Interesting statements...

Often, I read things and am captured by a paragraph, sentence or phrase. The theme of an article is clearly important, but I tend to look for those gems.

In his Ask the Recruiter column today on the Poynter web site, Joe Grimm writes about a new website called Ongo that he describes as a "personal news experience."

I am interested in places online where I can go to find more of the news that is important to me. It is the ongoing search we all undergo for: What I want, when I want it. Ongo sounds like an interesting venture of many solid news producers.

However, it was a paragraph late in Grimm's column about Ongo that caught my attention: "Kazim said that the Internet has disaggregated news to the point where it is overwhelming for readers who want to manage multiple news sources. Ongo is trying to be a one-stop shop for managing the news."

The internet, and many pseudo-news sites, have been negatively described as "aggregators" of news rather than producers. The problem there for journalism is that the producers of the news are losing out on revenue for their work when a "aggregator" takes it and publishes it and attracts an audience.

It is an interesting way to look at things that not only are sites aggregating news, but they are disaggregating it by making it spread over so many locations and thus making it difficult to navigate to good information.

In this case, Ongo is charging $6.99 a month and is working closely with those producers - sharing revenue from subscribers. And if it does this week, giving me what I want and what I should read, it sounds like an interesting concept.

Anything that is looking to serve readers and solve some of the financial puzzle to keep good journalism relevant and profitable is a worthy venture to me.

In fact, I don't think I would count Ongo in a simple fail/succeed scenario. Just for attempting it is a success in my eyes. If it works, great. If it is not financially successfully, my hope is it will create a foundation for another venture to improve upon the concept to one day be successful.

We must be willing to pay for our news.