11 ms·

As somebody who ran a (now defunct) journalism startup and is still heavily involved in crowd-sourced muck-raking: I think this is exactly the wrong approach to

by Mizza 9y ago

As somebody who ran a (now defunct) journalism startup and is still heavily involved in crowd-sourced muck-raking: I think this is exactly the wrong approach to massively collaborative journalism. The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is investigation. Even before the digital age, "news" was a way to sell paper with a mark-up. Now it's a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. The fact that the fourth estate emerged was just a lucky byproduct of the "news" industry, even though it is the foundation of the modern respect for the role that journalism plays in society. When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is _process_, not product. Even though it has been tried unsuccessfully or semi-successfully many times (ex, old school WikiLeaks, OpenWatch, WikiNews, MuckRock), I still think that this is absolutely the problem that should be focused on. The product of this investigation shouldn't be an article with mass market appeal, but really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields. I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed and used, the keys are: transparency, data science, and communications process. Various initiatives have been successfully cobbled together using Google Docs, Facebook and Slack, but these are usually projects with finite scope and a handful of participants. Nothing has ever come close to the kind of impact and reach that Wikipedia has had. I currently run the service https://pubmail.io https://pubmail.io as a tool for investigators and reporters to be more transparent in their email correspondence. Additional tools I'd like to see are tools for aggregating, combining and slicing relevant datasets for interesting patterns, and a central hub for mission-driven investigative collaboration. This is what my startup made, but it turns out that this is not a very capital-friendly or profit-friendly idea, so I think it would require a patron like Jimbo to really make this happen in a scalable, impactful way. Still, I wsh this endeavor all the best of luck and hope that it pushes the needle in the right direction.

snowwrestler 9y ago
> really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields Decision makers of any import have no shortage of high quality information. The availability of information is not a significant limiting factor on good decisions by powerful people. For example: Trump has the greatest information resources in the known world at his command yet he makes shitty decisions basically nonstop. A shortage of information is not the social problem of today. The big social problem today is the selection of information. That has more to do with tribal trust and culture than the information itself. For all the shortcomings of Wikipedia (and there are many), it is a source of information that is widely trusted and used across tribal boundaries. A "news" organization that achieves the same thing would be good. There are plenty of people and orgs doing great investigations. The problems are getting them eyeballs, and getting past the trust barrier. Who knows if Wikitribune will do it.
- walterstucco 9y ago
  I think the point is that the quality should be at the level of informations decision makers have access to I am too a decision make Smaller scale Same need of quality information
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  >The big social problem today is the selection of information. So, really high quality information for decision makers in relevant fields? To some extent, the OP surely meant getting professionals access to proper data, but what I would call "general population" news should still be of high quality and integrity. And we the people are decision makers, through public opinion and through formal voting. So having journalists dig into issues and present facts substantiated through research and proof is critical. I think you and OP agree more than you disagree.
  - Mizza 9y ago
    Yes, I think I just phrased that a bit poorly. "People who need to make decisions" perhaps, rather than "decision makers", which is a loaded terms. Most specifically: people who are consuming "news" information because it is relevant to their lives, not because it is just part of their continuous feed of info-tainment.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    A lot of people think that global warming is not caused by human activity. That's not because it is hard to get accurate information about global warming. In fact, it's incredibly easy--it's never been easier!--to learn all you want about global warming, basically for free.[1] So why doesn't everybody do that? Some people just don't have time, but for a lot of people, they actively reject accurate, useful information that is available to them, for free. Why? That's an important question. We're not lacking in investigations of global warming. We're lacking in trust in those investigations. Shoveling more information at those people is not going to solve the problem. The messenger matters! It matters more than the message, for a lot of people; it seems like a growing number of people. So, that's why a new messenger might be good, even if they're not funding substantial new investigations. [1] For no marginal cost beyond what it costs to access the Internet in general.
grandalf 9y ago
This is a very insightful comment. I think one relevant factor is the demand for factual information vs entertainment content. I struggle with what the appropriate mindset should be for someone undertaking journalism. Is a pre-existing belief in the legitimacy of various institutions/governments helpful or harmful to the process? Is respect/deference to officials, wealthy people, celebrities, etc., helpful or harmful? Because there is so much demand for entertainment (of which partisan reporting is one form) I am really not sure how much actual demand there is for truthful, in-depth coverage. The choice of what to cover entails a view foisted upon readers that some things are more worthy of our attention than others. So how can a journalism organization be upfront about the inevitable gaps in coverage so that readers will know to ask for coverage and know that the org is aware of the topic but lacks resources to cover it. For instance, a story about the issues going on in Syria and no story about decaying highway infrastructure might entail the belief that one is important and the other is not important. So I think the ideal news organization would locate every story on some sort of content map that defined exactly where it fit into the organization's broader mission. A story about Syria might be filed under "America's foreign engagements" and a story about decaying highways could be filed under "Tracking America's infrastructure quality and infrastructure projects". Personally I would love to see lots of coverage of infrastructure, as it is one of the few ways we can hold local, state and national governments accountable for one of their most important responsibilities. But the idea of a front page that reflects (only) everything that is important that day is where (I think) the biases start to creep in. Anyway, sorry about the digression, just wanted to express my appreciation for the parent comment.
- JFFalcon 9y ago
  > A story about Syria might be filed under "America's foreign engagements" and a story about decaying highways could be filed under "Tracking America's infrastructure quality and infrastructure projects". I'd like to point out that this is meant to be a global news source so the fact that America is involved would hardly be the most significant aspect of a story about Syria.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    Hah, those were simply examples about American news because America has some of the lowest quality journalism in the world.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> The thing we need more of is investigation. [...] really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields. I tend to agree. One thing I'd like to see is more of a focus on trends not events.
e40 9y ago
Agreed. We need more organizations like PBS' Frontline.
- Mizza 9y ago
  It's funny you should mention that - the startup that I mentioned was part of the first class of an accelerator run by a PBS Frontline producer-turned-venture-capitalist. Lots of good advice on journalism and product development process, not so good advice on managing and growing capital-friendly businesses. PBS has the advantage of government backing, massive public good will, and a gargantuan fund raising arm. Still, a very interesting overlap.
  - tomcam 9y ago
    The "government backing" portion is why PBS should not exist. They have the biggest conflict of interest in the world, because they are backed by a highly corrupt 3 trillion Dollar organization
austenallred 9y ago
I also ran a now-semi-defunct crowdsource journalism startup (Grasswire). What Wales will find (and I’ve talked with him about this) is that unlike Wikipedia the news world isn’t suffering for lack of content. Specifically, every single thing you could find on the WikiTribune page you could find in another place, probably written just as well, and still available for free. WikiTribune needs to develop an edge. “We’re accurate” isn’t an edge, because most people consider news accurate and authoritative. “We’re fair” doesn’t matter, because the people that think news is inherently biased have a (probably biased) news source that they consider unbiased. They don’t appear to be taking a “We’re focused on only important stuff” or any of the other ways they could differentiate. The power of crowdsourcing can/should be to produce types of news that for-profit news doesn’t do as well. Deep, investigative stuff that’s hard and expensive to do if you’re paying people for it. But that’s hard, and not many people click on it. Once you’ve done all that hard work, someone at NBC will take your research and write an article about it, tapping their enormous audience, and link back to you as a source (hey thanks!) Most people will never click. There’s very little incentive to perform the type of journalism that’s actually needed, and even if you create it you don’t necessarily benefit from it.
- danso 9y ago
  > WikiTribune needs to develop an edge. “We’re accurate” isn’t an edge This. I subscribe to the New York Times. Not because I believe they cover everything the best (I go to sports blogs and r/cfb for college football), and not even because they cover the things I'm very interested in pretty well. I subscribe, because on an average day, what they've chosen to cover and to cover well, generally appeals to me. This includes all the many, many things I am not aware of or give a high priority to on an average day, until I see it on the front page of the NYT. This isn't at all an argument that the NYT is better than every other outlet there. First of all, there are places that beat out the NYT on some days -- and conversely, days when the NYT has done something abysmal. But the cost of finding that optimal outlet (an argument for why personal optimization in this area has highly diminishing returns could be its own topic) -- which would be in addition to the cost of time that I spend consuming news and commentary -- isn't worth if relative to the NYT's success rate. Note I'm never restricted to the NYT on any day, of course. I'm arguing for why I'm fine with having the habitual inclination (and the recurring credit card payment) to make the NYT my primary choice on an average day.
dmix 9y ago
Do you have any examples of a public thread on Pubmail? You should link to a 'demo' thread from the homepage. Maybe an example interview or discourse with a politician. This would be the best way to sell the idea.
- Mizza 9y ago
  Unfortunately the site got wiped out a few years ago so the best stuff is gone, but I've recently got it back on line in a more resilient, spam-resistant fashion. There is a page of "Featured" exchanges, some of which include: Fresenius Kabi confirming they are still acquiring a company even after its founder and board chair were arrested on a narcotics trafficking RICO: https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/OF49EC78E8.C30281B7-ON862581C6.0043086E-862581C6.0047F23D/re-fw-wg-status-of-freseniusakorn-acquisition https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/OF49EC78E8.C30281B7-ON862... AmerisourceBergen confirming they paid out sales commissions based on the sale of opioid drugs, and changing that policy after the 60 minutes exposé: https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171105013005.29768.F72DAC6C278DC5BD/fw-confirmation-of-policy-adjustment-for-sales-co https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171105013005.29768.F72D... Some of the stuff is more trivial but needs to be done for completeness sake, like the WashPo denying payoff rumours: https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171111020538.56788.2671E2B8D04B3F3A/fw-response-to-internet-rumours-of-payoffs https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171111020538.56788.2671... Some of the stories are in silence - Cardinal Health and McKesson simply don't respond to any inquiries at all. When it comes to investigative work, I think that the "story" is often in the aggregate rather than any one specific detail.
alfla 9y ago
We have a website in Norway that does fact checking of news and statements made by politicians etc in the media: https://www.faktisk.no/om-oss/ https://www.faktisk.no/om-oss/ (only in Norwegian) I feel that they have a really meaningful and important role in the political debate today. See also: https://www.poynter.org/channels/fact-checking https://www.poynter.org/channels/fact-checking
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  We have Politifact in USA that serves similar purpose: http://www.politifact.com/ http://www.politifact.com/ It has come under its own criticisms, but the effort and philosophy is pretty laudable.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Fake news. That's the big problem: it's that easy to delegitimize something in the eyes of enough people that a competing narrative, regardless of its factual value, can be put in competition with it. One approach I'd like to see for this is the use of ethereum-style smart contracts to validate documents (and that it should be as obvious and reliable as a creative commons icon) and collections of source material and the semantic graph that connects them to be public, so that it's much harder for people to dismiss it by attacking the summary node that merely describes the relationship between them (the 'news story'). Textual narratives are stories about relationships and chronologies, but stories can be invalidated by attacking the teller. What we need are public shareable metadata and a protocol for linking disparate pieces of metadata together.
    - goialoq 9y ago
      How is ethereum relevant here? All that's needed is a hyperlink and a hash code for each claim/source mentioned in an article.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Regular people don't understand hash codes, a popular cryptocurrency (which Ethereum might be in future istm) would serve that purpose without people needing to be nerds to recognize it. People don't want to spend time knowing how all that shit works, the same way they just want to be able to recognize authentic cash notes in a physical wallet without having to know anything about specie currency or financial economics.
jonnycomputer 9y ago
Yes, and yes (and yes). We have news-worthy stories just sitting there waiting to be discovered, because discovery is much harder, more expensive, and more risky than copying news stories or press-releases. In fact, lately I've found the notion of "slow news" appealing: i.e. weekly (or even monthly) presentations of important news stories, increasing the SNR and total depth of the news I'm consuming.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
What about a platform that incentivizes investigations, and publishers pay for it?
- tomcam 9y ago
  You have just described traditional publishing.
  - misterbowfinger 9y ago
    I thought journalists can only do investigations for the publisher that they work for?
brudgers 9y ago
I remember the early days of Wikipedia. I remember thinking "this is crap" and I don't think I was mistaken at the time. The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that there was never a period where it seemed "good but". It went from a few years of being crap to evoking wow very quickly. It went from a sustained period of less useful than Britannica to more useful in the blink of an eye. Wikipedia went to wow because people (and machines) produced deep content. This suggests that deep reporting can be crowd sourced...I mean what but journalism is the Wikipedia article on the Trump presidency? The reporting just doesn't play out across static content on multiple sites. Consider the 2014 Romanian Presidential Election. [1] It might be considered authoritative reporting. The long process and continuous refinement of that reporting is hard to distinguish from investigative journalism in any way other than it not being in pursuit of a headline [2]. WikiTribune has the possibility of delivering news without mass market appeal precisely because Wikipedia more or less does it already. To the degree that the distinction between encyclopedias and newspapers come down to printing technology and the historical business models associated with those differences then the Wikipedia business model for journalism may be viable. [1]: I picked it arbitrarily, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_presidential_election,_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_presidential_election... [2]: And cynically being published despite the lack of titillation worthy of a headline.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Great points. I'm glad to see this WikiTribune and will try to support it, but it's producing more leaves when what we actually need is an easy way to navigate the branches. Ialready have access to a variety of news sources and though I like the collaborative approach on display here what's really missing are better semantic tools for parsing existing news. Increasingly, I feel the web annotations standard might point a way forward because it offers people a way to share information about content that's not under control of the publisher. Of course, this will generate a flood of low-quality garbage of the sort found on conspiracy sites, but it also allows for the creation of federated graphs that point back to primary sources, and my bet is that structural integrity will eventually count for more than startle value.
sparkzilla 9y ago
The thing news startups need more of is neither news nor investigation, but distribution. Too many news organisations think that quality content is the driver of news, when the challenge is to get distribution, and then you can make news of whatever quality you like. By focusing on "quality content" WikiTribune falls into the same trap. https://newslines.org/blog/wikitribune-will-sink/ https://newslines.org/blog/wikitribune-will-sink/
smsm42 9y ago
> The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is investigation. Hear, hear! I open the project and first two articles I read are about what Trump tweeted and how everybody is reacting. I can find that kind of stuff in literally every other news site. What I'd like to see is something deeper, more researched, more illuminating, something that makes me understand the world better, think about things I've never thought before, expose facts and connections I've not seen before. If it will be yet another log of what Trump tweeted and how everybody else reacted, I already have more than enough of those, not worth the effort for me to read another one and for the team to spend time to write another one.

by Mizza 9y ago

snowwrestler 9y ago

> really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields Decision makers of any import have no shortage of high quality information. The availability of information is not a significant limiting factor on good decisions by powerful people. For example: Trump has the greatest information resources in the known world at his command yet he makes shitty decisions basically nonstop. A shortage of information is not the social problem of today. The big social problem today is the selection of information. That has more to do with tribal trust and culture than the information itself. For all the shortcomings of Wikipedia (and there are many), it is a source of information that is widely trusted and used across tribal boundaries. A "news" organization that achieves the same thing would be good. There are plenty of people and orgs doing great investigations. The problems are getting them eyeballs, and getting past the trust barrier. Who knows if Wikitribune will do it.

walterstucco 9y ago
I think the point is that the quality should be at the level of informations decision makers have access to I am too a decision make Smaller scale Same need of quality information
unethical_ban 9y ago
>The big social problem today is the selection of information. So, really high quality information for decision makers in relevant fields? To some extent, the OP surely meant getting professionals access to proper data, but what I would call "general population" news should still be of high quality and integrity. And we the people are decision makers, through public opinion and through formal voting. So having journalists dig into issues and present facts substantiated through research and proof is critical. I think you and OP agree more than you disagree.
- Mizza 9y ago
  Yes, I think I just phrased that a bit poorly. "People who need to make decisions" perhaps, rather than "decision makers", which is a loaded terms. Most specifically: people who are consuming "news" information because it is relevant to their lives, not because it is just part of their continuous feed of info-tainment.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  A lot of people think that global warming is not caused by human activity. That's not because it is hard to get accurate information about global warming. In fact, it's incredibly easy--it's never been easier!--to learn all you want about global warming, basically for free.[1] So why doesn't everybody do that? Some people just don't have time, but for a lot of people, they actively reject accurate, useful information that is available to them, for free. Why? That's an important question. We're not lacking in investigations of global warming. We're lacking in trust in those investigations. Shoveling more information at those people is not going to solve the problem. The messenger matters! It matters more than the message, for a lot of people; it seems like a growing number of people. So, that's why a new messenger might be good, even if they're not funding substantial new investigations. [1] For no marginal cost beyond what it costs to access the Internet in general.

grandalf 9y ago

This is a very insightful comment. I think one relevant factor is the demand for factual information vs entertainment content. I struggle with what the appropriate mindset should be for someone undertaking journalism. Is a pre-existing belief in the legitimacy of various institutions/governments helpful or harmful to the process? Is respect/deference to officials, wealthy people, celebrities, etc., helpful or harmful? Because there is so much demand for entertainment (of which partisan reporting is one form) I am really not sure how much actual demand there is for truthful, in-depth coverage. The choice of what to cover entails a view foisted upon readers that some things are more worthy of our attention than others. So how can a journalism organization be upfront about the inevitable gaps in coverage so that readers will know to ask for coverage and know that the org is aware of the topic but lacks resources to cover it. For instance, a story about the issues going on in Syria and no story about decaying highway infrastructure might entail the belief that one is important and the other is not important. So I think the ideal news organization would locate every story on some sort of content map that defined exactly where it fit into the organization's broader mission. A story about Syria might be filed under "America's foreign engagements" and a story about decaying highways could be filed under "Tracking America's infrastructure quality and infrastructure projects". Personally I would love to see lots of coverage of infrastructure, as it is one of the few ways we can hold local, state and national governments accountable for one of their most important responsibilities. But the idea of a front page that reflects (only) everything that is important that day is where (I think) the biases start to creep in. Anyway, sorry about the digression, just wanted to express my appreciation for the parent comment.

JFFalcon 9y ago
> A story about Syria might be filed under "America's foreign engagements" and a story about decaying highways could be filed under "Tracking America's infrastructure quality and infrastructure projects". I'd like to point out that this is meant to be a global news source so the fact that America is involved would hardly be the most significant aspect of a story about Syria.
- grandalf 9y ago
  Hah, those were simply examples about American news because America has some of the lowest quality journalism in the world.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> The thing we need more of is investigation. [...] really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields. I tend to agree. One thing I'd like to see is more of a focus on trends not events.

e40 9y ago

Agreed. We need more organizations like PBS' Frontline.

Mizza 9y ago
It's funny you should mention that - the startup that I mentioned was part of the first class of an accelerator run by a PBS Frontline producer-turned-venture-capitalist. Lots of good advice on journalism and product development process, not so good advice on managing and growing capital-friendly businesses. PBS has the advantage of government backing, massive public good will, and a gargantuan fund raising arm. Still, a very interesting overlap.
- tomcam 9y ago
  The "government backing" portion is why PBS should not exist. They have the biggest conflict of interest in the world, because they are backed by a highly corrupt 3 trillion Dollar organization

austenallred 9y ago

I also ran a now-semi-defunct crowdsource journalism startup (Grasswire). What Wales will find (and I’ve talked with him about this) is that unlike Wikipedia the news world isn’t suffering for lack of content. Specifically, every single thing you could find on the WikiTribune page you could find in another place, probably written just as well, and still available for free. WikiTribune needs to develop an edge. “We’re accurate” isn’t an edge, because most people consider news accurate and authoritative. “We’re fair” doesn’t matter, because the people that think news is inherently biased have a (probably biased) news source that they consider unbiased. They don’t appear to be taking a “We’re focused on only important stuff” or any of the other ways they could differentiate. The power of crowdsourcing can/should be to produce types of news that for-profit news doesn’t do as well. Deep, investigative stuff that’s hard and expensive to do if you’re paying people for it. But that’s hard, and not many people click on it. Once you’ve done all that hard work, someone at NBC will take your research and write an article about it, tapping their enormous audience, and link back to you as a source (hey thanks!) Most people will never click. There’s very little incentive to perform the type of journalism that’s actually needed, and even if you create it you don’t necessarily benefit from it.

danso 9y ago
> WikiTribune needs to develop an edge. “We’re accurate” isn’t an edge This. I subscribe to the New York Times. Not because I believe they cover everything the best (I go to sports blogs and r/cfb for college football), and not even because they cover the things I'm very interested in pretty well. I subscribe, because on an average day, what they've chosen to cover and to cover well, generally appeals to me. This includes all the many, many things I am not aware of or give a high priority to on an average day, until I see it on the front page of the NYT. This isn't at all an argument that the NYT is better than every other outlet there. First of all, there are places that beat out the NYT on some days -- and conversely, days when the NYT has done something abysmal. But the cost of finding that optimal outlet (an argument for why personal optimization in this area has highly diminishing returns could be its own topic) -- which would be in addition to the cost of time that I spend consuming news and commentary -- isn't worth if relative to the NYT's success rate. Note I'm never restricted to the NYT on any day, of course. I'm arguing for why I'm fine with having the habitual inclination (and the recurring credit card payment) to make the NYT my primary choice on an average day.

dmix 9y ago

Do you have any examples of a public thread on Pubmail? You should link to a 'demo' thread from the homepage. Maybe an example interview or discourse with a politician. This would be the best way to sell the idea.

Mizza 9y ago
Unfortunately the site got wiped out a few years ago so the best stuff is gone, but I've recently got it back on line in a more resilient, spam-resistant fashion. There is a page of "Featured" exchanges, some of which include: Fresenius Kabi confirming they are still acquiring a company even after its founder and board chair were arrested on a narcotics trafficking RICO: https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/OF49EC78E8.C30281B7-ON862581C6.0043086E-862581C6.0047F23D/re-fw-wg-status-of-freseniusakorn-acquisition https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/OF49EC78E8.C30281B7-ON862... AmerisourceBergen confirming they paid out sales commissions based on the sale of opioid drugs, and changing that policy after the 60 minutes exposé: https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171105013005.29768.F72DAC6C278DC5BD/fw-confirmation-of-policy-adjustment-for-sales-co https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171105013005.29768.F72D... Some of the stuff is more trivial but needs to be done for completeness sake, like the WashPo denying payoff rumours: https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171111020538.56788.2671E2B8D04B3F3A/fw-response-to-internet-rumours-of-payoffs https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171111020538.56788.2671... Some of the stories are in silence - Cardinal Health and McKesson simply don't respond to any inquiries at all. When it comes to investigative work, I think that the "story" is often in the aggregate rather than any one specific detail.

alfla 9y ago

We have a website in Norway that does fact checking of news and statements made by politicians etc in the media: https://www.faktisk.no/om-oss/ https://www.faktisk.no/om-oss/ (only in Norwegian) I feel that they have a really meaningful and important role in the political debate today. See also: https://www.poynter.org/channels/fact-checking https://www.poynter.org/channels/fact-checking

SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
We have Politifact in USA that serves similar purpose: http://www.politifact.com/ http://www.politifact.com/ It has come under its own criticisms, but the effort and philosophy is pretty laudable.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Fake news. That's the big problem: it's that easy to delegitimize something in the eyes of enough people that a competing narrative, regardless of its factual value, can be put in competition with it. One approach I'd like to see for this is the use of ethereum-style smart contracts to validate documents (and that it should be as obvious and reliable as a creative commons icon) and collections of source material and the semantic graph that connects them to be public, so that it's much harder for people to dismiss it by attacking the summary node that merely describes the relationship between them (the 'news story'). Textual narratives are stories about relationships and chronologies, but stories can be invalidated by attacking the teller. What we need are public shareable metadata and a protocol for linking disparate pieces of metadata together.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    How is ethereum relevant here? All that's needed is a hyperlink and a hash code for each claim/source mentioned in an article.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Regular people don't understand hash codes, a popular cryptocurrency (which Ethereum might be in future istm) would serve that purpose without people needing to be nerds to recognize it. People don't want to spend time knowing how all that shit works, the same way they just want to be able to recognize authentic cash notes in a physical wallet without having to know anything about specie currency or financial economics.

jonnycomputer 9y ago

Yes, and yes (and yes). We have news-worthy stories just sitting there waiting to be discovered, because discovery is much harder, more expensive, and more risky than copying news stories or press-releases. In fact, lately I've found the notion of "slow news" appealing: i.e. weekly (or even monthly) presentations of important news stories, increasing the SNR and total depth of the news I'm consuming.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

What about a platform that incentivizes investigations, and publishers pay for it?

tomcam 9y ago
You have just described traditional publishing.
- misterbowfinger 9y ago
  I thought journalists can only do investigations for the publisher that they work for?

brudgers 9y ago

I remember the early days of Wikipedia. I remember thinking "this is crap" and I don't think I was mistaken at the time. The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that there was never a period where it seemed "good but". It went from a few years of being crap to evoking wow very quickly. It went from a sustained period of less useful than Britannica to more useful in the blink of an eye. Wikipedia went to wow because people (and machines) produced deep content. This suggests that deep reporting can be crowd sourced...I mean what but journalism is the Wikipedia article on the Trump presidency? The reporting just doesn't play out across static content on multiple sites. Consider the 2014 Romanian Presidential Election. [1] It might be considered authoritative reporting. The long process and continuous refinement of that reporting is hard to distinguish from investigative journalism in any way other than it not being in pursuit of a headline [2]. WikiTribune has the possibility of delivering news without mass market appeal precisely because Wikipedia more or less does it already. To the degree that the distinction between encyclopedias and newspapers come down to printing technology and the historical business models associated with those differences then the Wikipedia business model for journalism may be viable. [1]: I picked it arbitrarily, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_presidential_election,_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_presidential_election... [2]: And cynically being published despite the lack of titillation worthy of a headline.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Great points. I'm glad to see this WikiTribune and will try to support it, but it's producing more leaves when what we actually need is an easy way to navigate the branches. Ialready have access to a variety of news sources and though I like the collaborative approach on display here what's really missing are better semantic tools for parsing existing news. Increasingly, I feel the web annotations standard might point a way forward because it offers people a way to share information about content that's not under control of the publisher. Of course, this will generate a flood of low-quality garbage of the sort found on conspiracy sites, but it also allows for the creation of federated graphs that point back to primary sources, and my bet is that structural integrity will eventually count for more than startle value.

sparkzilla 9y ago

The thing news startups need more of is neither news nor investigation, but distribution. Too many news organisations think that quality content is the driver of news, when the challenge is to get distribution, and then you can make news of whatever quality you like. By focusing on "quality content" WikiTribune falls into the same trap. https://newslines.org/blog/wikitribune-will-sink/ https://newslines.org/blog/wikitribune-will-sink/

smsm42 9y ago

> The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is investigation. Hear, hear! I open the project and first two articles I read are about what Trump tweeted and how everybody is reacting. I can find that kind of stuff in literally every other news site. What I'd like to see is something deeper, more researched, more illuminating, something that makes me understand the world better, think about things I've never thought before, expose facts and connections I've not seen before. If it will be yet another log of what Trump tweeted and how everybody else reacted, I already have more than enough of those, not worth the effort for me to read another one and for the team to spend time to write another one.