News Is Broken – Jamatto Offers Three Things We Can Do To Help
London, United Kingdom (PRWEB UK) 5 September 2017 -- There are many complex and interlocking reasons for the breakdown of the news industry. Jamatto has identified three main opportunities where their solutions could help improve the situation:
1. Most readers don’t understand the complex and interlocking threats to the news. Many have no idea how seemingly harmless features of the online landscape have decimated quality news. These include adblocking, subscriptions, clickbait, and ubiquitous social media giants.
2. People live in ‘news bubbles’ of their own making. In this era of fake news and newspapers with strong political agendas, it is essential for our democracies that people break out of their bubbles and read more than one source of news to formulate a true and accurate story.
3. It is difficult to support a broad variety of journalists and news outlets. Common subscription models only work for consumers committed to a single point of view. ‘Free news’ is typically tainted with annoying advertising or funded by hidden agendas. Targeted promotions intentionally keep audiences from stepping out of their bubbles. Donation models relying on consumer goodwill provide an unreliable stream of income at best.
Subsequently Jamatto developed three tools which speak to each of these problems:
- News Blues (http://www.bitly/NewsBlues) - a tongue-in-cheek game to educate consumers about the threats to quality news, and how they can help - while they have a bit of fun dodging the villains.
- Pangloss News (http://www.pangloss.news) – a site which makes it easy to read different viewpoints about top news stories. Anyone can contribute by posting a story or a point of view.
- Jamatto Micropayments (http://www.jamatto.com) – a means for publishers and vendors to charge small amounts easily, and consumers the ability to make hassle-free small payments.
Jamatto was born from the conviction that everyone should be able to access a broad range of news - easily and without having to pay a fortune for it - while providing an honest living for journalists and news outlets. People across age groups are willing to pay for quality content and services online that they find valuable and useful. Given a product like Jamatto, online news outlets can give their consumers an easy way to support quality journalism, and open up a new revenue stream for themselves. This has the added benefit of cutting down vendors’ reliance on questionable advertising practices, and ‘clickbait’ tactics which has decimated the quality of news.
James Jardine, one of the co-founders of Jamatto, explains their rationale, “One of our key objectives is to introduce consumers to the concept that paying for quality news is a good idea, and we want to give them an easy way to do so. What’s more, we want to provide a way for consumers to pay for quality journalism which is not a subscription - which really only caters to those who are extremely loyal to a single publication and its points of view. This creates the freedom to continue to explore - and fund - other points of view.”
About Jamatto
Jamatto is a London-based company that offers publishers and vendors the ability to charge small amounts easily, and consumers the ability to make hassle-free small payments. It is simple for publishers to install, and consumers only have to set their account up once, by signing in with social or email. After that, it’s a one-click payment mechanism. They have over a dozen newspaper clients across the UK, Ireland and South Africa, with a growing pipeline and plans to expand into the USA. Find out more at http://www.jamatto.com.
James Jardine, Jamatto, http://www.jamatto.com, +44 7725448634, [email protected]
Share this article