I think Story will disrupt (and become the future of) the entire publishing industry.
See, here's the thing; no one cares about magazines any more. They're irrelevent. The fact the magazine industry is still around is insane. It's built on the back of bullshit ABC figures (how many copies they claim to sell) and dumb advertisers who still pay these guys for page space blindly believing people still read the things. Print magazines are a corpse. And the iPad equivalents are the corpse on a screen.
People don't want to pay money to download a 500mb file of 100 pages of month old stories which are unsearchable, unsharable and you delete forever after reading. It's so insane I can't believe Apple even bothered making the Newsstand app. I would've left that industry to die an overdue death.
But I love journalism. I love it. Magazines used to be my favourite thing. Journalism is so powerful and so important but it's gone to shit. The industry is tarnished. The honesty of the writer and the trust of the reader has gone but the need for real, real, journalists is so important.
Here's where Story comes in.
After we have funding I want to start commissioning journalists and photographers to create stories that will feature on the Discover screen. Real journalism; war stories; photo stories; writing that makes you laugh out loud in public; work that inspires, educates and makes your day better. The nature of Story means you can follow your favourite journalists/photographers directly. Imagine that. Whatever they publish will pop to the top of your feed as soon as they produce it.
It's a great plan. This model could change everything.
Paul isn't hot on having an editorial department, "I hate the word 'editorial'". Paul dreams of creating code that will learn what you like and be able to automatically pull up and display popular and cool stories on the discover screen. A perfect automated system. Paul's plan seems much more realistic and 'now'. I like it but I'm an editorial guy and I want to disrupt and resurrect that entire wrecked industry.
