Fighting Fake News With New Age [News Media]

davidsdurions

Bring out yer dead! All your fake news are belong to us! Trinity said, "It's the question that drives us." "What question?" "Where can I get some unbiased and factually accurate news reporting?"

Well, we've got plenty of choices out there for news media and we're all pretty familiar with their weaknesses. Today, Wikipedia maestro Jimmy Wales announced a "fix the news" plan of a crowd-funded website running news stories by journalists and volunteers.

I think it's a fine endeavor and I hope any success is something that other media outlets take heed of and hopefully change course themselves.

In this thread, I'd like to see a discussion about not only this particular revelation, but hopefully some discussion about why our news media has come upon a trust issue with the masses and is Mr. Wales' plan sustainable? It's not meant to be a news aggregating thread so don't just dump articles in here. Give me some substance!

ObiFett

Having Wikitribune not rely on ads is a huge step towards having a legit news source. Allowing advertisers to be a thing during the news was one of the major contributing factors towards it pushing agendas by focusing on saying what people want to hear.

Fencingsax

ObiFett wrote: »

Having Wikitribune not rely on ads is a huge step towards having a legit news source. Allowing advertisers to be a thing during the news was one of the major contributing factors towards it pushing agendas by focusing on saying what people want to hear.

News has been funded by advertisers (except for state run news, like PBS and BBC etc) for about as long as someone wanted to make money off the news.

davidsdurions

Yeah, their suggested payments are $10/$40/$120/"You Decide"(because of course they'll take whatever anyone is willing to give), I'm curious what news is worth to people.

ObiFett

Fencingsax wrote: »

ObiFett wrote: »

Having Wikitribune not rely on ads is a huge step towards having a legit news source. Allowing advertisers to be a thing during the news was one of the major contributing factors towards it pushing agendas by focusing on saying what people want to hear.

News has been funded by advertisers (except for state run news, like PBS and BBC etc) for about as long as someone wanted to make money off the news.

Its been more than 10 years since I took a Poli Sci class, but I thought I remembered learning that news in the US (during a specific time slot) used to be subsidized by the government in some way and when that was taken away it slowly starting shifting from reporting facts to reporting what would get the most viewers and increase ad revenue.

Astaereth

Obviously Wales believes he can use the trust people have in Wikipedia to build trust in the news, but I wonder if things won't go the other way--conservatives downgrading Wikipedia as having liberal facts. Wiki may be too important a resource to jeopardize in this fashion.

Meanwhile I feel like this venture has things backwards. Wales is taking professional journalists and crowdsourcing fact-checking--ie, empowering the comments section to change the news. Imagine a Wiki-style edit war over what really happened with Hillary's emails or whether Trump just lied about such and such.

Seems like you want the opposite--crowd sourced news articles that get professionally fact checked and polished as they cross an upvote threshhold. The only way to fix news is to replace the establishment media with citizen journalists who are held accountable. IMO, anyway.

Fencingsax

ObiFett wrote: »

Fencingsax wrote: »

ObiFett wrote: »

Having Wikitribune not rely on ads is a huge step towards having a legit news source. Allowing advertisers to be a thing during the news was one of the major contributing factors towards it pushing agendas by focusing on saying what people want to hear.

News has been funded by advertisers (except for state run news, like PBS and BBC etc) for about as long as someone wanted to make money off the news.

Its been more than 10 years since I took a Poli Sci class, but I thought I remembered learning that news in the US (during a specific time slot) used to be subsidized by the government in some way and when that was taken away it slowly starting shifting from reporting facts to reporting what would get the most viewers and increase ad revenue.

Newspapers started the Spanish American war. Yellow Journalism was a thing.

Quid

Astaereth wrote: »

Obviously Wales believes he can use the trust people have in Wikipedia to build trust in the news, but I wonder if things won't go the other way--conservatives downgrading Wikipedia as having liberal facts. Wiki may be too important a resource to jeopardize in this fashion.

Meanwhile I feel like this venture has things backwards. Wales is taking professional journalists and crowdsourcing fact-checking--ie, empowering the comments section to change the news. Imagine a Wiki-style edit war over what really happened with Hillary's emails or whether Trump just lied about such and such.

Seems like you want the opposite--crowd sourced news articles that get professionally fact checked and polished as they cross an upvote threshhold. The only way to fix news is to replace the establishment media with citizen journalists who are held accountable. IMO, anyway.

Wikipedia is already treated like this. Pull something up and it's "Whatever anyone can write what they want on there." Pull up the sources for an article and they're dismissed.

I imagine this will remain largely unsuccessful at changing minds until minimum standards to not present falsehoods are required of any self described "news" sources.

Edit: Hell, I have several colleagues, always of a similar political slant, that refuse to accept dictionary definitions if they don't match up with their personal opinion.

davidsdurions

Quid wrote: »

Astaereth wrote: »

Obviously Wales believes he can use the trust people have in Wikipedia to build trust in the news, but I wonder if things won't go the other way--conservatives downgrading Wikipedia as having liberal facts. Wiki may be too important a resource to jeopardize in this fashion.

Meanwhile I feel like this venture has things backwards. Wales is taking professional journalists and crowdsourcing fact-checking--ie, empowering the comments section to change the news. Imagine a Wiki-style edit war over what really happened with Hillary's emails or whether Trump just lied about such and such.

Seems like you want the opposite--crowd sourced news articles that get professionally fact checked and polished as they cross an upvote threshhold. The only way to fix news is to replace the establishment media with citizen journalists who are held accountable. IMO, anyway.

Wikipedia is already treated like this. Pull something up and it's "Whatever anyone can write what they want on there." Pull up the sources for an article and they're dismissed.

I imagine this will remain largely unsuccessful at changing minds until minimum standards to not present falsehoods are required of any self described "news" sources.

"Your sources are fake, mine are real, end of story"

BSoB

I don't think a Wikipedia model can be fast enough for News.

I think with enough work and enough good faith participants, they could get to a decent article about an event ~6 months after it happened.

Mc zany

I think the problem with this is that most people will be biased. Just look at the comments section of any historical article.

Giggles_Funsworth

I'm not saying this is a bad idea but it seems like it's already been done.

Jebus314

At it's core I think it's just following the path of most other forms of media from ad based to subscription based. The addition of wiki style editing is ok, but I'm guessing it will be heavily moderated to the point that you're basically just using a handful of volunteers as additional staff.

Elki

We're not doing a news media thread.