However, a few themes came out of our presentations from Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, Jeff Fluhr, co-founder and CEO of Spreecast, Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa, Aria Haghighi, co-Founder and CTO of Prismatic, and Josh Miller, co-founder of Branch. Here were the ones we found most compelling:

• The future of news will come from other people. This isn’t to say that the majority of the world will eventually get all of their news from Twitter and Facebook, but it is fair to say that we’ll increasingly rely on recommendations and smarter social cues from friends and respected strangers as we sort through the vast amount of information available online. This could mean something like Prismatic, which as my colleague Mathew Ingram has written, is working to combine data from social media with individual interests to create a smarter social reader for news.
• We’ll be reading all the news that fits — on mobile. For traditional sites, having a strategy that works for mobile is not longer an option, but we’ll increasingly see mobile-specific approaches from startups like Instagram, which was able to scale successfully by creating a simple, fast photo experience for mobile users in a hurry, or Circa, the startup that’s re-thinking how to structure news stories based on the attention spans and needs of mobile readers.  ”We distill these important details into specific pages,” Galligan said. “You hop through and jump from point to point.”
• It’s all about the individual person and the brand they build. Obviously individuals have always had a hand in shaping the news since the days of newspaper editors picking the stories that end up on the front page. But since the early days of blogging we’ve seen the rise of the personal brand grow in importance, and our panel earlier on Wednesday with some of the pre-eminent bloggers like Maria Popova and Andrew Sullivan only solidified the idea that smart, passionate writers can build their own readership online. Berry talked about how RebelMouse is allowing any individual, whether a famous blogger or not, to highlight personal achievements and content in one place, and with the rise of Twitter we’ll likely see this continue. “RebelMouse allows you in a very efficient way to say, let’s make this my splash,” he said.
• People want to talk about the news but they’re looking for smart conversations. We’re moving on from the days of television round-tables and flame wars in comment threads — or at least many people are looking to move on. Several interesting tools have launched recently that allow for more dynamic conversations online about the news, and we’re seeing those conversations happen both in text and multimedia. Spreecast joins the likes of Google+ Hangouts in lettings users host video discussions with additional social components, and Branch is looking to re-invent online discussions by making them invite-only and embeddable across the web.
• Traditional advertising can’t support the future, but no one’s clear what the alternative looks like. Some of our most heated discussions all day came from the discussion over how to make money from content in a way that allows writers and artists to benefit, consumers to enjoy reasonable prices, and businesses to stay afloat. From Popova discussing affiliate links to Buzzfeed discussing sponsored content, it’s clear we’re far from reaching a consensus. But from Prismatic’s efforts to work with brands to make money off their content on the service to Spreecast’s premium services, it’s clear that startups are at least considering smarter ways to approach the problem than traditional banner ads.

Check out the rest of our PaidContent Live 2013 coverage here.

One approach that has gotten a lot of attention, in part because it comes from former Tumblr designer and Instapaper founder Marco Arment, is an online and mobile magazine called simply The Magazine, which launched earlier this month. The simplicity of the name is reflected in the platform itself: Arment’s digital magazine, which is focused on long-form essays about technology and culture, has virtually none of the elements that we’ve come to associate with online or virtual magazines — it has no masthead or sidebars or boxes with interactive ads, no table of contents or sharing buttons or drop-down menus. In fact, it has virtually nothing but words and links (and some cool hyperlinked footnotes).

One of the reasons why The Magazine is able to strip down its reading experience so much is that it has no advertising of any kind: the content is subsidized solely by subscriptions, and Arment said recently that it is already financially sustainable — since it is being produced almost single-handedly, and therefore has an extremely low cost structure compared to traditional publishing. In that sense, it approaches what some have called “artisanal” publishing, and there is some good discussion of the pros and cons of that model in a Branch discussion that includes designer Jon Lax and NYT staffer Jeremy Zilar.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

From a design perspective, however, the simplicity of the app is its most interesting feature, in part because Arment seems to have approached it in a way that is the complete antithesis of traditional publishers: as he has described in his posts about the genesis of the project, he started it by thinking about what elements he really needed, and left everything else out. By contrast, most magazines and newspapers seem to ask themselves “How can we take all the stuff we already have and the things we already do, and squeeze them into this new container?” This process is fundamentally broken.

Designer Craig Mod looked at The Magazine and its design philosophy in a perceptive essay entitled “Subcompact publishing,” in which he compares what Arment did to the way that Honda disrupted the automotive business in North America, by providing something that fit the minimum needs of a large group of consumers. In a similar way, Mod argues, publishers need to stop thinking about all the things they can cram into a design on the web or a mobile device and start thinking about what developers and entrepreneurs call a “minimum viable product.”

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

There are already some great examples of content experiences that are trying for a “minimum viable product.” The Magazine is one, but so are lesser-known or more experimental features such as Evening Edition, which was created by designer Mike Monteiro and provides a heavily-curated selection of news and features designed to give readers an overview of the world in the same way a newspaper front page does (or used to). Another more recent entrant is a news site called TL;DR — internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” — which summarizes top stories in a more approachable way than traditional portals.

Let the content fit the experience, not the other way around

Other similar experiments include Summ.ly, a startup launched by a 16-year-old entrepreneur, which Om wrote about recently. It is also designed in as simple a way as possible, to take advantage of the limited time and screen real estate that mobile users often have when it comes to content consumption — something that is also a driving force behind Circa, the mobile news-aggregation app launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Matt Galligan and funded by Cheezburger empire CEO Ben Huh. And then there is the short-form, mobile reading experience offered by Tapestry, which was recently launched by New York-based incubator Betaworks based on a model pioneered by author Robin Sloan.

It’s worth noting that Twitter is a great example of the “minimum viable product” approach, both as a company and as a way of publishing content: not only is the restriction to 140 characters something that keeps Twitter from becoming cluttered with too much verbiage — the way other formats such as blogs can be — but the whole nature of the service itself was so simplified that in the beginning it wasn’t even clear to many people what it should be used for. That didn’t start to become obvious (even to the company’s founders, I would argue) until millions of people were using it, and even then many of the uses that the tool was put to came as a surprise.

This is part of the reason why some Twitter users are so concerned about the future of the platform, as it adds more content through features like its expandable “Cards” and seems determined to layer more and more functionality on top of the service. With any kind of publishing, there seems to be an almost irresistable temptation to continue adding more features and content and doo-dads until the original simplicity of the experience is lost, or at least significantly diluted.

Why aren’t more traditional publishers experimenting with features or services that are similar to Arment’s magazine, or Tapestry’s mobile approach, or a stripped-down experience like that offered by TL;DR or Circa? It’s not because they can’t — obviously they could if they wanted to. But as Craig Mod suggests in his essay, with reference to disruptive economics guru Clay Christensen, they don’t do this for the same reason North American auto-makers didn’t compete with Honda: they simply didn’t see it as a competitor until it was almost too late, because they had defined their business in the wrong way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

The app is more than just an attempt to rethink the way that traditional news is delivered or consumed: Huh and Galligan want to rethink how it is constructed, on an almost molecular level, and adapt that for an age that is becoming increasingly mobile and time-constrained.

Part of the thinking behind Circa comes from ideas that have been described by author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, as well as media-startup veteran David Cohn, who is also a founding partner of Circa and acts as its editor-in-chief. The main idea is that the traditional article or story format that newspapers and other news outlets have produced for so many years no longer fits with the way we produce or consume information now. The standard “inverted pyramid”-style article was designed for the days when people might only see one report about a news event, printed on dead trees and without links, so it had to include virtually everything.

Now, however, the news has become more of a process than an artifact, with multiple reports from different sources, updates, social links and other elements added over time. But news-reading formats remain more or less the same as they have always been.

News needs to adapt for mobile consumption

As Circa CEO Galligan also points out, more and more people are consuming the news on their phones and other mobile devices, as recent surveys from research agencies like the Pew Center For People and the Press confirm. If the long and often overly-complicated news article doesn’t jibe with the way we consume information in a digital age, it is even more out of step with the way we consume news on a mobile phone. As Galligan put it in an interview before Circa’s launch:

“With tablets you can kind of lean back and read longer articles, but the phone is dramatically different — you’re in line waiting for the subway or you’re in line for coffee and it’s kind of ‘gap time.’ Lengthy articles are very time intensive and attention intensive, and they are tough to consume on the phone.”

So part of Circa’s mission, Galligan says, was to rethink not just the way that traditional news is delivered for mobile or digital audiences, but to rethink the way that news is produced as well — and that meant trying to boil down the idea of a news story into its component pieces. So Circa doesn’t show you an entire news article, the way a mobile news app from the New York Times or some other traditional outlet would: instead, it breaks the news down into its “atomic units,” which consist of a series of news facts, background information and other elements (photos, quotes, etc.) A user can then choose how many of those atomic units to read at a given time.

So in looking at a news event like the vice-presidential debate, for example, Circa began with a short paragraph about the stakes for the respective candidates, with much of the emphasis on the Obama campaign to make up for the allegedly lacklustre performance of the president in the previous presidential debate. If that’s all you wanted to know, the brief would be enough — but scrolling down in the app produces other points, each of which is a short paragraph or two that adds more in the way of background to the story, a quote to highlight the issues, and so on. The points are written by Circa’s editors, and the sources for each are included at the end of each item.

Rethinking not just news consumption, but production

Circa also lets users “follow” a story, which is like a bookmark — so as new information or updates are added to developing stories, a reader is alerted to that when they open the app and can easily see what new developments there have been in the news events they are interested in. Breaking up the traditional story structure in this way allows Circa to come at the news from a different perspective, Cohn said in an email interview:

“Once you start to think of news as happening in these ‘atomic units,’ rather than as things that need to be wrapped up and shipped in an article, you can start to do different and unique things such as let people “follow” a story, provide different context based on what a reader has consumed before, bridge from one point to a story that provides background, and so on.”

I have only just started playing with Circa, so it’s hard to say whether this kind of atomic-level news consumption will become mainstream, or whether most people are happy enough consuming traditional news articles through mobile platforms like Flipboard or through newer aggregators like Prismatic (which Galligan says he is a big fan and user of). And if the idea of Circa is to allow people to quickly scan short news briefs, what is the business model? On that topic, Galligan says the company is thinking about advertising, but also about the back-end production platform that Circa has built, which other news entities or content producers might be interested in.

There’s one thing to be said for Circa, however: unlike most of the existing news-reading apps from both traditional media players and newer entities like Flipboard or Zite, it shows some of the most advanced thinking about not just the delivery of news but the way news stories are constructed, and that is refreshing. It’s ironic — and somewhat fitting — that it comes from a man like Huh, who has been regularly scoffed at for his theories about journalism.