I publish Tea Party Economist five days a week. It looks as though I will soon be facing competition.
Maybe from you.
There is a free mobile phone app called Flipboard. It lets you get access to lots of Web stories on any topic. You pick the topic.
If you want to create your own magazine based on these stories, you can. The app lets you aggregate these stories. It publishes them in a format that looks like a magazine. Your magazine.
I plan to start a K-12 online curriculum in the near future. One of the requirements for being a student will be having a blog site. The students will post their own weekly essays on their sites.
But Flipboard can be for “extra credit.” Students will launch their own magazines. By the time they graduate (goal: age 16), they will have one or more of their own magazines in addition to their blog sites.
This is the new journalism. If kids grow up with this, there will be an army of creative, self-motivated people publishing highly informative magazines.
How will I compete with this?
The free market unleashes human creativity. Free programs like Flipboard are going to enable students to discover the world of publishing at a young age. This is a great thing.
It's de-centralizing the distribution of information throughout society and it's a good thing. No more do people have to rely on what a talking-head bimbo with a D-cup bra size reads from a teleprompter on the 6 o'clock TV news. Reality is not whatever Anderson Cooper or Shepard Smith (or Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather before them) says it is.
I have been playing around with Google currents and Feedly. I am not sure which I like the most. I really liked Google Reader but they are discontinuing it.