[DavidJEastman]

Hi everyone,

I'm starting a news digest for businesspeople that is called the Business News Digest.

Since you guys are businesspeople, I'd like your feedback! I'd like your initial impressions, so I'll stop talking and just give you a link to the tentative site:

Business News Digest

Please either respond in this thread, via PM, or email me using deastman@umd.edu. I'd really like to hear your opinions.

Thanks!

[Onyx]

Looks okay to me, although I don't see any advantage to this over any other business news feeds, which are readily available on the Internet. What is your unique selling point? And do you expect to make a charge for this service?

[DavidJEastman]

I'm glad you responded, and I'm doubly glad that you asked those questions.

I believe the primary advantage to an average reader is that we're giving him or her the opportunity to see a good breadth of news stories in a relatively short amount of time.

The key is that we don't just give the first paragraph of a 3000 word story and leave the reader to figure out how the author came up with that; we also give readers the evidence that leads to whatever conclusions or questions the author brings up. I don't believe that we replace our readers' traditional news sources so much as we supplement them; who has time to read, in-depth, each of the sources that we cover each week?

As to the second question, we are still discussing that. We'd like to charge a subscription fee once we figure out how best to serve our potential customers. If we get good feedback on how to add more value to the digest we can then see what they might be willing to pay. For now, however, it is gratis.

Do you believe the news stories themselves are not offering enough of a unique value as to be useful in reading each week?

Thanks for your input! We appreciate it.