Month: April 2018

Disrupting The Newspaper Business With A #Startup Based On Usenet

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The issue at hand is the newspaper business is dying. It seems as though the best way to fix the problem is to completely re-imagine what a newspaper is. Newspapers have always been a platform for distributing news, but over the years they have come to have significantly great cultural meaning than that.

I propose we get down to basics and provide a platform for writers, photographers and videographers to contribute quality content to a social media platform and be paid for it. Now, if you did it right, it’d be a win-win scenario because content providers would get paid and you, the startup, would make money from advertising.

I propose you base your startup loosely on Usenet concepts. I’m the first to say something like that already exists — Reddit — but this would take the Reddit model to the next level in various ways. Producers of quality content would be recognized and monetarily rewarded. They would have to be in possession of a Verified Account, but after that things would be pretty simple.

One a Verified Account holder could start a new Group and within that Group start a new thread, which I call a Conversation. All content would be threaded and based on the Post, which would be multimedia and have a WYSIWYG editor built in. Reddit has kind of moved towards this and that would be a danger — that Reddit would co-opt all your features even if you had a lot of cool ones, but anyway, I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn, so this is just a daydream.

Below are some videos where I talk about this at length.

‘An Uber For News’ — How To Save Newspapers From Themselves #Startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

So, I’ve come up with what I think is a really cool way to “disrupt” the newspaper business. Here’s how it would work — the service to the uninitiated would, on the surface, seem a lot like Reddit. But it would, in fact, be much more than that.

The service would be a social media platform designed not only to “kill” Twitter, also reward producers of great content. All the reporters who have been laid off from newspapers would find a new home with this service which would lay out clear metrics for how you could make money. You would not only be “graded” by your fellow users for the content you provided, you would also credit for how many clicks and shares you got within the system. Using this formula your pay would be worked out for each article you contributed to the system.

Once you became a Verified Account holder, you might also garner additional remuneration for various things associated with the Groups and Conversations you created.

It’s really a win-win situation because a lot of people who are fed up with Twitter would flock to a service which actually rewarded people for producing quality content. Of course, a lot of people who use Reddit would say that the service was a rip off of it, when, in fact, it was actually an update of the old Usenet service.

I feel this is a pretty cool concept and if I had a few hundred thousand dollars laying around, I would try to establish the startup myself. But I can’t code and don’t want to learn, so this is just a daydream. I find the whole concept fascinating.

The Vision Thing: How To Save The Newspaper Business By Disrupting It

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have given this some thought and I realize that rather than a “top-down” disruption of the newspaper business, you would need to do a “bottom-up” approach. I say this because it’s highly unlikely you could find an egotistical billionaire willing to put up with the slow-mo mentality of the legacy newspaper organization. But if you told them you were going to completely disrupt the newspaper business with a fleet footed startup, I think you might be surprised.

So, what I would do is, rather than buy up newspapers and convert them to a social media platform based on Usenet, I would design such a platform and use it to strike at the jugular of the traditional newspaper business. What you do is, you design the platform in such a way that quality content bubbles up to the surface and journalists would be make money off of the content they contributed to the system. You might have a few well-paid journalists to seed the system at first, but those people would not be the point of the platform.

The point of the platform would be to completely destroy the traditional newspaper business. You would do so because of how it was designed. You would give journalists an entire page to work with and that content would be threaded. End-users would also be given the ability to in-line edit what you had originally written. You start the service off somewhere like New York City where there are a lot of journalists hungry to make money. Once you get the kinks out, you expand the service to the cities across the country. The point of all of this would be to provide a platform for world, national, local and hyperlocal coverage. If you loved covering city hall, you could do that and the the system would provide you with a platform to that and make money.

Now, I think Korea has something similar to this but I don’t think it’s a social media platform. That’s the key difference. This would be a social media platform designed specifically to promote and reward quality content. Everyone who contributed to the service would be graded by users and they would also receive points for the number of views or clicks they got.

You would have to be sneaky though. If you didn’t do it right, the entire media industry would gang up on you and scream bloody murder for you killing the traditional notion of how news is distributed. It’s one thing to kill the taxi industry and quite another to kill the newspaper business. But the newspaper business is dying anyway and this would be an example of burning the village to the ground to save it.

It’s possible that Reddit could co-opt all of these features if your service became popular enough, but, then again maybe they wouldn’t. But this is definitely something to think about.

How To #Disrupt The Online Media Business #Startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have talked about something like this before, but I feel like talking about it again. It seems pretty obvious that the media business is ripe to be “disrupted.” But how to do it? It seems to me that if you designed a social media startup that updated Usenet concepts and paid professional journalists to inject it with quality content from the get-go, that would knee-cap Twitter pretty easily.

I have gone into great detail about the feature set of this proposed service, but in general the idea is you would have full paged posts that were threaded int the context of Conversations in Groups. You would make the whole thing inventive and easy enough that even the most stressed out journalist or entertainer could use it and ta-da, you kill Twitter and make a lot of money.

The most important thing of it all would be the full-page post that was threaded. That’s really powerful. It’s powerful because instead of posting in an online magazine or newspaper, you would skip the middle-man and post a story — that could be inline edited in the context of a thread — directly into the platform. That’s pretty cool. And given that you were paying journalists to contribute to the service as you grew it, they would have a vested interest in helping you use-test the admin aspects of Groups so it was really, really easy.

This is all so obvious to me that I am sad that no one else has thought of it. I want to use this platform because it’s such a great idea.

V-Log: Thinking About Starting A Podcast

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have been thinking a lot about starting a podcast devoted to talking about Trump, but I won’t do anything formally until I get some traction, any traction. If even a few people tell me they would be regular listeners / viewers, I would do it. But not unless that happened.

Anyway. Here are some samples of what I’m able to do. If you are interested in helping me out in some way, let me know.

I Believe The Trump Pee-Pee Tape Is Real

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I think it’s pretty obvious that the Trump pee-pee tape is real. It’s got to be. How else do you explain Trumps surreal softness on the Russians? The huge question, of course, is he willful in his traitorous behavior or is he just an idiot? That’s a question we may never know.

Another question is, will we ever get to see the pee-pee tape. I doubt it. It would make no sense for the Russians to release it when they can simply uses its release against Trump as long as he’s in office. Anyway, the below videos are really interesting and I suggest you watch them. They go into a lot of detail about all of this and its implications.

V-Log: Thoughts On A ‘Twitter Killer’ #startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Instead of going into great detail via text about all of this, here are some videos I’ve done. I think you’ll think they’re pretty cool. I’ve already written a lot about this before, so again I know no one will notice or care.

Enjoy

V-log: A Liberal Ponders Trump Maybe Actually Spooking The DPRK

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

For once, at least, it seems that Trump has managed to if not do something “right,” managed to cause something beneficial to happen. It’s too bad that in this case the “madman theory” is in play and we happen to have an actual madman in the White House.

Anyway. Watch the below video, it’s fairly interesting.

Trump Is Probably Going To Survive & Prosper, Sad To Say

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I don’t have any secret knowledge that would lead me to believe this, but I do have a general sense of what’s going on. I have a feeling that in the fall of 2020, all the characters associated with the Trump Administration’s many scandals will still be on TV, still talking about how it seems Trump is going to leave office sooner rather than later.

I’m not buying. I think Trump is going to not only survive, but thrive for eight long, long years. There just doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that is going to get rid of the man politically. In fact, we aren’t anywhere near “peak Trump.”

If Trump should start a war with either Iran or the DPRK in the coming months and years, well, he’s only going to get even ore power. So I would suggest we use our power and energy for being politically engaged.

Oh, Come On, People, Why Aren’t We Talking About Barbara Moore & Trump?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now, I am the first to admit that The Daily Mail is a trash publication, but is Trump a trash person so why can’t we at least get people a little bit interested in this story about Trump having an affair in the 1990s with a Playboy bunny named Barbara Moore.

Nothing illegal happened, of course, but Trump is the president and so by definition anything as salacious as this that he’s done in his life is news. I just think we should at least be talking a little bit about it between all the commotion about Sean Hannity.