Bob London argues that real journalism, which breaks original stories, offers something aggregators can't. Early design choices made the outlet look like it just repackaged headlines, when the actual reporting was unique. Design and language matter for showing readers what they're actually getting.
Chapters
They're getting inundated with sources of information. And if you're just another source of information because you're an aggregator scraping headlines from around the web and putting them in a slick copywriting format, like some of the companies that purport to be, you know, news providers, that's so different than journalists who dig up a story, report the story, they pursue the story, and they break the story and the news because they understand their audience. I think one of the distinctions was you can't get this stuff anywhere else. You can get different coverage, but you can't get this anywhere else. So to hear you guys talk about journalism, and when I interviewed your employees, it was the same, you know, digital media journalism, the outside world needed to have that, that appreciation. And I know that from what I've seen that you guys have produced in the last couple of years, it looks like you're working hard to get that perception where it really should be, because that's where the value of the company is.
Absolutely. And I think your point about the aggregation, I mean, one of the things that we did is we tried to make it in the early days, particularly when the focus was much more on mobile, get in and out of the stories as fast as you can, right? We didn't want someone to have to like spend 10 minutes with one of our stories. So we tried to make it look as clean as possible, as brief as possible. And I think that gave the appearance that it was aggregation, that there wasn't more underneath it. And so I think there's some of this, it's the language piece, some of it was a design piece.
Yes.
To highlight the people and to show what it is. So it's all of it, you know, working together in concert that really went to change what we're doing, right? The way we talk about it, the way we show it, how, you know, how we show it, all of that has changed since we've worked with you.
