Slashdot Mirror
The Convoluted Life Cycle of a News Story
ideonexus writes "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we have a perpetual stream of factoids from which a story emerges. Lauren Rabaino of mediabistro details this new lifecycle of a newspaper story, from tweets to blog posts to an eventual print edition, and asks What are the best standards of practice? Should news sources provide a single web address with a stream of updates, post new blog entries that link to older ones, or should they adopt a Wiki approach to the news — revising a single story with a history of revisions available behind the scenes?"
Here in the UK all the news comes from hacking cell phone voicemail systems.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
I couldn't figure out a way to fit it into the summary, but I was bothered by the way Reuters recently handled their story claiming George Soros was funding Occupy Wall Street (OWS), first running a headline claiming a connection but with a story that offered very spurious evidence of monetary support for the movement, and then taking that story down under heavy criticism from other news sources and reposting the exact same story with a headline absolving Soros of any connection to OWS with a new link, while simultaneously killing the link to the old story without any explanation.
It was extremely problematic for people debating online, as my conservative friends suddenly had their link go dead, while my liberal friends suddenly had the same story but with a headline supporting their position. It was the same exact story, but since nobody RTFAs, the headline was the most important piece of evidence in the debate.
I post this example, not to dredge up some off-topic flamewar about OWS, but because it seems like a pretty clear cut case of how we don't want news agencies operating. I read a comment on Slashdot recently that the reason we aren't allowed to modify our comments is to prevent users from editing out things in order to accuse others of strawman attacks. If you screw up a fact, you post a correction. It seems News Organizations owe us the same courtesy.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
How about actually reporting the truth instead of slanting it to the political leaning of your respective audience?
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I thought it was all about complimentary copy advertorials? They actually still have reporters?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Depending on the circumstances, the press release might get written by a business trying to push their next product release or dis their competitor's new product, or it might get written by a government agency trying to increase its clout within the government or as part of a longer-running PR campaign.
Then the press release is sent to the press, some of whom ignore it, some of whom mindlessly print it, and some of whom decide it's a good enough story for their market so they talk about it on radio or TV or give it print space.
Then other commenters start giving it coverage, whether that's talk radio ranting about how bad or good it is or somebody submitting it to Slashdot or whatever.
Then the tweets and the blogosphere get it. That doesn't mean they don't start stories on their own, but the people with interests in controlling the press or touting their products don't leave it to chance. (That's not even counting the ones where the tweets and blogosphere get started by astroturf, which is also pretty common today as an alternative business model to astroturfing the AP, Washington Post, or EE Times.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Made me think of this xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/978/
They should use a public git repository. They should also release everything under a dual Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License/GFDL. They can then support themselves by giving speeches and selling t-shirts.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I've heard that those crazy neckbeards over in comp-sci solved the problem of how to manage, timestamp, and attribute revisions to a complex file or group of files that can be expected to be revised over time according to new information, requirements, or refinements. And solved it bloody decades ago. Revision control, people, it isn't just for sourcecode.
Combine that with some of the newer and more www/browser friendly automated merge-and-pretty-print stuff, it should be architecturally trivial to provide a stable URL for a story, a full revision history(including times and who made the revisions), along with related stories, the ability to track revision activity of specific comitters, etc, etc.
I enjoy a good bit of handwaving about how to "best" express complex structures within the limitations of obsolete formats as much as the next guy, and quite possibly more; but it just seems so pointless in this case: There isn't any need to cram the entire sausage-factory of news production into a few square inches of ink-on-dead-tree, so lots of nuanced bloviation on how to do that is just a lot of fluff over a toy problem(nothing wrong with toy problems, as a hobby; but they are a distraction if you are supposed to actually be working...)
If the process is complex, involves multiple inputs over time, from multiple people, then it is indeed impossible to cram without some loss of fidelity into a single static text lump. We could either wring our hands over what transform algorithm is most 'true', or we could just stop fucking around and use a format actually designed to capture something structured that way. This doesn't seem like a difficult decision.
This is the same way in which news has always developed. The difference now is that all the rumors, facts, leads, and dead ends that a good reporter sifted through and tracked down is much more public. Now we get to see the making of the sausage because so many people are willing to post random noise and data, but most of us still want trusted reporters to help us analyze and make sense of a story. Every individual needs to pick their level of comfort and trust in their sources -- some will continue to trust the traditional institutions of journalism, and some will believe that 'Anonymous Coward' is a trustworthy and citable source.
Same signal, more noise, and less ability of the average American to distinguish between the two.
update: Homeless man was not a veteran.
update 2: Unconfirmed whether man was homeless or not.
update 3: Actually the dog bit the man, not the other way around.
update 4: The victim was a 9-year old boy, and the dog was a pit bull mix. Boy lived down the street.
update 5: Owner of the pit bull failed to register dog as dangerous breed with authorities.
update 6: The dog was a fox terrier, no special registration was required.
update 7: Bite by dog not confirmed, but there was a lot of loud barking.
I seem to recall another civilization where news stories were subject to constant, behind-the-scenes revisions. I read about it in a book. One must always take care to interpret the past correctly, through the darkly-tinted lenses of our current social and political mindset. After all, it would simply be unsettling if there were anything at all in our history that happened to be politically insensitive or inconvenient for our current religious, economic, or secular leadership. Simply revising or "reinterpreting" key facts and events go a long way towards removing all of that troubling cognitive dissonance; such dissonance could cause people to question the way things are right now. Sadly, I can't really remember any more details about this civilization, because my e-books retailer erased every copy of it.
News via Wiki? I don't think so.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
Here in the US all our news comes from the UK from hacking cell phone voicemail systems.
The best practice of a newspaper is for a reporter who understands the events to find the actual facts about the events, and tell them in a story that is accurate to those facts in terms the readers understand.
No news is made this way. Which is why nobody treats the news as anything but propaganda, whether they like their propaganda or not. All we've got is infotainverts.
--
make install -not war
1) Event happens ...
2) Field reporter sends details to news office
3) News office embellishes the story to add sensationalism, interest, and other compelling things
4) Marketing office adds advertiser tie-ins and paid referral language
5) Story is published
6)
7) Fact Checking
> What do they call ... where the original, ... 3 months
> unfounded claim, appears
> after the internet has declared it dead
> and buried?
Generically --> "rebunking"
1) Pick unpopular issue.
2) Ignore all facts on the issue.
3) Tie unpopular issue to politician Murdoch does not like.
4) ????.
5) Profit.
6) Complain that the politician is now suing you for Libel.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.