Here, have a business idea (media related)

[DuaneJackson]

I've got an idea that I've got no time to research or exploit.

So if anyone wants it, take it!

Like most of you I don't get the time to read a paper on a daily basis, so I get The Week. It's basically an overview of the weeks news with articles from various UK and international papers.

But - what I'd really like is the ability to choose a number of different columnists/sections from various newspapers and have just those its emailed to me as a print firendly PDF.

For instance, I could choose to have Mark Steeles column from the Independent, John Gapper from the FT and the 3AM girls from The Sun along with a number of other columns (including Johann Hari in case I run out of toilet paper). It'd then get emailed to me once a week as a PDF along with a synopsis of the weeks most important stories.

This is certainly something I'd pay for and I don't think anyone else out there is doing it.

Does anyone think this is viable?

 

[Gillie]

Yes I would pay for it too! Save me trawling through pages when I finally get round to it!

Please someone do it!

 

[webit]

Have a look at this:

http://bbcnews.benmetcalfe.com/digest/

 

[DuaneJackson]

Yep, that's the kind of thing. But for a much wider range of media than just the beeb.

 

[MyNI]

But is that legal? You would basically be syndicating various newspapers illegally unless you made a deal with them all. The only way I could see it being done otherwise is if the articles we from the day before...and who wants to read that anyway?

 

[DuaneJackson]

There must be a way to do it legally as it's what The Week do. It'd be a weekly thing, so it'd be various pieces from the previous 7 days. Plenty of people read The Week and that's all old news.

 

[MyNI]

Yeh well that proves I was right and wrong. Right about the fact that they only seem to be able to use old news, but I guess I was wrong about people not wanting to read it. As long as the articles have a longer shelf-life I suppose it would be ok. For instance an article about 'A Change in Political Voting Trends' would be alright but an article like 'Police Hunt Serial Killer' would be of no use because it would already be out of date or updated by the next day.

 

[robertm]

Isnt that what RSS feeds do? (only you dont get a pdf - but what so great about pdf?)

 

[DuaneJackson]

Jonny Consumer has no idea what an RSS feed is. Plus not all articles are available as a feed, and it'd be a lot of hassle to set something up to pull all of the articles you are interested in.

As a techie I'm sure something could be done to amalgamate most of the stuff you're interested in, but for yourself - not with a nice interface for others to be able to use the service too.

A PDF gives you absolute control over the way a page looks when it's printed. Again, Jonny Consumer still prefers to read paper, not screen

 

[MyNI]

I'd love to meet this Jonny Consumer, he sounds like a stand-up guy I don't think the actual implementation of this idea is the problem, that is the easy part.

 

[DuaneJackson]

He is a nice bloke actually : )

I thinkt he hardest bit to pull together would be the licensing deals with the various publications. It'd need some VC to get the marketting off the ground too.

 

[MyNI]

Yeh well with any form of internet based business, your biggest cost will normally be marketing and advertising. But web hosting is still a hell of a lot cheaper than paying rent and rates for a building! My final opinion, yes this idea is a good one and could definately work, but it is the kind of business you would have to be personally interested in...because at the moment the thing that would make me say NO to this project if I had come up with it would be that I just couldn't be bothered! Not a great trait to have I know, but I just prefer to get involved in projects I enjoy. It is a brave and dedicated business man who can make a successful business from something that bores him.

 

[10Yetis]

I think windows live does this does it not?

I remember playing about with it when it first came out and just added all the columnists I liked, or maybe it was sections?

Good Idea though.

 

[DuaneJackson]

MyNI, exactly the reason I can't be bothered with it! Well, that and not having the time. But if I did have the time I'd find something more interesting to work on.

Windows Live looks very close to what I'm thinking off. But again it's a fairly limited pool of information to select from.

 

[Investified.com]

Contact the writers and ask them if its ok to reproduce their work but with their name as the author and the newspaper title.

 

[Vicky R]

I used to do something a bit like this to keep me in beer money when I was studying for my masters. I used to read a cross-section of defence magazines for a client and summarise the key articles and send them a synopsis of the things they were interested. It was extraordinarily dull.

Perhaps this is something that some of the media monitoring agencies offer as a service? I guess you'd need to pay the exhorbitant fees charged by the Newspaper Licensing Agency, if you were wishing to do this sort of thing, though.