About NewsDiego

NewsDiego was designed to simplify access to the growing number of local news sources now emerging in the post-newspaper era. I waited a year or two for someone to build this needed piece of the local news puzzle but got tired of waiting, so I designed this site...

With the demise of newspapers we obviously lost writers and journalists, but we're also losing the newspaper's role as convenient packager and interestingness arbiter. The confused state of affairs exists because we haven't yet ressurected an ability to package and rank content from the dozens of local news organizations rising from Gutenberg's ashes.
Hence NewsDiego.

I could lay it out with 500 words or so but I think a few crudely crafted diagrams will do a better job:

Nothing too surprising here. Given the technology available prior to the internet this was probably the most efficient system possible. People now also visit the website of the local newspaper but if you replace the paper boy with a website the system is essentially the same. You could argue that news monopolies naturally evolved because they were the only way to simplify access to news before the internet. People will pay for one newspaper of record but they will not pay for five competing smaller newspapers. The side effect of these local news monopolies has been a lack of competition, lack of innovation, unnecesseraily powerful editorial boards, inefficient and therefore expensive advertising.

The second diagram shows the current state of affairs. I consider these the awkward adolescent years of news.

So we have chaos. It's democratic but it's also incredibly messy. The readers of newspapers used to getting a conventiently packaged bundle of news at their doorstep every day are now faced with a decision of which sites to check every day. See this article on the Paradox of Choice. The existence of multiple, competing news outlets is a positive for society as a whole but they make the task of finding relevant, interesting news much more difficult for individuals.
Note: Please see this video on RSS if you're unsure how it works. What I'm building, and what I feel is inevitable, is the following setup:

Some interesting articles about the evolution of journalism:

The Hubris of the Paid News Curator

Newspapers’ decline is a sign of democracy’s health, not a symptom of its death

Slate - It's time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential for democracy.

Suggestion Box

Please leave your suggestions for site improvements below. I'm constantly updating the site and this will help me build my to-do list. Thank you - Kirk

Some feedback received before this page existed:

"I have to say... you have a decent site for starting out and it's filled pretty nicely already!"
"You should never require JavaScript for navigation. I use NoScript, and your links don't work."
"I'm looking at the site now, at 12:03 am, and it looks pretty plain. If the homepage resets at midnight, it doesn't make much sense to us night owls." Ed. Note - Please see the News Archive
"We are pleased to report that out of all of the local campaigns we ran self-serve ads for, yours was one of the most successful campaigns on reddit! Your overall campaign CTR was an impressive 0.19%, and redditors were genuinely excited about your business and had very positive comments on your ad"