adrianmott.com

During the 2008 presidential elections, I found myself getting sick and tired of all of the biased partisan dribble that was being produced from the major news channels – you know the culprits. It seemed like my options were either totally liberal MSNBC, or totally conservative Fox News, with not a whole lot in between. Online, in written news articles, the same sort of biased opinion exists, with a few exceptions. I’ve always found myself craving multiple sources in my news and not simply settling for reading one source all the time.

Fast forward to today, and enter Newsy.com – an online video news site that covers the day’s news from multiple sources.  Their format is strictly video, and they use their own ‘reporters’ to cover the sources in their attempt to touch on all aspects of the story as it unfolds.  At first glance, the site doesn’t appear to have a ton of stories, a product of their age and resources most likely, but I expect this to increase over time.

Newsy also just launched an iPhone app, which has me very excited (as I just picked up a new 3G S).  I really like the video format – it takes less time to consume the stories and the reporters do a good job keeping you interested during each 5 minute or so clip.

The company earns revenue through advertising around its videos and also offers to license them to other sites who may want to incorporate them.  The site is about 10 months old, and has already received funding, and apparently is going to announce another round of funding at $2 million.

One question I have is how are their sources and news stories are being uncovered?  As they move forward, are they putting the resources into developing a piece of technology that will automate this process (a la Memeorandum)?  The lack of automation in finding and filtering news stories from all of the sources they cover could be the cause for them being slow to publish new videos.  They could also be suffering from a lack of personnel and video creation and editing resources.  I would say that for them to really make a splash in the public news market, they have to produce at least an hour’s worth of video per day.

Will this new site fix the ever slowing news industry?  Probably not – that will take a true shift in the industry’s access and revenue models – but this format is certainly interesting and useful.  The company is doing a lot of the legwork for us in filtering out articles for stories that we may never see, and for that I am grateful.