1) I had no idea NewsTilt existed. I make my living on the internet. I should have known about it.
2) The name suggests to me that they will put a slant on the news. I like unbiased news, and most other people at least pretend to. Also, 'tilt' is slang for 'fail'. That doesn't come to mind immediately from the name, but the association with the word is there subconsciously.
I remember hearing about it when it launched, when people raised some of your same concerns. It's interesting to look back on the initial reactions as part of the postmortem:
The major problem is 1). We did not do well at publicizing either ourselves or our journalists.
People brought up 2) a lot, but I don't feel it was as bug a problem as almost anything else I put in the post. Our major competitor was called "true/slant", and it did they little harm (but then they built their brand around that, so it's a little different).
I have several friends who were writing for True/Slant when you guys launched. They all were aware and wanted you guys to drop dead as they had already gambled with this other j-startup and now there was a second one casting doubt on their original choice.
Of course 5 months later, both projects are dead and gone under less than ideal circumstances.
I actually was invited to and attended a planning meeting for True/Slant's Chicago people. They asked me to be there so I could explain how they could use Windy Citizen to promote their stuff. They seemed like good people, but I suspect their content was too earnest to really make a go of it. They had the same problem you did:
Without naked women, it's pretty hard to build eyeballs on the web.
Comments
2 other points he didn't grasp:
1) I had no idea NewsTilt existed. I make my living on the internet. I should have known about it.
2) The name suggests to me that they will put a slant on the news. I like unbiased news, and most other people at least pretend to. Also, 'tilt' is slang for 'fail'. That doesn't come to mind immediately from the name, but the association with the word is there subconsciously.
I remember hearing about it when it launched, when people raised some of your same concerns. It's interesting to look back on the initial reactions as part of the postmortem:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264477
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bwrew/iama_founder_of_...
The major problem is 1). We did not do well at publicizing either ourselves or our journalists.
People brought up 2) a lot, but I don't feel it was as bug a problem as almost anything else I put in the post. Our major competitor was called "true/slant", and it did they little harm (but then they built their brand around that, so it's a little different).
I have several friends who were writing for True/Slant when you guys launched. They all were aware and wanted you guys to drop dead as they had already gambled with this other j-startup and now there was a second one casting doubt on their original choice.
Of course 5 months later, both projects are dead and gone under less than ideal circumstances.
I actually was invited to and attended a planning meeting for True/Slant's Chicago people. They asked me to be there so I could explain how they could use Windy Citizen to promote their stuff. They seemed like good people, but I suspect their content was too earnest to really make a go of it. They had the same problem you did:
Without naked women, it's pretty hard to build eyeballs on the web.
Maybe I play too much poker, but I interpreted "tilt" as a sort of crazy streak. As in, here's a bunch of people going nuts about the news.