News articles on demand

Is this a service? If not, this needs to be a service.

Affordable articles with extremely quick turnaround time.

If its just news, the writing style isn't hard and its just re-writing whats already happened/been reported. But since its news, it is time sensitive. Essentially article re-writing in less than an hour.


Not if you re-purpose general news for a niche. Scan news for niche keywords and then re-purpose the content on your own site before most of your audience sees it from a large source.

Sounds like a job for a virtual assistant!

I think the problem is the "faucet." Since this is entirely based around getting it done fast and breaking the news for your readership, you need someone on the ball constantly. To offer it as a service is going to require some kind of time-period agreement so people aren't trying to micro-manage the output flow.

Also, there's the problem of the "good / cheap / fast" triangle:



You pointed out that it'd be low quality, but acceptable for the purpose. I don't think it'd be acceptable work. You'd have to get rid of the "cheap" part or you'll have ESL writers with wonky phrasing and grammar issues.

It could work though to some degree, in regards to making money from the business. It does have a unique marketing angle to it.

You can hire writers who are available for short notice articles, it just costs more. No reason for anyone to think that curating news stories would be garbage or poor quality inherently.

Ryuzaki said:

Sounds like a job for a virtual assistant!

Click to expand...

Yea, except their English isn't the best :L

Ryuzaki said:

You pointed out that it'd be low quality, but acceptable for the purpose. I don't think it'd be acceptable work. You'd have to get rid of the "cheap" part or you'll have ESL writers with wonky phrasing and grammar issues.

Click to expand...

I spoke too quickly... What I was getting at, is that re-writing is much less time consuming and easier than writing an article that requires research. I was also hinting at re-written content usually having less value from a traditional Builder pov.

Ryuzaki said:

It could work though to some degree, in regards to making money from the business. It does have a unique marketing angle to it.

Click to expand...

I think it could work if you had a weekly max retainer, gave a publisher account away, and allowed the service to post breaking news between $X and $XXX times per week.

Potatoe said:

You can hire writers who are available for short notice articles, it just costs more. No reason for anyone to think that curating news stories would be garbage or poor quality inherently.

Click to expand...

I was thinking the cost could be cut down (or profited from) if that's all you did, and had subscription services.

This would work well if you had a pool of writers that could pick up from the queue.

This is interesting although I was under the impression that timeliness would also mean a presence of autonomy. News doesn't wait for you and "on-demand" is another series of steps that delay output.

How I would do it.

I would contain it to a corner of the website, or even as a subdomain that attempts to funnel that traffic into your quality, regular broadcast. Then, I would hire a team of fast and cheap (but low quality) virtual assistant writers to write breaking news in short summaries, angled to the niche.

But why would I do it?

This being said, it's more of a branding exercise to keep the mindshare of your existing audience than to attract new ones- unless you are doing a "The Verge" move (Tech to News + Tech to Crap). For the cost, I would think that running paid campaigns on your regular broadcast would be a better use of time and money until you feel like you've reached a ceiling you can't break.

Sometimes moving forward doesn't mean newer ideas, but better (execution) of the same ones.