Might be for the best. Often the comments directly on articles can be... extremely rough, to say the least.
Launch of gaming news site, Rascal
- Thread starter J.Quondam
- Start date
Anon Adderlan
Adventurer
Again, what value are they adding beyond what places like #DiceBreaker already provide?
Journalists who want to focus on journalism.
I'm not, as plenty of professionals have no idea what they're doing outside their particular niche.
And why would anyone pay to comment there when they could just do so here (and any number of other sites) for free?
Twiggly the Gnome
Legend
I subscribe to a site that went to a pay-to-post model. They let things go that they wouldn't have before because every post has a paying customer behind it now.
Still, we here are armchair quarterbacks, with less access to their business needs than they have.
There, you'd at least be reasonably sure a lot of people had read the pieces to discuss them.
The Patreon cut is larger than the Ghost cut and doesn't lend itself to as creative a format, nor frontpages.
The soccer blog I founded just moved to Ghost with subscribers. Every single writer/photog/editor and the managing editor is making more via our subscribers than we were under an ad-driven model.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
It's what media companies have turned to after trying everything else. If you're sitting on a better idea that they haven't tried, you will find a lot of eager listeners.
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Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Competition makes media outlets work harder. Even if you're happy with Dicebreaker, Dicebreaker will be better if they're trying to not get outdone by Rascal. And vice versa.
Anon Adderlan
Adventurer
To be clear I'm in the "I want to believe" camp as I'm dreading the inevitable information dark age we're facing. This is why I'm being critical as opposed to ignoring it entirely.
I wouldn't be so sure, especially when the quarterbacks are experienced in an industry and have different perspectives on it.
Which is their only value proposition and depends on staking a claim to the top of the information food chain.
I was too specific.
Ads are a dead industry for content creators at this point. That market is moving to siloed information you have to pay to access or be heard. So maybe they're ahead of the curve, but now they have to create the infrastructure without any developers in addition to figuring out how to draw people out of one silo and into theirs, all while the majority of users are asking them for a #Facebook page.
Journalism is also a dead industry, and no those aren't happy noises I'm making. But let's be honest, anything that was reported by these founders would have come out from insiders soon after if not far sooner.
Competition puts media outlets out of business, and there comes a point where the services themselves cannot be meaningfully improved and it comes down to wealth and ubiquity. And if you're just entering the market you need to present a compelling value proposition right out the gate. So what is that beyond the good feeling one may get for supporting 'real' journalism?
Ghost is a fully functional CMS (it's backend feels a bit like WordPress and a bit like Patreon). They don't need developers.
So, by all means, quote Lin Cordega's financials and business plans to us, Mr. Quarterback! Oh, you don't have those?
How on earth can you claim to know Rascal's business better than the folks at Rascal when you don't have the most basic of their actual information or plans?
And, by the way, the issue of being an armchair quarterback isn't about how well you know the game - it is about how little skin you have in it. The real quarterback has to deal with the actual situation on the ground. The real quarterback is the one who gets sacked, and has to deal with repercussions. The armchair quarterback gets to have folks forget when they are wrong, but crow when they are right.
I mean, Lin Cordega is the top of the RPG investigative journalism food chain right now. It is a very small chain, admittedly, but the name has cache in the field at the moment.
