Slashdot Mirror
Future of Internet News?
Matthew asks: "Now that the Internet has become an integral part of many people's lives, it has also become the place where many of us get our daily news reports (think Slashdot, New York Times, etc). The decentralization of the Internet offers many advantages over traditional media such as newspapers and television, as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. But how does the future of this utopia look? With the uprise of ad blockers, are we going to be able to get our news for free? Will the Internet become a place for the "selected few" with money to spend? How do DRM and Trusted Computing play into the role? What does Darwin say will happen to newspapers, radio, television?"
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Well, I have made the transition to obtaining almost all of my news via the Internet. It started back with the first news item I saw first on the Internet, the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing and has accelerated ever since. Certainly the future of news gathering will be via dissemination on the Internet whether that news is contained in Internet feeds of video from traditional news sources like CNN, CBS, ABC, etc.... but the growing numbers of blog reporting sites will become an even greater force in refining information delivered via traditional outlets and through the creation and reporting of novel news items. Of course 99% of bloggers do not have the resources individually that major news organizations have, but this is changing with group blogs and communities of bloggers.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
As long as people use IE and browsers that don't natively support ad-blocking (or pop-up blocking, as is the case up to SP2), ads will still be the driving force behind Internet mainstream news. Once ad-blockers really catch on, registration will be required more for spam purposes, then after that, it'll require real registration and payment.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Who said it was a utopia? Most people getting their news from major news sites that are offshoots of the same media companies that run TV. The other news is made up of what people actively seek to find out about. So that means people going out and finding the stories that reinforce their existing opinions, further fragmenting society.
Utopia? Not as such.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I can't remember the last time I picked up a hardcopy of a newspaper... or just about any other publication, aside from a paerback novel.
Why read day-old news when you can get up to the minute headlines via http and RSS? If I am not at a PC, I can read them with my blackberry or my cell phone. I even saw a laundrymat with a news ticker in the windows the other day...
The future of Internet News
When I read news, I want 3 page articles about it. Most of these stories you read online or in a paper could be put into one sentence and it would have the same value.
The content control becomes oligarchical. At least, that's where it leads.
It happened 122 years ago. News at 11.
ergo, Darwin has nothing to say about this.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Well, you know in cyberpunk movies how the technology always seems old and cobbled-together? Well, thats what people will start doing when things are commodotized enough and when they lose all the freedom they used to have with the old stuff. The "new shiny internet" (tm) will be a DRM laden piece of crap, and anybody who is interested will just hop on a darknet.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I think Newsmap, a quasi-graphical google-news site, will be a model for how news is "viewed" in the future. check it out here. It's quite easy to use.
BLOOD & THUNDER SLASHDOTTER: ...And the bezan shall be huge and black, and the eyes thereof red with the blood of living creatures, and the whore of Babylon shall ride forth on a three-headed serpent, and throughout the lands, there'll be a great rubbing of parts. Yeeah...
...For the demon shall bear a nine-bladed sword. Nine-bladed! Not two or five or seven, but nine, which he will wield on all wretched sinners, sinners just like you, sir, there, and the horns shall be on the head, with which he will...
...Obadiah, his servants. There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi-- with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one...
FALSE SLASHDOTTER:
BORING SLASHDOTTER:
COMMANDER TACO: Don't you, eh, moderate other people, or you might get moderated yourself.
MODERATOR: What?
COMMANDER TACO: I said, 'Don't pass judgment on other people, or else you might get judged, too.'
SLASHDOTTER: Who, me?
COMMANDER TACO: Yes.
MODERATOR: Oh. Ooh. Thank you very much.
COMMANDER TACO: Well, not just you. All of you.
Personally I think blocking popups and ads is the same for news as music piracy is for music industry. I use Adblock when I browse and began by blocking slashdot ads. Then I realised that it was worth encouraging, so I subscribed. I believe that people won't let the occasion to encourage a site if they believe it's worth it. But in a majority of cases, there are a LOT of annoying ads and I think it's normal to want to avoid them, especially if the site's content isn't worth it.
Hmm, I personally get the majority of my news from the 'net - the New York Times is simply prohibitively expensive in real life up here in Canada, and Google News and CNET provide some info that I wouldn't otherwise find in the local papers - which are quite good.
That being said, I do read a real paper every morning with breakfast, and I don't see the current model of dual-distribution fading (that of the print edition + the internet edition. Some choice quotes from the post are simply not going to hold up:
With the uprise of ad blockers, are we going to be able to get our news for free?
I'd like to see some statistics, but I don't think that this is a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, I know a lot of tech savvy people and some don't use ad-blocker for philosophical reasons, and some are just too lazy (some do use it, and I think it's great). And the majority of people continue to use IE, and even smirk at the notion of switching browsers!
The decentralization of the Internet offers many advantages over traditional media such as newspapers and television, as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. But how does the future of this utopia look?
Come now.. Utopia? Seems a little perjorative. Yes, there are advantages - but the good, fact-referenced (well, hopefully) stories are only there because of the ads and the print editions! The internet is in most cases a mere adjunct of the print edition. It does offer advantages.. but some disadvantages too. I love my computer, and I still prefer reading a print edition . . . can't even put a rational reason down. I spend most of my day looking at computers anyways.
Will the Internet become a place for the "selected few" with money to spend?
No. I don't think so. The current distrbution model is working just fine. Ad-revenues are good, and there are simply so many online sources of news (NYT, CBC, BBC, Washington Post, etc. etc.) that if one paper goes to a pay model, then boom - they just loose their market share. They could all get together, but that would be monopoly and illegal.
So, for those reasons, I feel the future of internet news is bright and doesn't hold any of the radical changes forseen by 'Matthew'.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
All you need is Drudge...
Pop-ups are quickly fading, replaced by ads that try to catch our attention. As I type this, I see strange happy faces and rays eminating from a person on the phone at the top of Slashdot.
Soon you'll see product placement in the articles themselves. I saw I, Robot over the weekend and was disgusted by the blatant product placement and direct references by the actors.
Pretty soon Slashdot might start talking about Linux in their news items or something.
"Two American students were arrested today for running the website newstor.com. newstor.com catered to distributing copyrighted news material that are normally available to subscribers only. The website retrieved the subscription-only webpages using usernames and passwords donated by regular visitors, and redistribtued these to all visitors using BitTorrent and P2P technologies.
"The New York Times editor-in-chief estimates that newstor.com has been responsible for loss of $43 million dollars per annum to their revenue, based on the standard subscription rate of $14.95 per month.
"Soon after the arrests, two new websites have been created that do exactly the same thing as newstor.com."
Yes, what would Darwin say about television, radio and newspapers? Let's see... Darwin was a biologist, and none of these are biological. They don't reproduce, so they're not susceptible to natural selection, and they don't need to mate, so sexual selection is also irrelevant. I guess evolution happens through other means in the media business.
How does the "uprise [sic] of ad blockers" change anything? We've been flipping past newspaper ads, going to the bathroom during TV commercials and changing the channel during radio ad spots for quite a while, and the free market hasn't collapsed -- how is the Internet any different?
Slashdot::NYTimes as Dung Beetle::Elephant
Albeit, I first found out about the Columbine shooting and the Columbia explosion the day both of those happened while checking slashdot.
What does Darwin say will happen to newspapers, radio, television?"
/. these days - does every news story have to include a reference to Apple?
What is it with
Newspapers and TV news aren't really just about news - they're a form of entertainment. In a sense, when you buying a newspaper you're really paying for the editors to sift through all the crap and present you with a mix of stories that - hopefully - largely interest you.
It's almost traditional to spend a lazy saturday or sunday morning on the couch/deckchair/stardeck with the weekend edition of your paper of choice. You can't really do that with internet news sources, and especially not automatically aggregrated news sources such as google news. Perhaps one day when wireless electronic paper devices becomes reality, there will be an equivilent, but I get the feeling that's a few years away yet.
Slashdot will always be FREE!
Well, I am biased, but I think the future of news delivery is towards personalized news delivery, tailored to the interests of each reader. Memigo and Findory (no relation) are two examples of personalized news agents. MSN Newsbot is also going into that direction and I am betting Google will follow soon.
"What about cd's? Couldn't someone just listen to those" you ask.
Sure. But if that was going to kill radio, it would have died with 8tracks, tapes, or...well...cd's. But it hasn't. People want to know what's going on, and nothing visual is appropriate while driving (other than the road, of course). Radio is all it ever needs to be for someone driving an hour commute every morning and evening, 5 days a week.
What about the rest of the time? Who knows. But it will survive, if for no reason other than that. Oh, and the workforce (esp heavy labor) will always want something to listen to as well.
TV, esp broadcast tv? Hard to say. Newspapers? Ouch.
The fact is that people can now go to a preferred site on the net and read about current events with exactly the same bias as they have - in other words, while the democratization of the news that the internet has provided may be a good thing for different points of view, those points of view are becoming more polarized as news agencies go after niche markets. No one needs to encounter things on the news that might challenge their perceptions anymore, or inform them of an event in an impartial manner. As news agencies struggle to maintain their profit margins, they're losing the same journalistic standards they claim are lost on 'amateur' internet sites. It's another bitter battle against 'old' and 'new' media. Unfortunately the winner in this case may not be the consumer, because as we gain more and more niche markets we gain a less balanced perspective of the world and its events. Deep divisions in opinion are what have really defined the beginning of this new era, rather than a sharing of information.
Perhaps it is possible- why not stick "This article brought to you by Pepsi Cola- the choice of the next generation"- right at the top with the author.
Maybe good of it will come. Imagine- the next big tsunami like disaster hits- and multinational rush in trying to out do each other for global recognition. Now that would be progress.
I don't claim to be immune to this, the only on-line site I where I typically read in-depth articles is Salon.
For daily news, the internet works well. Check the headlines, check sports scores, movie times, events, etc.
/. deals with that kind of traffic every day. Maybe the brains at /. that keep the site running under constant load could help these sites out. Just a thought.
Where big news breaks, so does the internet. Take a look at the Sept 11 attacks. ALL major news outlets were down. Slashdot stayed up*, but offered limited info. When it came down to it, radio and TV were the only reliable sources. The internet just can't handle demand for broadcast content. Even newspapers were able to get info printed before the internet outlets began to respond again.
The internet can be used as a news medium, but only when traffic permits.
* Have you guys ever thought of starting a news consulting service? CNN, Nytimes, USAToday, and most other new outlets can't handle the load.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I think one of the 'problems' of reading online news sources, are that you seek out news that confirms your world view. You also tend out to seek out news that you think might be interesting to you, and missing on a whole lot of other news.
Take the tsunami for instance. I wasn't watching the news or reading the papers around the time (hadn't started up my newspaper subscription yet). I did seek out the usual online sources, clicking only the links that I thought would be interesting to me. I didn't actually find out about the extent of the tsunami until Wednesday, and that's only because I saw it on CNN (tv not website).
Reading newspapers, I tend to read for start to finish, picking up interesting book reviews or local events I wouldn't have read about otherwise.
Je ne parle pas francais.
While blogging, I discovered something.
My blog is about biology and bioinformatics news. I had the habit of visiting some science news sites... recently, I found the RSS feeds of many press release services. News flash : most "science news" sites just copy/paste press releases. I do the same 50% of the time too, because it gets the point across when the PR is well written. But I do add my opinion / grain of salt when I can, which most science news site don't take the time to do / don't have the expertise necessary to understand. Being a PhD in bioinformatics with a strong biology background sure helps for that; and to filter unrelevant junk science news (there's lots of that, trust me).
Future of news? If its that easy to get on-par (content-wise) with most of the old-fashioned news source, independant sites like mine, run by expert on a niche topic, might be the future. Blogs are just another medium; it helps publishing fast and easy.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
The Internet is the penultimate example of a "free market" information system. Literally anyone who has access to a computer (and this can be just about anyone who has the necessary basic skills, thanks to public access from libraries and such) can have their say in a public forum, and have others see what they've said and sometimes respond with their own opinions.
The obvious advantage of this is that there will always be multiple perspectives on any given subject, from the mainstream to the personal to the radical or absurd. Ideally, this would mean that each person who reads the news online has the ability to weigh various viewpoints, and formulate their own opinion based on these. This can also lead to situations like bloggers bringing down Dan Rather for reports on documents that were falsified. So, in an ideal world, all perspectives would be considered and eventually, the truth would emerge.
However, the problem arises when all these sources are based on something that is supposedly "common knowledge" but is in fact not true. The best example I can think of offhand is the infamous "I invented the Internet" quote from Al Gore. Even though the transcript of what he actually said is readily available, and those who had a clue figured out what it was that was actually said, the general public accepted that Al Gore said, "I invented the Internet." Even today, most people would agree that Al Gore said that. His opponents and even his supporters said it bolstered his arrogant image, and in an election that was decided by less than a thousand votes, one could argue that it cost him the election. So, even though the truth was accessible, it did not match with what is still today commonly accepted.
So, the fact is that one can find any perspective on anything through the Internet. The problem is: What happens when all those perspectives are based on some unifying falsehood?
Love the Third Amendment?
"selected few". Hmmm, would that be people who pay for content in the real world right now? Newspapers cost money to read, so does tv (cable channels, there is always government sponsored public television), magazines etc. Why should these companies start giving away their bread and butter? When you get news from other sources you pay for formatting, editing, story checking and someone's neck being on the line if it's inaccurate (granted doesn't always happen but you occasionally hear about reporters being fired).
I wonder why these companies are still giving it out for free. Obviously there must be some way of profiting because I doubt it's a charity event. Do banners and profiling pay that much?
There is lots of available information. What matters is being able to bring it together, classify it, and rate it in a trustworthy way. That is the real contribution of participatory media like Slashdot: The processes for reviewing submissions and moderation of discussion enable people to view news and analysis based on readily available criteria instead of getting a digest that was produced for everyone.
All I block is popups.
I love the principle of advertising covering website costs. Why? Because I don't feel like giving out cash to read the news.
If ads, don't cover enough of the bill, were going to end up with micropayments. Using something like Amazon.com as an intermediary... and you pay perhaps $0.25-0.50 to read an article. IMHO I'd rather not get to that point.
I don't think banners are such a big deal. I prefer the subtle google ones.
IMHO the best model uses the following:
- Banner Ads
- Subscription service for no ads
- Micropayments
Just the other day I started resurrecting MacVillage.net. I did that as well. There banner adsads (I'm considering a subscription service if people want it). And there's the ability to give a micropayment ($1).
On the bottom of the page is a simple request. If you can spare a dollar, and want to keep the minimalist ad appearance, consider giving a dollar.
In the past life of the website, it prevented popup ads and such. Hopefully this time it will as well.
Here's an example
The ads IMHO aren't obtrusive or in the way. There will be one Google text ad in the content area (I'm experimenting with that). But intentionally text so it doesn't stick out to much.
I like having very few ads. And hopefully enough people like it too... and will help keep it that way.
I think everyone benefits.
The future of news and the future of computing will be tied up in the idea of Trust. Information will become more valuable the more it is trusted. The question that needs to be asked is how do I trust you and how do you trust me online.
Which leads to the next question, who do you trust with vouching for yourself online. And realize the answer to the question will be the person who will know you, and not some false or pseudonym. Who do you trust saying you are you, and that you do indeed know what you are talking about regarding the subject you are speaking of.
I personally don't want any of the following as vouching for me exclusively: The Government, My Bank (or anyone I pay money to to vouch for me). Now do I trust my friends, do I trust my church to vouch for me, and which of those do you trust? Also, what happens when I go from being a citizen of one state to another? Or from one country to another? What happens when I'm trusted by a known non-trusted/enemy organization?
Granted there are a ton of solutions out there, but nothing which is accepted yet. And each of these solutions have problems.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
To the submitter: that's an odd news site you linked to. It does not render properly in Firefox, everyone seems obsessed with being first to welcome Soviet Russian Overlords for Profit, and it curiously mirrors your story with a link back to itself. I am confused.
The second advantage is the real reason for the success of news on the Internet. The Internet serves as a huge database of old stories, facts, and analyses. In the old days, 2 years after you read a story in the "Washington Post", you may forget the exact details. Retrieving the original story requires a trip to the library and manually scanning through hundreds of reels of microfiche. In short, accessing the old story was prohibitively expensive, but that old story may contain critical information for assessing government policy towards, say, Taiwan.
Now, you can use Yahoo! Search to simply find the old story and access it within 15 seconds. You can quickly determine whether our government policy towards, say, Taiwan is correct. No longer can charlatans and quacks fool or manipulate you as easily.
In fact, I myself have used the power of the Internet to find the latest news about Taiwan and have summarized what I found. The reality of Taiwan is quite damning of current American policy.
Blogs and Podcasting will be the news media of the future. There will be many people who will take up new roles as honest and active reporters.
Why does everyone always think that things must converge to some single future state? Regarding ad-blockers, I see three responses.
/.), and small, free personal news sites (blogs).
First, I'd wager that some sites will rearrange their content to be less pleasant to read with ad-blocking enabled or will create in-line text ads that are much harder to filter. Ad-hating people will stop visiting those sites, but the sites will still attract enough audience to survive. The number of free, ad-supported sites might decline, but will never go to zero.
Second, if anything, ad-blocking will further entrench the corporate subscription-only sites because it kills the natural migration path for small personal sites. Currently, a growing small site can recoup its bandwidth costs with ads. If that avenue is not open, then small sites must either sell-out to a big corporation or close up shop when the traffic gets too high.
Third, perhaps one solution is a bittorrent-like version of the WWW for small popular sites. Small sites that cannot afford to have a million or even a thousand daily viewers will submit their content to a bittorrent-like entity.
In short, technology and trends will mean that there will always be some number of big for-pay news sites (e.g., WSJ); medium-sized ad-supported sites (e.g.,
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Thank you! It's getting increasingly tiresome to see such abuse of Darwin's Evolutionary theory by people who quite simply have not taken the time to absorb the fundamentals.
Spencer, on the other hand. . .
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Will the Internet become a place for the "selected few" with money to spend?
I expect that if a payment role comes in that many news sites will join together and a core distribution node will be put into place where you can go and signup for whichever sites you want and every day you get e-mailed a virtual newspaper with all the news from those sites. It won't be "select few" as you are already paying for your newspaper now you'd just be getting it in a different medium with (hopefully) more meaningful news.
Have you metaroderated recently?
In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is Epic?
It's fiction but what might happen when Google takes over?
Hello webmasters,
I block your ads when they get in my way.
Remember the [blink] tag? Why would a flashing graphic be any less annoying?
If your ads flash, blink, move around, make noise, or freeze my browser for 3 minutes while it loads an in-banner video I do not want to see, I will block your ads.
Do not bitch, moan, or say "but it's the advertisers that want to annoy you so". Just don't have ads that attempt to FORCE me to watch them. I will go to your site, I will block the ads, I will not feel bad about it. I used to block them my putting hand over the screen, now I have a ready-made plug-in that lets me rest my arm. The more intolerable your ads become, the more drastic our countermeasures become. This didn't have to be an arms race, but since you forced our hand, now we have adblock.
Sincerly,
Someone fed up.
You can't take the sky from me...
Thanks for that informative link to Slashdot on the Slashdot home page. Now I know how to get to Slashdot to read the news.
Yahoo news crawls some 7000+ news sites, Google News crawls 4500+ English news sites, and Topix.net crawls 10,000+ news sites. Once you add in the thousands of local blogs, you will need a system like Topix.net to filter the relentless stream of news articles and posts that are generated every day. You will need something that can sort through the news, determine the trends, and ignore the old repeated stories for you and present them to you in RSS for consumption with your favorite RSS news reader.
-AS
Why do you need a link to the front page of /. on this website? ;-)
Advertisers will realise that pop-ups suck and everyone hates them, where as old fashioned banner ads are perfectly fine and few people block them. Systems like salon are also ok if a bit annoying. The general rule is if its too annoying then people will find a way around it or just go somewhere else. Every format has its own optimum advertising style - TV for example is suited to having reasonably spaced breaks - eg 15-30 minutes apart that have mostly interesting adverts that people want to watch. If you fuck with that or start putting banner ads in TV programs then people get pissed off and skip them like in the US.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Do we really a link to slashdot on a slashdot submission?
My fairly recent change from surfing to RSS has changed my surfing habits substantially. Although I am trying a second RSS reader on OS X, most of the syndicated sites are blogs, with a few real news outlets. Groups of bloggers with varying interests filter so much information effectively, that the time required to actually find the information through casual browsing is prohibitive. While I read the bloggers critically, they help to get the news and interesting material to the surface. They're a filter rather than journalists, but a very valuable filter.
Newspapers are many times filters also, by posting breaking news from Reuters and such.
First, I will continue to use the ad blocker. Nothing you say will convince me otherwise.
Second, I am in no way obligated, implicitly or explicitly, contractually or morally, to view ads. If you're willing to take this route, you also have to argue that it is/should be illegal/immoral to fast-forward through commercials on the T.V., or to get up and make a sandwich when they come on, or to not look at the advertisements in a magazine.
Third, ad-blockers will win this particular game of cat and mouse. If websites do not serve us without an ad download, we will download the ad and fail to render it.
Fourth, I don't see a problem with paid-subscription services once the market equilibrates. Something that few people seem to understand is that looking at ads inflicts a cost on you. Companies wouldn't pay for your eyeball time if it weren't worth something. Why is it worth something? Because we are sheep. We react to ads.
Everyone, of course, seems convinced that only other people react to ads. No one admits that they, themselves, are personally influenced. But if you don't react to ads, then why do you object to my ad-blocker? And if you DO react to ads, necessarily in a way that costs you financially, then why aren't you just willing to make the payment up front? At least that way you KNOW what you're paying. At least that way you cut out the inefficiency of the middle-man advertiser and actually get your product cheaper.
So get your moral outrage off of my ad-blocker. Better, get one of your own. I use Privoxy, which works miracles with any web browser on any platform.
It is inevitable that newpapers will move to a subscription model. Online ad revenue is low and there is just too much money involved, and the sources of the information are in the hands of a few news organisations.
:)
Just like iTunes changed music, one day (quite soon, and just as suddenly) we will see an iNews equivalent giving paid access to multiple news sources. On the other side legal enforcement of their IP by news agencies will be stepped up (just like RIAA). Most newsgathering is in the hands of a few companies (Reuters, AP etc), when they say "no more free sites," it's over.
There will be lots of complaints form the "information wants to be free" crowd, but they will end up paying anyway.
To maintain their sites, Bloggers will actually be amongst the first to sign-up to such a model. Especially when they realise they can receive substantial affilliate money for sign-ups
Newsblogs are good for fact-checking and opinion. The hard bit, the newsgathering and primary reporting is what people have to pay for (because there can be no opinion pieces without it).
Blogs will always be hampered by this lack of ability to actually gather news. As mainstream media realises that blog-like opinion is easy to add to their sites, there will be further integration of user opinion and blog-like features into their sites.
We're already seeing this trend with the increase in the number of available broadcast, satellite and cable channels. There are countless news shows, and each one can target a niche market. Few have incentive to even try to remove the appearance of bias; in fact, they increase the bias to help define their niche more clearly.
With the unlimited number of sources on the Internet, I believe that the trend will simply accelerate.
The really interesting question isn't so much how, but which ones embrace it, and how many of them will embrace it embrace it in time, and to what extent?
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
"The decentralization of the Internet offers many advantages over traditional media such as newspapers and television, as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. "
But does he/she have control over how news gets created? Are we all going to be reporters? Will we all be "embedded" in Iraq? To whom is "Deep Throat" going to spill the beans? Richard nixon? The Pentagon Papers? Agent Orange? Who's going to have the connections to catch Ollie North in the act? How about editor? Who's going to bring all the good stuff together, and bring it up to some kind of standard? How about slander/libal issues? Will society be "flatter" than usual?
...try Drudgereport. ny times is nothing but left wing propaganda.
I have always referred to the 10 or so sites that I check every day when I wake up as my "morning paper" :-)
What happens when the advertisers figure out what's going on with adblock and they start hosting ads that looks like:
http://cnn.com/saibjkb26234/istc6d23.gif
If the name of the ad is randomly generated, you would have a hard time blocking just the adds without also resorting to blocking all images at this website. It would be almost impossible to block text based ads.
If you look at who was behind the "trusted computing" initiative and what its goals were it was very obvious clear that you didn't want to put any trust into something like that. Fortunately "trusted computing" and DRM were doomed from the begining since people were not quite that stupid to fall for those schemes and are voting with their wallets for DRM-free hardware.
Ads cost money. Every time you get something for free thanks to advertising money, you pay for it when you buy things that have been advertised.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather pay for a site that doesn't have ads and pay less for tangible products I buy. That way I don't have to pay marketdroids to spew their bullshit.
An important question will be what news and information is reliable. That's gone downhill in the last 20 years as the TV news sources compete to have the first "exclusive" info, regardless of whether it's true or not.
I'd rather pay for access to quality, well researched, and TRUE information than to find some free place that offers "maybe true, but sensational!" information.
They'll just do what some sites such as Tom's Hardware and Experts Exchange are doing now. Just look at some of their articles and you'll see links. Hover over them, though, and you'll see that a Windows XP link takes you to classes for training to be a Windows XP administrator, and other links take you to other unrelated items.
These ad-links are very annoying and look like actual relevant links, so Joe Schmoe will assume he can learn more about Windows XP and then find he just clicked on an ad. Once this trust is broken, they won't know what to click on any more.
I doubt anyone can come up with a link blocker, that would defeat the purpose of the Internet, eh?
It seems to be the buzz word for the last year or so, but I have not seen many good blog sites. It seems most bloggers are individuals with a heavy slant on things, they're the lunatic fringe of news reporting.
At least in my eyes, "blog" has become synonymous with garbage. Very local tabloids, nothing more.
Why is this so bad? Even if people get their news from 1 or 2 sources that are heavily biased, the opposing viewpoints are a click away. Often, they provide links and connect to each other, despite being mortal enemies with irreconcilable differences. (I never heard of Daily Kos until I started reading LGF regularly, for instance.)
Users get to determine what they read and in what format they read it in. They can even determine how much of which slant they want on the story.
Without the internet, you would have to search long and far to find opposing viewpoints. You'd have to take what you read at face value or go pay a visit to the library and hope they have recent, relevant material. Either that, or you'd have to subscribe to every magazine and newspaper on earth.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
there's a bot posting urls/titles (from rss feeds) of news stories from the following sources:n kie.comu rity.orgt .org
exploitwatch.org
freshmeat.net
irc-ju
newsforge.com
norml.org
packetstormsec
secunia.com
securityfocus.com
slashdo
Although I get a lot of news through the 'net (both local and from my home country) I also get a real newspaper every day. For me personally, a real paper has long in-depth articles, or even just fuller versions of the same stories.
The other problem with Internet news - it may just be a problem with people in general, but exacerbated by the 'net - is that it creates tunnel vision, only tuning into the news you want to hear, that backs up your own prejudices. I cringe whenever I see people posting links from places like World Net Daily or Indy Media as if the content within is gospel truth, not heavily spun to the left or right semi-fiction.
I know of course that traditional print media also has political bias, but the spin is usually appended onto the pure reportage so both can be separated.
This article made me think of Epic 2014, as previously discussed on Slashdot. Rather sensationalistic, but interesting to think about.
But I do add my opinion / grain of salt when I can, which most science news site don't take the time to do / don't have the expertise necessary to understand.
That is what ruins blogs. There is absolutely no objectivity. While you might try to keep the news as accurate as possible, someone else might just try to spin the news their own way. It leaves the reader not knowing what to believe.
This was generally backed by the statistics from the server and the results from the questionaire. The ability to cross-reference and thread stories was also useful, but only to those who had become "involved" in a story in progress.
Based on this work, I'm going to say pretty much what I said when I was doing this work - news carriers will become information repositories. How the user chooses to access that information will become increasingly personal. The ability to cross-reference stories from multiple sources will become increasingly important, as news vendors discover that you don't need both journalists AND editors.
In consequence, I expect the news system to split into various tiers. First-tier news vendors will have journalists in the field actually gathering news. To some extent, this already happens, but it is likely to become much more severe. Second-tier news vendors will have editors but no journalists. They'll compile news, but not generate any. Again, a lot of vendors already do this (see how many quote AP, Reuters, etc) but they usually still have some news-gathering staff. Third-tier news vendors will have far more commentary than actual hard news.
It makes no sense, economically, to have multiple companies do essentially identical work on all tiers. Outsourcing is cheap and allows for specialization. Specialization, in turn, can mean fewer competitors in that field, which means the potential for greater profits.
If my prediction is correct, then I expect different tiers to charge in different ways. The primary news sources would likely charge a small amount (to maximise the customer base) and on a per story fragment basis. The second tier will likely charge a subscription, where the price depends on what features you want. Third-tier commentary sites will likely be free, and will probably be increasingly sponsored by the other news groups.
Advertising on the Internet is likely to die a death, as more sophisticated blocking techniques are developed, and as distrust over potential spyware scams increases. In consequence, sponsorship in return for increased references is likely to be the preferred model in the future. Doubly so, as search engines adopt the Google method of using references to place sites.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://www.newsisfree.com
and if they ever started charging for news, p2p would be used to steal it...
Many have said that the Daily Me, a personalized newspaper, will be the future of news.
JD Lasica wrote a particularly good piece on it.
I too fear that we'll have to rely more and more on the final piece of blocking software - the one between our ears.
that in order for newspapers, televisions, and radios could survive, they'd have to reproduce sexually, enough to create variation, enough to withstand nature's brute
On the internet, there is no such thing as "public record". It is near-impossible to establish who said what in the past, even large, venerable institutions such as the NYT, which used to call itself "The Paper Of Record".
I don't know about you, but to me it's a pretty bad situation.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Unless you buy an online subscription, the news on the web is just headlines with little in depth material.
Sadly many people today are quite happy with just the headlines. Makes me wonder what happes.
Thanks to the beeb, I will get free news.
I'm casting no asparagus here, but when the original source is gone and there is no "library" of archived material you can check against, how can anyone be sure that a newsitem on a geocities account is complete and faithful to the original?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Darwin used contemporary knowledge of animal husbandry as a metaphor for natural selection. The same metaphor can be used for social structures. Try googling Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologists who first suggested the "meme" as a mental gene. "Gene" is actually a term for a unit of inheritance, an abstraction. DNA has genetic properties, but it is not a gene.
Coming from a journalist's standpoint, I doubt most newspapers will require a fee for a daily view of their paper. Ad-free sites will reign. Papers make most of their cash through ads, not subscriber fees. Unless bloggers network a little more or are under one domain, you aren't likely to see payment for their words. They can't make a living off a blog, unless people really love to hit the PayPal link.
Although you may need to pay $2.95 to access the original articles at the Western news sources (e.g. "Los Angeles Times"), you certainly can verify the validity of the replicated news articles at the Geocities web site.
Taiwanese behavior is damn sick.
My kids had better not inherit Gene's eyes, that's all I'm saying.
There is no such thing as "public record" on the internet. :(
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
I'd really like to see more work along the lines of Columbia Newsblaster. I find that it presents more valuable information in a better format than Google News. If only it were updated more than once per day at best...
From their FAQ:
Every night, the system crawls a series of Web sites, downloads articles, groups them together into "clusters" about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of what the major stories of the day are, so you don't have to visit the pages of dozens of publications.
Newsblaster is an academic project from the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. It is designed to demonstrate the Group's technologies for multidocument summarization, clustering, and text categorization, among others. It is funded under DARPA TIDES and KDD and has been operational online since September 2001.
It might be old news to a lot of you, but I'm amazed at how many uber geeks I've run into who haven't heard of it. It's worth at least a look, if not a prominent bookmarking...
I'm talking about archives, which can help establish truth. If you cannot establish beyond a doubt that the "archived" version of a page is what was actually published X years ago, you can't prove anything, whether you are Joe Blogger or the Vatican.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
It's a good shot and a noble project, but would you want to have only one library, with limited funding and space, for the entire world?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Aw, who am I kidding? If we can't get these greedy bastards to even use meta tags or robots.txt correctly, a real distributed archive isn't even worth dreaming about.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Fark of course!
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!
I just want to mention that ad-blockers only function now because ads are delivered from external servers.
It would be trivial to alter the delivery method to pass the ads into the host server, and embed them in the requested document. They are simple to block now because the reliy on flash, external ad servers, or popups.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Lately, the only ads I see are for Vonage - and boy do I see a lot of them.
But they are nice. I'm sure I would use Vonage, if I had the need for it.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Maybe website will start to invent more subtle and less aggressive means of advertising ?
Maybe they'll realise that people are more angry against pop-ups that invade their screen, load huge band-width consuming Flashmovies, and distract their attention, than against small text integrated at the end of the page (ala google text-ads for exemple ? or the "read also... / find cheap..." suggestions at the end of some on-line newspaper's pages) ?
How much people write ad-blocks filters that stops "*/ads/*.swf*" versus how many of them try to suppress the "Find cheap xyz on the web" texts ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"thats the stupidest site ive ever seen and its actually very hard to use and it hurts my eyes"
That and it makes his penis go limp.
I would just like a three-paned application that does a distributed usenet. Threaded messages and the like on various topics in a directory structure. But remove the need for news server, and let it be p2p distrobution.
Couple that, with pgp of authors and some buddy-list-like system, where you can learn to trust certain authors, etc, while also haveing plain-text posts(so full-time authors/reporters could build trust among readers and verify his identity with a post, etc).
Plus, have some smart playlists/search ability of your news cache, being able to find all Microsoft or Linux posts, etc(coupled with the directory structure) And you are good to go.
Lastly, make it a protocol such that you can have a web frontend to it and run it as a daemon, for groups.google.com like sites.
That would pretty much make me happy. Like an RSS meets blogs meets usenet meets WASTE/freenet meets napster.
Anyone interested?
When Isaac Asimov was under contract to Doubleday (according to his mult-volume autrobiography), he argued that he was losing royalty mony because the publisher refused to release the hard-cover, the soft-cover, and the book club editions at the same time. His argument was that each medium appeals to a different personality, and thus, no medium would cut into the others' sales.
Well, he turned out to be right.
I think this is also the way of the various news sources - each does and will have its place. The Internet will not supercede the regular news except for thos who would use the net for news anyway.
Mark Edwards
IRC Richard Dawkins was rather against the use and essentially overuse of that particular metaphor.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"i have to pay for my newspaper, so why shouldn't i pay for my newspaper on the internet?
.com mania.
because everything on the net is free?
no. it's not. the money has to come from somewhere.
if i know how to make a news site without costs i'll start a new
Privacy is terrorism.
News by definition isn't intended to be a surgical exposition on a topic. I work at a news organization so I know that quite often one sentence summarizes the whole news article. The rest is either "storified" data -- e.g. Ten people were confirmed dead, while five were reported as missing -- background information, or worse, padding with no relevance to the topic at hand. (Watch out for expressions like "meanwhile"!) News is no longer news if you can't read it while it's hot. What you need to read are magazines like National Geographic or the New Yorker. Because their deadlines are measured in periods longer than a day, they can adopt a more leisurely approach to their subjects. Unfortunately, magazines appear to be less willing than news organizations to share their content online. Quite a few of them require paid registration.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Why enter an arms race you have no chance of winning?
Sure, you can block the ads however in the end if/when enough people block ads and the ad-supported business model becomes unviable then you will have lost the so-called arms race as you will be unable to access the websites without a subscription.
You might not have noticed, but subscription-only cable channels ALSO have ads.
Movie theatres didn't use to have ads. Subscription site don't have ads... yet.
You can't take the sky from me...
I apply the same approach to television news. Where I am, we get one channel broadcasting news at 5pm, another two at 6pm, and a fourth at 7pm. That means that (if you can stand listening to that much crap for that long) you can get at least three different versions of events from TV alone every day.
At first I found it interesting that each providor put such a totally different spin on the 'facts', then it amused me - don't these people realise that people can watch other versions of events, and see right through their sensationalist crap?
Now it just sickens me. It sickens me that they have zero conscience and zero integrity, and zero interest in reporting what actually happened and that they spin such totally misrepresented crap knowing full well that plenty of people don't know any better than to just swallow their stories hook, line and sinker.
Journalistic integrity is a long-dead myth. Those bastards don't care about reporting facts, they care about finding ways to feed advertising to people, and if they have to sensationalise a story to the point of outright lying to get people to listen/read/watch their advertising, then they won't hesitate for a second to do it.
It's not about the news anymore folks, it's about the advertising.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The Internet has been my primary new source since then. I watched 9/11. I watched the landings on Mars. Suggested news sites:
The link provided in the article for Trusted Computing is to Ross Anderson's so-called TCPA FAQ, which is badly biased in its opposition to the technology. For a more balanced description see the Wikipedia, especially the discussion page where some pros and cons of the technology are debated.
I don't know what the future of journalism looks like but I'm willing to bet that it will NOT look like slashdot.
What the hell is this crap?
There's news outside of Slashdot? Whatever... *shrugs and points to ad at tope* I don't mind those kinds of ads (the one currently on is about Sun Fire Serves)
I'm at the point where I don't even hear TV network news or newspapers any more. I get all my news from National Public Radio, the BBC, Slashdot, and the local left-leaning community radio station (www.kboo.fm).
It has definitely changed the way that I filter current events. For instance, I had a peek at Yahoo!'s headlines a few minutes ago and there was a story about Harvard University's president making derogatory remarks about women. I clicked on the headline and read a paragraph of the story. Then I look through the rest of the story text for a link to a transcript of the actual speech itself. I wanted to see exactly what he said and in what context.
Of course, there was no link. So I assumed that the news reporters were taking his remarks out of context. This is the influence of Slashdot where everything is linked and if you say something stupid a hundred thousand people will see it and many will take the time to reply about how stupid you are.
By refusing to stand up to mass media manipulation by the far right, the major corporate media outlets (the TV networks, Clear Channel, the daily newspapers) have damaged their credibility beyond repair to me. No one takes them as seriously as they take themselves or believes that they are as credible as they were thirty years ago.
Once you get past its headline, the corporate news story is often nothing more than propaganda for the continued economic benefit of the corporate management class.
The past hundred years has seen a complete and total global communications revolution. It will continue. Don't worry, you will be able to get the news and information that you need from the internet in the future.
Secondly, we can block images from any site, including the one we're currently on (Firefox does this too), so these are highly vulnerable to being smushed (a smush industry technical term, sorry), and so ads-as-images will probably die, or at least cut way, way back. I don't see many of these either.
Third, we can block google-style ads (ads sourced using off-site bandwidth) by blocking the source at the reject-this-server level. So google style ads are vulnerable, and could die too... though these are so inoffensive to me that I've never bothered to even try (plus, they're often actually relevant, which puts a different face on matters.) Let's say that rather than likely to die, they are at least still vulnerable to being killed.
That leaves text ads that are sourced from the site we're actually visiting. We want to read the text on the site, so we're not going to block text in general. Doing so selectively is problematic, to say the least; I think you're likely to end up blocking exactly what you want to read if the ads are well-targeted. Google (for instance) could pull this off by supplying the ad stream to the site we're visiting sub-rosa, and then the site has to source the ad using its own bandwidth and server resources, to us. A smart site will move the ads around and they'll really be difficult to distinguish with software that isn't nearly as smart as you are. At that point, you're probably going to see the ad -- there's no good way to distinguish it from the desired reading material if it is well aimed.
So that's where I think we're heading. FWIW, which, as with most crystal ball gazing, probably isn't a lot.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Lazy hacks and lazy bloggers love bad metaphors. It sure saves thinking.
Like all utopias: infinitely distant and infinitely elusive.
Quite the statement about our society when anything denoting freedom is referred to as a utopia. Prematurely cynical, if you ask me.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
The Taiwanese government annually spends about $2 million to hire American lobbyists...
LOL $2 million dollars. The power companies spent $ 65 million just to defeat one referendum on power deregulation in California. Tell them to come back with some folding money.
> How do DRM and Trusted Computing play into the role?
Simple: they don't.
DRM is exactly equivalent to taking flexibility away from the user.
Most of the content industry remains stubbornly opposed to the simple fact that "The Customer Is Always Right". And in this case, the Customer prefers non-crippled content.
Free, unencumbered sources of news have already proven that they can maintain reasonably high quality, which is good enough for most people.
Some claim that it's possible to fashion a "minimally-intrusive" DRM that doesn't bother most people. The problem with that claim is that too many years have come and gone now, and too many people have tried and failed (and failed utterly, a la SDMI) to fashion any kind of user-friendly DRM.
So a "more rounded" and "accurate" view only involves cherry picking from organizations that all present similiar shades of bias? Please. A diversity of sources doesn't mean a diversity of views, especially in this case.
As others have pointed out, the danger in any medium, but more so with the Internet and New Media in particular, is that the ability to set up an echo chamber is strikingly easy.
...just the latest piece of shit that elitist morons in business use to distinguish "us" vs. "them". Just the latest increment of the dog collar that began with pagers, skipped to text messaging and is now the Blackberry-type device.
Know what? I make $175K US, and I don't carry one of those fuckers. Never will. Do you absolutely, positively need to reach me? Call and speak. Don't send me a text message like some robot.
And to your so-clever point; yes, I believe there are absolutely 10's of thousands of extremely well-paid people with access to tech who don't even know what a Blackberry is. Don't it just kill ya???
Pshaw! How could Internet news sites hope to restrict their content to paying subscribers, realistically? If the CNNs rely upon in-your-face advertisements to keep their Web shops running, then they'll just have to stick with traditional media.
...wikinews! Great! All the benefits of anonymous online, multi-contributor submission with no accountability, and none of the troublesome professionalism of mainstream journalists! Fact checking? Bah!
Could the old-guard news media possibly withstand this assault? Inconceivable!
OK, as long as Wikinews is even handed and doesn't develop an agenda
Dude, I have to hand it to you. I pissed myself. Really.
"With the uprise of ad blockers, are we going to be able to get our news for free?"
salon.com has an innovative business model to keep content free in the face of our best attempts to block out ads. you watch a thirty second flash ad, then, to see the article, you click a link that shows up in the flash ad when it's done. the eager among us are so poised to pounce on the link, we absorb the ad in toto.
Thanks for the hyperlink to Slashdot Cliff. It's funny that I've never come across this site.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
...only old Korean people will read blogs.
Free news on the Internet would be like Free journalism. People will be able to post news and well as read others. But on the other hand, the news would not be moderated, hence it may lead to fraudelent news or yellow journalism. So, though we can take sites like NYTimes, /. or Hindustan Times as bench mark sites for news, personal blogs might not be that reliable as a source for news in the near future.
Sounds like: http://epic.chalksidewalk.com/
Fortunately, news sites like http://abc.com.au/news (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) will always be free, because they're tax payer funded and advertising is illegal for our ABC...
With the rise of blogs, rss and the like, it will be easy to spread false news as it is to publish accurate ones.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Acutually, I think of it as a differential part of many people's lives.
I am really waiting for a proxy kind on neural net bayesian filter thingie that filters the news for me.
Maybe an rss reader which recognizes the headlines I click on or offers radio buttons for rating: (*) interresting ( ) neutral ( ) not interresting.
It could then drop headlines I am certainly not interrested in or present the good ones more prominent.
I'd also like this agent to index all the web pages I surf and give me a search interface for my browsing history. How often did you find something interresting you forgot to bookmark and you cant remember on which browsers history (home, laptop, work, girlfriends computer) you should search?
It could try to cluster my interrests and skim some selected news sites. If an article fits into the stuff I like it could be presented like: You might want to read this...
And this same agent could periodically check selected web pages for changes and for example check for showing up or vanishing terms or phrases. Example: "Alert me when term 'version 3.4 beta' is not on the page any more OR when term '3.5' shows up on the page."
You ask why I am not programming such a buddy. Because I suck.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Now for a [insert word that means self advertising]: Project nuWeb is aimed at making IM+P2P come true.
http://pixelcort.com/
Can we please stop linking to that FAQ about Trusted Computing? Talk about spreading FUD all over the place.
After having done a paper on TC I would really recommend that people read the specs (a bit dry), or the book?
Read "The Diamond Age" as well and see if TC can fit into the idea from there of anonymous, secure communications. You're not going to reach level 20 of Cryptnet without something like it.
If you've got the time then have a look at it from another perspective and wash a bit of the FUD off.
pure reportage
There is no such thing; each of the many choices in creating reportage imposes a viewpoint. Viewpoints are not bad, you just have to bear them in mind when you watch things, and they're often better when worn lightly by a presenter who has a sense of irony about their own position and makes it clear. Better than pretending to be without any views.
e.g.
You are in the congo covering a volcanic eruption in Goma - a resort town popular with whites. There are looters across town, or there is a government press conference on this side of town about the relief effort. There are also some ex-colonials staying in the hotel you stay in as a journalist. Which one do you choose to cover in person, with the camera, and which others through syndicated news? The choice could drastically change the story you come up with. The reality of TV news, or newspaper reporting, is that there are many choices on the way to the reportage and each one affects what you can report.
The same choices are made by photo-journalists all the time when they snap images. They don't take images of everything (they can't possibly) but try to give a flavour of what it was like. What it was like depends heavily on who they are.
Re Internet news making you stupid, brief and ephemeral comments are encouraged by the medium, but we might see that change as more and more newspapers come online. In fact all the newspapers I buy have an electronic edition which is almost an exact replica of the paper one - I don't see how the internet could therefore be less detailed/reflective. Re tunnel-vision, I think you underestimate how many people in the US watch Fox News as their sole source of news (for example). The internet would be a big step up.
The main advantages of the internet as I see it are the plurality of views available, and the fact that you can search it (not to be underestimated).
You have to consider that the ad-blocking programs also improve. I am pretty sure that if the ads change their delivery methods, the ad-blockers can adapt to that to separate what's content and what's not.
The New York Times is actually thinking of going OFF the Internet, at least according to stories from a few weeks ago.
By flooding the online ad market with supply, websites were destined to land on the pop-up model soon or later. The end-user would in turn embrace the pop-up blocker.
I strongly suspect that as the Internet moves forward it will dawn on content providers, especially ones with very large daily audiences, that the space on their sites can be made scare in the same way television time is scarce and will begin to charge accordingly. Granted, Ma and Pa's Beenie Baby Recovery Service will no longer be able to afford to advertise on CNN.com, but there are larger tragedies than that.
http://www.broom.org/epic/
Good point. I've seen people find one web page with one news story, and trust it without doing further corroboration. (It's on the Internet, it must be true, right?)
But having found ONE article via the Internet, even if it's biased, makes it easier to research other sources. Instead of searching "hundreds of reels of microfilm," you know the date, you can go right to the same time period.
I'm most excited by the Google News and other aggregators, because when a story breaks you can see not only the US position (NY Times), but how other countries are reporting it.
And yet Dawkins suggests the idea in "The Selfish Gene," and certainly the article's writer was imagining Darwin's reaction in these terms. Why is he against its use, and "essential overuse?" It seems fairly harmless in this context.