source while Newsvine is proprietary. So NewsCloud’s blog supports dual posting with TypePad, WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal. Newsvine prefers to keep your postings inside the garden walls.
And then there’s the issue of compensation. Newsvine has been nurturing a kind of multi-level marketing system where contributors get paid a percentage of the advertising that runs on their pages. The popular Digg social news service is rumored to be joining the trend of paying contributors in its next version.
The ad revenue sharing plan may not add up to more than pocket change, but it could be appealing as part of Newsvine’s value proposition. It may also meet the biggest challenge for any publisher: attracting and retaining a critical mass of motivated users. Otherwise, they’ll visit, read, and leave.
Being paid to blog about the news could pay redeeming group dividends as well. When Reifman started a local coffeehouse called Habitat, the clientele got to vote on where the profits of the coffee house would be tithed. A news ad co-op for worthy causes could evolve for NewsCloud.
As the Online Journalism review noted about Newsvine, and would apply equally to NewsCloud: “By combining professional journalism with inspired citizen comments and blogs, [this model] has the potential to keep the spirit of socially responsible journalism alive on the Web. That spirit is conversation.” [24×7]
