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Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinge Launches News Service

New submitter lillgud writes: Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party, has unveiled a news service to compete against "oldmedia." The news stories will be three sentences in length, and distributed within shareable images. Falkvinge says this obviates certain parts of the industry — for example, there will be no need for clickbait headlines, because there's nothing to click on. The business model is based around advertising, but those ads will simply be a watermark on the image. Thus, no worries about adblock, and no concerns about ad networks collecting information from users. The service is targeted to be operational in Q3. Each writer will be paid in accordance to a revenue sharing model, and Falkvinge's goal is for each part-time writer to receive €125/month in exchange for four stories (12 sentences).

4 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thanks, I'll pass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    because the "other" news you have been reading are not illegitimate children of political agendas and advertising...

  2. Re:Thanks, I'll pass by tmosley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The reason for your wariness is that the vast majority of other political parties advocate for something other than freedom.

    When you have a political party that advocates something approaching pure freedom, then their political affiliation is no longer destructive. Freedom is good. Any thing which promotes freedom is a virtue, not a vice.

  3. Re:Thanks, I'll pass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When you have a political party that advocates something approaching pure freedom, then their political affiliation is no longer destructive

    Just because someone's political orientation agrees with yours, and is on the good side, doesn't in any way stop their political affiliation from being destructive. It is pretty easy for people to unknowingly sabotage their own side, because they go too far. As with what the GP was talking about and many other examples, if you misrepresent reality in the name of pushing an agenda, or even introduce strong bias, you risk hurting your own cause when others call you out for your mistakes.

    A good cause doesn't need more preaching to the choir that just polarizes everyone and kills any spread of an idea to new people.

  4. Re:Thanks, I'll pass by meta-monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's incredibly naive.

    Pretty much everybody likes "freedom." But everybody has a different idea of what "freedom" means. A conservative businessman might argue environmental regulations impinge on his freedom to dump soot from his factory into the air. Hippies downwind might argue allowing the businessman to dump soot into the air is impinging on their right to breathe.

    The Communist Party of the USSR defined "freedom" as "absence of opposition to world socialism." Some Muslim clerics believe freedom (or peace, at least) is found in "submission to the will of Allah."

    I do not want a news service that promotes "freedom." I want a news service that provides facts, and promotes nothing.

    And claiming to be unbiased, when in fact presenting a bias sabotages the arguments. Liberals have such a distrust of Fox News that Fox could say "the sky is blue" and liberals will question their accuracy and motives. Truth, reported from a news agency founded by somebody who founded a political party (that is seen by many as radical, and these very people we're trying to convince to change their minds) will be seen as suspect, and rejected.

    There's a cognitive bias for this. I can't remember the name of it, perhaps one of you can, wherein truthful arguments presented by someone you don't like reinforces your adherence to your own false beliefs.

    --
    We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.