Q&A Y Combinator: 'News organisations can learn from start-up culture'

As large-scale news publishers look at ways to generate new revenue - from the Guardian's possible members' club to News International's consideration of pay walls - initiatives aimed at supporting new online news projects, with new business models, are growing in number.

Last month Journalism.co.uk talked to Mark Potts about Growthspur, a new company aimed at finding new business models to support local news and information sources in the US.

Growthspur's initial focus is on independents and a move away from existing business and operational models for news organisations - a sentiment shared by start-up funding company, Y Combinator.

The US outfit, which matches start-up pitches with the initial seed-funding to get them off the ground, recently launched its Request for Start-ups (RFS) scheme to ask for start-ups to be paired with new business ideas thought of by Y Combinator. Top of the pile for the first wave of RFSs was 'The Future of Journalism'.

"We expect RFSs to be relevant in two cases. If a group is already heading in the direction described by an RFS, we hope they'll be encouraged to apply by hearing that this is something we've been waiting for. And if a group hasn't decided what to work on, perhaps an RFS will spark their interest," explains Paul Graham, Y Combinator partner, in a blog post.

"Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time. And yet people still need at least some of what they do. You can't have aggregators without content," the RFS outline on the Y Combinator site says.

"What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money - as print media once did - instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?"

Journalism.co.uk caught up with Y Combinator's Graham to ask what a new start-up for journalism would entail and why it deserves funding.

Why is Y Combinator looking to get involved in investing in the future of journalism?
We don't have any special interest in journalism per se. We're interested in start-ups, and it happens that one of the most promising start-up ideas we know of is related to journalism. But I suppose that isn't entirely a coincidence: journalism, as a business, is in turmoil at the moment, and some of the forces threatening it are the ones that would make this new idea work. It's an ill wind that blows no good.

Where did the idea for the Future of Journalism RFS come from? Have any existing start-ups inspired you?
No existing start-up inspired it. It was just a result of looking at the question without any presuppositions. Most discussions about the future of journalism are implicitly about how to save what we currently have. We just didn't include that assumption.

You mention programmers, data mining and making sites scale in this RFS - are these areas overlooked currently by journalism outlets or skills you see as vital to the future of journalism?
Most start-ups need programmers, so that's not surprising. The fact that the start-up would need people good at data mining needn't imply that existing publications ignore it, though.

The idea we have in mind only competes with existing journalism in the sense that telepresence competes with airplanes. That wouldn't imply that video compression was an area currently overlooked by aircraft designers.

Are there elements of a start-up businesses that existing media companies could learn from?
Yes, a great deal - from start-ups or from mature technology companies for that matter. The most important lesson is that you may as well embrace change, because you can't hide from it.

Almost as important is that in technology, you want to hire only the very best people. The best programmers are immeasurably better than the median.

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