I recently stumbled across Slinkset in my regular quest for new journalism business models (technically it’s been around since last summer). Slinkset enables you to create your own social news site in seconds (think Reddit or Digg). I was a little skeptical about how easy it could really be, so I created a Journalistics Slinkset site. Now it’s not as pretty as Reddit or Digg, but it took me five minutes start to finish to set it up. I estimate it would take another hour of my time to customize it further. Compare this to months of development and tens of thousands of dollars to build a site like this the old fashioned way, and it’s pretty impressive.
Of course, when I discovered Slinkset was a Y Combinator company I was less surprised. Y Combinator has launched some of my favorite startups over the past couple of years, including Reddit, Wufoo, Scribd, Weebly and Backtpe (we use Backtype Connect on this blog). Slinkset is the latest of my favorites to come from Y Combinator’s program.
Better than my example of the Journalistics test site would be J-Startup News, a social news site covering “The Latest on Journalism Startups and New Business Models for News.” I can’t think of a more appropriate example to go along with this post. While J-Startup News doesn’t have a ton of voting going on, there are some great examples of new business models for news on the site. Fit Scoop, BrideTide and {typography} are other good examples of Slinkset sites.
Slinkset is a great example of a new business model for news. Now anyone can create a social news site around a particular subject or topic they are passionate about. The key to making a social news site work of course is having an audience. If Slinkset were to offer services to help social news site managers establish and grow their audience, or help users make money off their social news sites, the service will increase in value. I’m sure they’re working on this.
If you’re an out of work journalist that’s not prepared to jump into the blogosphere, but recognize a gap in coverage in a particular niche, Slinkset could be a great tool for quickly launching a new social news site. I also think Slinkset would be an interesting tool to integrate with existing online news sites and blogs to embrace user generated content or citizen journalism, particularly around the area of local news.
If you have an idea for a social news site and use Slinkset to launch it, or if you’ve already used Slinkset to launch a social news site, please let me know.
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