You did no fact checking, and I must scream
187 comments
·October 17, 2025chaps
martin-t
> Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
This should be illegal.
If people were able to propose laws and vote on them directly, it would be, be a landslide.
The number of people who benefit from this is tiny compares to the number who are harmed. But it's nearly impossible to pass things like this because people vote for parties and are therefore several levers removed from influencing actual laws.
hansvm
Isn't it illegal now? That sounds like a cut-and-dry libel case.
cess11
How would you criminalise it? Currently journalists are free to not sell their immaterial rights under these conditions where they're transfered to a corporation that puts an editor between them and the publish button.
fph
The name at the top of the article is still the journalist's. They might be selling (through ads or a subscription) an article written by a Pulitzer winner, but in fact it is partly written by an editor, and the journalist hasn't even checked it. Isn't it like selling "beef" lasagnas that contain horse meat?
lynx97
So you're saying the pay is poor, and your coworkers deliberately fuck you over for their own gains. That pretty much sounds like a job you should stay away from by any cost. Do something else, something productive that doesnt lead to a bunch of lies being sold as truths.
ccakes
Yes but many of us also complain about the lack of quality journalism. We can’t encourage good (presumably) people leave the industry and also want the standard of reporting to improve
saghm
If the system is broken in way that disempowers the people who are good and apparently getting screwed over, it's kind of selfish to ask them to stick around and shoulder the burden to fix it for our own external benefit.
chaps
These problems are largely economic. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
vorpalhex
These problems are not economic. They are a function of an extremely broken process. The lack of money for people doing work on the ground through this model is part of why it is dying and high quality writing is going other places.
lynx97
I once sat on a table nearby of the local investigative newsroom crew having a chat in a cafe. The vibe I got was so evil, I definitely wouldn't give them any of my money. In fact, I have given up on the concept of independent journalism, I just dont believe anymore it is happening. Knowing the onwership structure of the publishers in my country (and many others around me) also adds to the unwillingness to donate. They are all inconservative hands, and are being used to push agendas.
projektfu
How much does it cost to check one fact? If you check just one, and it's wrong, it's probably not worth treating the whole as an accurate piece of reporting. If BBC had checked just one fact in the slop, they could easily decide that it's not worth republishing.
chaps
Why do you focus on "one fact"? Reporting, fact checking, editing is a fluid project that changes as the piece progresses. What needs fact checking in one draft is very different from what needs fact checking in another draft. And like I said, editors make changes that the fact checkers never see.
Again, these are economic problems. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
projektfu
The OP is about a news org basically republishing a viral text its people didn't write. There is no particular need to check every most of the facts like the OP did when a quick glance tells you that it's unreliable.
Self-Perfection
Uhm is it possible to mitigate second point by publishing encrypted article in social network along with is sending it to the agency to assign it timestamp? Or maybe in any blockchain if one does not like social networks.
Then if journalist does not like how mangled was his piece on publishing he can disclose encryption password to show everyone what he actually wrote in the article?
ffsm8
> It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
That sounds like absolutely atrocious living conditions for the journalists employed by such a news room.
Honestly, at that point - look for a different job!
I'm not saying this to be mean, I am just picturing myself in such a working relationship of being employed by an organization working in an industry which is hemorrhaging valuation because of various developments like AI (but even before that it was going downhill).
You will be happier doing something else! At that point, learn a trade or similar. You'll be better paid, have a more stable lifestyle and will feel happier long term, even if you love being a journalist now.
Sorry to be such a downer, but hearing messages like that gives me flashbacks to people getting exploited - and I bet ya that the owner of that newsroom will not be suffering like the journalists. You're sacrificing your own happiness in life for another person's wealth gain - just because you thought it was "worth doing" in your 20s. Because yes, money maybe doesn't buy happiness, but it sure as hell gets you an incredible amount of stress if it's absent.
chaps
I'm no longer doing journalism as my main gig and I'm much healthier these days thankfully.
Use this energy to consider donating to a newsroom. :)
travisgriggs
> The media have comprehensively failed us.
Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.
I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.
Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
simonw
"But the press of today is a for profit endeavour."
It is worth paying attention to the significant rise in prominence of non-profit newsrooms, particularly in the USA.
Some notable examples:
The Baltimore Banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Banner Founded: 2022
ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica Founded: 2007
The Texas Tribune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Tribune Founded: 2009
The Marshall Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Project Founded: 2014
I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).
rootusrootus
I would like to see more information like this, thanks for sharing. Though at least one of those examples has a red flag for me - The Baltimore Banner gets a non-trivial amount revenue from advertising. For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.
I would also be interested to hear about how older small and alternate news sources compare to these newer ones. To use an example I'm familiar with, Willamette Week in Portland has a reputation of being halfway decent. Though to be fair, it also has advertising, and does not even have subscriptions since 1984.
simonw
"For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism."
Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started. Running a newspaper used to be a fantastic business, because you effectively had a local monopoly on advertising to a geographic area. If someone wanted to promote things in your city, you would be top of their list.
Facebook, Google, Craigslist etc completely decimated that business model over the past 20 years and the news industry is still trying to figure out how to fund itself via alternative means.
Historically news organizations have had very strong mechanisms for avoiding advertisers influencing their coverage - the "editorial–advertising firewall". Reputable new orgs like the Baltimore Banner should have policies like that in place today.
lesuorac
> For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.
I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.
Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.
Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".
The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.
BeetleB
I didn't realize Pro Publica is that "new". I've been following them for almost as long. They are fantastic.
BolexNOLA
Definitely a template. I can’t think of a single major issue I’ve had with anything they’ve put out. I’m sure something exists, I haven’t read literally everything they’ve put out stall, but I have been very impressed with everything I have seen.
Aunche
Blaming society for the poor state of journalism is tempting but ignores that the root of the problem lies from within. Financial institutions and other journalists demand information dense journalism to do their jobs and have no problem paying for it, so this is what they receive. Most regular people view news as a form of entertainment and have no problem with sacrificing their attention, and this is what they receive.
lubujackson
Worth noting this is far from a modern problem. Google "yellow journalism".
BurningFrog
The free press has always been for profit!
What's changed is that the profit used to come from advertising. Since everyone read the news, they could charge a lot for ads.
Those days are over, and news now bubble up from social media. That kinda works, but it's far from ideal.
To me the 2019 "Covington kids" incident showed how broken the media had become. All the prestigious media, from NY Times down, reprinted a viral Twitter thread as front page news without any fact check.
The reported "facts" were completely wrong, and even if they had been right, some random kids being rude in a park should never be national news.
Bu that's the news world we live in now.
anonymousiam
Speaking of Twitter, I couldn't help but notice the lack of a Twitter/X icon on the author's blog page. Lots of other social media links are present.
edent
Author here.
Elon directly screwed over some of my friends. He turned Twitter from an imperfect mess into a shit filled pit of despair.
I don't want to encourage anyone to use his services.
Hope that clarifies things!
topaz0
> to grab and keep eyeballs
yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful
hexbin010
Its first and foremost purpose
pessimizer
People conveniently leave this out a lot. Outlets like The Guardian have lost massive amounts of money every year for decades. They are supported by wealthy people who want to see their agendas be influential.
So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests.
It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal.
[*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
tpolzer
Unlike opaquely financed and privately owned media companies, the Guardian is actually relatively clear and open in how it is financed and set up in a way to try to make them as independent as possible (see for example the Scott Trust's annual report https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/The_Scott_Trust_Limite...).
That's not to say that they don't run their fair share of gossip/clickbait... but show me an online medium that does not.
jack_h
You’re using multiple definitions of “free” here. One is freedom in the Lockean sense, the other is freedom from the properties and consequences of an emergent system. It’s a bit like saying you are free to choose your own mate and have kids without government involvement but you’re still a slave to natural selection.
The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.
awesome_dude
People do forget that there are only three known models for funding new/press and they are all susceptible to bias and error.
1. State
2. Profit driven
3. Charity (includes volunteers, billionaire patrons, crowdfunding)
layer8
The press has always been for profit, it was never a charity. What I see today is a mix of trying to maximize profits (which is different from merely making a living from it), and it being more difficult nowadays to make money from diligent journalism, mostly due to how the internet works.
socalgal2
> But the press of today is a for profit endeavour.
For me, the press today is a for influence endeavour. Most journalists have a POV the majority of topics they write about they express that POV with how they discuss the topic. For example, which people they quote, generally only ones that agree with their POV. If they present an a opposing view they always couch it and phrase things to push the reader to discount that view. If they preset a supporting view they phrase it in a way to make it sound trusting and authoritative.
To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way.
wredcoll
> To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way.
This is a good thing.
Aside from the bit where it's always been like this anyways, we, as modern humans, don't have the time to evaluate everything from first sources.
You can't read every scientic study or the 500 pages of tax documents that were studied to produce a report on someone committing tax fraud.
I don't need more "facts", I need useful information I can take action on.
beej71
Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts.
I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected way. He said that the sentiment of the post was accurate, even if the post itself was not. And he left it up!
The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant.
That was a decade ago. Since then, that attitude has clearly become more prevalent not just with your average Facebook poster, but also within the government and media themselves. For none of these groups does does "truth" support their goals; fact checking is a complete waste of time, and might even be detrimental.
JohnMakin
Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore. Reality is whatever you feel it is, or whatever you feel you want it to be, and the internet (the current iteration of it) is perfectly content to feed you that reality, and fake/real is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.
I've also been in similar discussions and have since given up - even if you show incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).
MichaelDickens
> Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore.
Is there any factual basis for this claim?
I don't have any evidence, but I would speculate that if you got longitudinal data somehow, it would show that more people today care about objective fact than they did in 1950.
nabakin
I wonder if there's something we can do. A social network that penalizes misinformation and rewards expert analysis. Something like that would never be as big as general social media but maybe it could be developed for a small set of users who care enough about truth to contribute to it and grow it over time
Karrot_Kream
The market is probably the best we have and that's a dismal bar. Predict wrong and lose money.
projektfu
Sen. JD Vance stood by his false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — an unsupported story that former President Donald Trump has also echoed on the debate stage and on social media.
During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-cla...
oceansky
“Margaret, the rules were that you weren’t going to fact check.”
throw54465665
[flagged]
amiga386
Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia?
*laughs in Taylor Lorenz*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age
Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/
Kiro
As someone who lives in a country where pretty much everything is public information, including social security numbers and tax records, I find it very interesting that you can keep such a thing a secret.
didibus
In case people don't click, Wikipedia says:
> Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources.
> How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.
smallpipe
The average journalist has to churn enough stories that they don't have time to be looking up anything.
There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.
BeetleB
I was a news junkie for several years (now cured).
I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad.
My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.
[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.
cooperadymas
Many wise people would agree with you.
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
eh_why_not
In a discussion of an article about encouraging fact-checking in writing, I wish you would have made your quotes informative by replacing "many wise people" with the actual names of who said them.
For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/502048-why-you-fool-it-s-th...
[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
BeetleB
"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
-- not Mark Twain
mananaysiempre
A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper.
[1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
dragontamer
A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop.
Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
prerok
Did you mean it was decent in the past?
I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.
zahlman
> A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop.
> Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
I've seen signs of AI slop on AP (and Reuters).
eduction
Even if the heyday of profitable journalism fact checkers were a magazine thing. Newspapers generally did not use them, they moved too quickly for that and had too much space (newsprint between the ads) to fill.
On the other hand, in that era a much higher proportion of the news in a paper was directly reported by the journalists - things they physically saw, people they physically talked to or called. They weren’t using some half baked thing from the internet because there as no internet. Although they might run something dodgy from another newspaper or wire service, but that was pretty rare, at least outside of the celebrity gossip and film columns (which were, sexist-ly, considered women’s news and thus not held to the same standards).
amiga386
That's why it's called Churnalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism
Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.
Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.
sixtyj
B2B magazines and websites are full of churnalism. They are unreadable.
The issue here is that for every journalist there are 6 to 7 PR people. (There approx. 45,000 journalists but 297,000 PR people in the USA. PR agencies employ 114,000 ppl.)
harrall
Average newspapers have average content.
But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.
Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.
Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.
The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.
rootusrootus
In this conversation I keep seeing comments about good newspapers. I'd be interested in seeing a more specific discussion that debates which newspapers qualify as good. Everyone has their own opinion, but maybe a consensus would emerge.
Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.
I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
harrall
A good newspaper to me is one that regularly does their due diligence (fact checking, possibly considering things from several angles, giving background information) and has a consistent but reasonable bias. NYT and The Economist are very good ones.
It’s extremely hard suggesting newspapers to an online audience. People don’t easily separate bias and accuracy — they think they are correlated.
Bias and accuracy are unrelated to each other.
If I suggest The Economist, people think I’m for liberalism (The Economist has a major liberalism slant), but really, they tend to make factual statements and then turn to liberalism as a solution, which a regular reader can be like “okay the facts and your background introduction to the topic are good. I don’t necessarily agree with your solution but I get your viewpoint.”
When people ask for suggestions, they often want a simple news source that is unbiased. And I have nothing to give them because I don’t read unbiased news sources.
BolexNOLA
I really like the economist for their various data points/graphs and such. Always very useful and quality in my experience. They are very good at displaying the data used to inform their pieces. It’s the analysis that can be all over the place depending on the topic at hand.
As others have mentioned I would consider ProPublica probably the gold standard right now
dragontamer
The average newspaper has grossly declined in quality IMO.
But there are some good investigative journalists out there.
Arguably, all the smart and careful journalists have moved to the weekly or monthly format. Economist, The Atlantic, and the like.
ofcourseyoudo
I think a much smaller percentage of smart high school seniors want to go into journalism at all. And if they do they'll probably just start a TikTok debating people
dfxm12
Perhaps there's also less stringent editing on the "Showbiz & TV" or "Culture" sections of the paper than the "News" section. I mean, papers in general are working leaner than they should. Hopefully, they put the editing focus on what's most important, but still, being lazy even in a lighter section does reflect poorly on the entire publication.
GolfPopper
Gell-Mann Amnesia?
AdmiralAsshat
Curious that the Wikipedia article seemingly editorializes the quote. The article displays:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about economics than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But in fact Crichton's quote was:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [0]
Why they felt the need to edit Palestine out of the quote is unclear.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michae...
svat
Quotes aren't supposed to be altered like that; I've just fixed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1317337583
Changing "Palestine" to "economics" was done by an anonymous editor five days ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...
caseysoftware
I love that the Wikipedia article on Gell-Mann amnesia was edited to an inaccurate quote.
Now flip to another Wikipedia article and..
CamperBob2
Because it distracts from the general point, I imagine. The quote isn't about whatever is going on in Palestine at the moment (which is usually something spectacular, terrible, and highly polarizing), but about accuracy in news reporting.
Editing the quote without using "..." or similar indications was, of course, unacceptable.
zdw
There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker.
The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
kevinmchugh
Aiui the New Yorker has always been the most rigorous in its fact checking.
IndySun
I have got into a long habit of noting the writer of articles I like (that are accurate after checking). I try to follow well written, honest, as unbiased as you can get (or at least consistent if biased - very important) journalists. So the organisations, corporations, stations where they journalise is of lesser consequence.
rs186
Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations.
I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened.
(And it is laughable they published this piece https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform.... When I pointed out their own rich history of inaccuracies and retracted reporting, they deleted my comments and flagged my account.)
Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact.
I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.
GMoromisato
The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like?
My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.
But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.
Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.
Of course, that's how it used to work!
abound
For me, it seems like the solution is some sort of seamless micropayments solution for individual articles. I don't want to subscribe to 30 different outlets, but I'd pay $1-2 per article for a good piece of journalism from those outlets.
The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees.
I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base.
[3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
* I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW
ThrowawayTestr
People used to pay $2 a day for a newspaper, what's $2 a month gonna do?
pessimizer
> My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news.
I think that this is a fundamentally wrong headed idea. I might go farther and say that you're not going to create a new model for news, you're going to discover a new model, or you're going to accept the model that you know works, and figure out how to make it conform to your values without breaking it.
The facts: people who produce a lot of what we call news want it to be read. They write it because they have made a value judgement that it has importance, and that it should be reacted to by people. They should be backed by people who share those values - and those people should be paying for the news to be made and circulated to anyone who they can convince, beg, or trick into spending their time to understand what the producers of the news (both financiers and journalists) think is important.
This is the current actual model of the news, even though it still masquerades as a strange public service model adapted from network television news where OTA channels were required to do something in return for their use of the public airwaves. This was never the print model, which is that you have a boss, and you do what he says.
The other model of the news was never in danger. People will pay for sports and celebrity news and photographs because it is entertainment. People will even pay for crime news (of the titillating type, like violent street crime, rape and murder) because it also usually is entertainment masquerading as public service. None of that is in danger. It's important to be specific about what you're talking about.
I think that the way to save the endangered part of the news is the same way we need to save everything - more collaboration tools for individuals to form into groups. I think we see this forming with things like Substack, Patreon and Locals, etc., and what we need is to make this more decentralized, and not routed through a few gatekeepers all additionally gated by banks and credit card companies. 500 people should be able to start a newsroom of 10 people with their spare pennies, and get what they believe and what they think is important to the widest audience possible. The Substacks, Patreons, etc. have shown that it is not hard to get that many people together to pay a few bucks for something they believe in, or simply like.
If there's a tl;dr: you shouldn't be paying to read journalism; if anything, people should pay you to read their journalism. I wish I could take money from 80% of the garbage I wasted my time reading. We need microdebits, not micropayments.
Apreche
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
sojournerc
Most people don't, sure. But anyone who calls themselves a journalist or has gone to j-school sure as hell better. That's literally the point. That's what journalism school teaches, or at least should; Not how to repost crap from other crap. It's simply not an excuse for an organization like the bbc.
omnicognate
I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not.
I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
edent
Author here.
Both "you"s are aimed at anyone who shared the fabrication. Journalists shouldn't have reported it uncritically, but everyone who hit the share button is culpable.
There's an old proverb - "Who is more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him?"
omnicognate
Well, I don't disagree but if you expect the general populace to spontaneously develop an immunity to this you'll be waiting a while.
Ekaros
On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap.
Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
Apreche
Their job is journalism, you would hope they have the skills, but not necessarily. The news business is not making much money, and aren’t paying big salaries. You’re not getting world renowned journalists to do a puff piece on a recently deceased celebrity. And even if they don’t use an LLM, they are still putting in the bare minimum effort for work they likely have no pride in.
ikiris
If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It’s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage.
sincerely
The article is addressed to journalists, who have not only the necessary skills but also a professional obligation to provide truthful information
Brian_K_White
The checking doesn't require anything more than what the original writing required.
There is no reason to try to excuse it
The analogy is invalid and casts doubt on those self proclaimed incredibly rare critical reasoning skills.
dfxm12
You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".
OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.
However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
alexpotato
Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc:
People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information
I like this quote for two reasons:1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.
2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting.
Couple things:
1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.
2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.