Last night an ad at this weblog brought me to Jongo, an English language newsportal I had seen before , but was not sticky enough to keep my attention. As a newsportal it looks rather excellent. Nice lay-out, they seem to have all the important news and although their interviews are rather boring, they do an effort to use multimedia effects.The problems is more that they use the concept of a newsportal and that is very much 1990s. They seemed to have missed out on much of the developments of the recent half decade that makes the internet so much more a conversational tool. Jongo talks like an authority, they bring only "Jongo News", although I have seen it earlier at Reuters. Trying to become a new brand in the news industry is, I think, a losing proposition. CNN might be able to hold on to it a bit longer, but no way you can establish a new brand in such a way.
Then, the tools for conversation are lacking: no rss-feeds, no feedback or comment section per article, no links to other sources.
The operation looks like a well funded one, but I'm afraid this is not going to work in the long run. News has become a commodity and for the digital vanguard their RSS-readers has become their portal. The rest will stick to paper or the online copies of the old media.
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