If I understand this correctly, it doesn't overwrite existing affiliate links. I feel it should though, its my browser after all.

Yes, we'll be working on the ad revenues. They certainly aren't high enough to support a massive media organization. They should be high enough to support a low-overhead one-man journalism show.

There are other revenue streams, too. It remains to be seen which is the best for us.

Yeah, similar alright. We have different outlook. The writers for our site aren't "contributors". Rather, they are the stars and we are providing a service to them.

Interesting question. I'm guessing since you ask about the DCMA you're asking about copyright. Well, we'll vet all our writers, and it should be no problem at all. We'll also delay payment of new writers so that there is no way to do some kind of grab-and-dash.

Its also much much much easier to search for copyrighted material in text than in video or flash content. I can't imagine solving this will be a hard problem.

Its not strictly limited to journalists, but its focus will be news, and we're looking to restrict the authors to high quality writers.

While I expect to widen the platform to all comers in the long term, we'll be very careful how we do it. It'll be our equivalent of reddit's search for how to do subreddits well, and Facebook figuring out how to let everyone in.

We were only trying to be secret to not build hype when the product isn't ready. Backfire! We hope you aren't put off. We are going to be as open and transparent as we can be.

(I should point out in that case that I'm only using this name for consistency. I'm pbiggar on HN.)

No-one is being crapped on here. I've updated the CFJ to hopefully make that a lot clearer.

Done, thanks. Who needs spell checking when you have HN :)

I'd also capitalise "google". I know it can be a verb, but you're using it here as a noun.

The YC motto: make something people want. Journalists do not want to be exploited for pennies, so that is not a product we would be involved in.

I would not be happy getting rich by exploiting others, and newslabs won't be involved in anything like that.

There isn't anything about our market, because we're not specific to any of them. If you are a journalist, write about what you are interested in. So far, we've had interest from people who write about finance, about tech, about gaming, and lots and lots of local journalists.

So long as you don't plan on lumping them all together into one big amorphous news website that tries to cater to all tastes but has no real editorial focus or voice. Give them tools to find / understand / build their own audience.

Sounds like you're on the right track there though.