25A, What's next?

what's next in my venture? I think we’ll see news outlets doing a better job being more colloquial, but perhaps not necessarily honest. I interviewed 3 UF students—Kristin Bausch, Garrett Kost, and Issac Price, to see what they thought.

They thought a venture like mine needs to be more niche, i.e just do political news (Issac and Garrett said this) Kristin thought that the project is fundamentally flawed, and thinks that people are just going to continue to consume the news that “makes them feel right” Garrett suggested just to focus on Politics, while Issac thought the news source shouldn’t just be a US thing, he claimed “everyone in the world needs news, and we can't be the only ones who have these problems”

In the future, I’ll try and focus on public policy stories, and maybe consider expanding to include international news. It makes the most sense for my venture to start small and niche, and for us to write about what we’re good at and familiar with (for me, that’s American politics and business), Expanding to other markets will be hard, but entirely possible with time and patience I think.

The other market I chose was the opposite of the news… tabloids. No joke.

I thought if there was a polar opposite, an anti-informative, who would it be?

It's not CNN, fox, MSNBC BBC, it’s the people who write stories for entertainment purposes. That’s not the same thing as what I’m trying to do, in fact, that’s what I'm trying to move away from. I interviewed for this market daicia King, Brooke Kahan, and Abbey White, all friends of mine who like this kind of “news”. The only way I think we could create something for this market is to have a “fun” story, not necessarily written the way other sources would, but have a piece to take a break from the “hard” news. Brooke liked this idea, but simplified it to be “just a fun little quote every day”, similarly, daicia wanted a riddle or a “daily picture, just something cool and unique every day”

Interesting enough, there’s actually some overlap between what I’m trying desperately NOT to do, and what I’m trying to accomplish. In a weird way, I think it actually accomplishes what we’re trying to do, but better. I agree with them in a way, we’re essentially making news for people who get distracted easily, people who have a hard time understanding “complex” stories, so this brain break might be a nice add on that contributes to the overall causality of the newsletter, while still maintaining the integrity of the piece.