WikiTribune – Evidence-based journalism
I understand what they&#x27;re trying to do here, but beyond the problem of &quot;fake news&quot; there appears to be a deep crisis within the profession of Journalism itself. Wales is correct, in my opinion, that the proximate cause of this crisis is indeed social media. (If you don&#x27;t agree just ask yourself how often you visit the masthead of whatever newspaper you typically read, and why that might be the case.) But I just don&#x27;t see crowd-sourcing as the solution to this problem. I&#x27;m inclined to agree with @intended&#x27;s diagnosis, and I feel like the solution has to come from the profession of Journalism itself.<p>So, in attempt to not be &quot;that guy&quot; that just complains here&#x27;s what I&#x27;d suggest as a start.<p>- Institutions need to drop their relationship with Facebook et al (The Guardian has just done this [1]).<p>- There&#x27;s a few places (and in the interest of avoiding starting a flame war, I&#x27;ll forgo naming them explicitly) that parade themselves as &quot;objective&quot; sources of news by telling you they&#x27;re explaining &quot;complicated&quot; concepts in digestible ways. In my view, that&#x27;s just a rhetorical tactic to disguise what is actually just <i>advocacy journalism</i>. It&#x27;s not objective at all, and seeks to <i>form your</i> opinion rather than present you with data from which you <i>form your own</i>. These places need to either be shut down, or pivot back to what we&#x27;d traditionally consider actual reporting.<p>- I consider myself reasonably well read, and read the actual, physical paper daily (when I can, I suppose). There is a distinct difference between the content I see pushed on the internet and what&#x27;s in the traditional paper and it&#x27;s this: increasingly articles that belong on the opinion pages are pushed elsewhere, probably because they know it&#x27;ll generate more clicks elsewhere on the site because it makes either a controversial or marginally supported claim. In my view this <i>directly</i> contributes to the loss of faith people have in the Journalistic profession because it&#x27;s just so damn easy to point out instances of bias. So, hire some old school editors and fire the &quot;social media&quot; guy and put content where it belongs.<p>That&#x27;s just what I can think of off the top of my head right now, but I&#x27;m pretty convinced that &quot;crowd-sourcing&quot; is not the answer to this problem.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;digiday.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;digiday.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-ar...</a>