GigOm reports on a new venture for on-line news:
Daylife, a stylized news aggregator that is the closest thing we’ve seen to a webified newspaper, beta-launched this morning.
Daylife is a meatier version of aggregators such as Google News, Topix.net, and Techmeme, offering tools for pivoting around information by story, characters, time, popularity, photos, and quotes, in a wide range of news categories.
Funded by old media and new media alike — “roughly twice as many investors as it has employees,” says paidContent — the company is perhaps best known for the involvement of media guru Jeff Jarvis and media bogeyman Craig Newmark.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, an investor in Daylife, pans it in a review on his site.
Daylife enters the market about a year after a slew of other competitors came out with their products. Gather.com, Inform.com, NewsVine and Topix all have competing products. Google News reigns over all of them.
But I think Daylife has the right idea. It’s all about the human interface. Just needs a little tweeking for the Nokia Web Tablet. Good to go.
NewsHour reports new media has caused a ripple in space/time. The nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, Knight-Ridder, ceased to exist, after selling its 32 papers to a smaller competitor, the McClatchy Company, in a $4.5 billion deal. At the Los Angeles Times, the publisher and editor were forced out when they refused to impose hundreds of corporate-mandated layoffs.
Maybe the future for both newspapers and television stations is some kind of “citizen journalism” unit. Maybe not. Whatever happens, the internet is not going away and citizen journalism will expand with better tools and techniques. Hopefully, professional journalists will find an audience for “news done right” — and profit from it.
Come to Portland — it’s a greenfield.
