Slant, Tilt and Bias

They are different - (Image by tillwe via Flickr)

NewsTilt – a new news platform backed by YCombinator – launches today. Word of their launch has been crackling on the wires (well, some of the wires) for a few weeks and they’ve been getting good ink.
From their press release

“In the future, news will be all about the journalist and their community,”
…
By handling distribution, advertising, and myriad technical issues, NewsTilt will free-up its stable of professional journalists to focus specifically on their craft, and interact with readers just as bloggers have in the past.

And from their site at newstilt.com

NewsTilt is the platform for the new model of journalism, which is centered around the journalist. We handle everything that is hard about building your brand online, leaving the writing and reporting to you.

I obviously like what NewsTilt is planning to do – I’ve been doing it myself for the past 20 months. The more the merrier, as Lewis said earlier, and “Nothing will work, but everything might” as C. Shirky did even earlier than that.

Comments on NewsTilt’s pre-announcement on Hacker News included references to us at True/Slant. As did comments on their press release. So, too, did the nice write up they got on TechCrunch. And also a bunch of stuff across Twitter. One or both of the Founders have not been keen on these comparisons. This is natural: we’re biased to think that what we create is its own precious snowflake. We felt that bias when people compared True/Slant to others who’d come before us.

They will be different: we’re different teams with different sets of experiences, different goals and outlooks. Even with much of the same basis, seemingly small tweaks can be huge differences and differentiators. I look forward to seeing those from NewsTilt.

What’s more interesting to me is the sameness of how NewsTilt (I’m really having a hard type keying in that name correctly … I’ll go buy the typo domain in case they get huge quickly …) is going about their business:

• Quality journalism created by credible sources
• Focus on the journalist / Contributor / author / proprietor / “Brand” (apologies, Caitlin, et al.)
• A simple platform that abstracts all the technology and administration and distribution, etc. so the journlist / Contributor can focus on writing and community

Focus from the outset is on quality of community member participation, too. It’s been amusing and satisfying to watch all the recent hubbub about comments, boosting the signal-to-noise ratios in web discussions, in making sure community members have a bit of skin in the game so they’re not simply flying in, tossing a molotov cocktail and flying back out. We’ve planned and done all those things from the beginning. And, again, there’s satisfaction that goes along with that. (N.B. I wish that satisfaction came with a side of “BIG FAT CHECK,” but we take what we can get …).

Another point of interest Prof. Rosen touches on is the bias inherent in journalism. We’re people; we can observe and report, but there’s always going to be a Slant or a Tilt to it; the hope is, there’s also some True or News, too.