I'd love to see more linking to primary sources in news stories. Academic writing normally has lots of references that allow you to follow things for yourself. It's understandable that newspapers wouldn't want their stories to be 30% references, and it seems that many major news sources write their online stories in the same way they would write newspaper stories, but on the internet it's actually quite possible to provide all kinds of extra detail, such as notes from the fact checkers, external references that corroborate or contest, relevant reference material, documents, perhaps even links to summaries of digested information where it wouldn't be ok to publish the raw details.
On the web, stories can still be quick and easy to read for those that want that, while providing a huge wealth of information for those that want more background or a better understanding of where a story came from.
I like the slogan 'show your working', I just think that it can be done in an even more radical way online than even this article suggests (and might also make people more prepared to pay for the work, when they can see what they're getting for their money).
Not sure I agree with the general premise that what the vast majority of consumers of journalism want is proven transparency versus reinforcement of what they already agree with and tribalism.
The article seems to completely ignore many real world factors of human psychology present in people’s relationship to consuming news as well as the complex financial forces involved, or propagandist motivations of some state controlled media.
Also doesn’t account for news sources shifting dramatically to being mediated by social media gatekeepers rather than direct relations between publisher and consumer so it doesn’t account for pervasive filtering and how well researched and transparent journalism is pushed out for tribalist click bait anyway.
Nice utopian vision but too far removed from key real world factors to be practical I think.
These points are valid, though I feel what's more dangerous than social media filters reinforcing existing beliefs is those sites and their algorithms putting such a high focus on speed rather than quality. Face it, doing a lot of careful research and producing a well written article does worse in a lot of cases than just kicking crap stories out the door as quickly as possible to show 'consistency' and ride hype trains. The technical setup meant to provide 'relevant' content seconds after something happens discourages anything more thoughtful by design.
Agreed. I think fast food vs eating healthy is a good comparison. The message in this type or article strikes me as sugesting better labeling for healthy food assuming that’s what people want while discounting the fact that fast food is cheap and easy and people buy it most often to satisfy a subjective feeling of hunger (while they have a ton of other stuff to focus on) rather than treating each meal as an objective assessment.
A lot of articles with suggestions posted here (HN) for making “things” better often focus on the mechanics of the thing and technical or procedural changes but a lot of the time ignore the reality of human behaviour and motivations. I think that relates to engineering/programming culture and focus on STEM with a lot less value placed on humanities which is then reflected in products and opinion pieces and people being frustrated that things can’t just be “fixed” through clever changes to objective mechanics and approach.
That’s drifting into other bigger topics but it’s a frustrating trend.
I wholeheartedly agree that focusing on lower level mechanics is the way to solutions and am at times frustrated by their dismissal in preference for some higher level debate across a seemingly arbitrary division. In my case health debate terms are basically down to gut flora and conditions that cause me to crave french fries. Well, I don't crave french fries anymore (or meat, and decreasingly dairy except the Super burritos :).
I've had this particular OP debate about journalism with a coworker, that maybe such a publication doesn't need mass appeal if the thought leaders would be willing to pay more for it. I throw money at thought leaders whenever I can, eg. "this album on Soundcloud is good, I'll send a dollar per track. CRAP it's 25 tracks..." and still send it all. (in retrospect, they must know people behave like this... or at least, I do now :). BUT... if it weren't authentic work, I wouldn't get that impulse, so it's not really a secret that can be exploited.
It's not the most popular thinking mode. Put the body into a healthy state, and it will crave healthy things. Like math class or starting strength training, you might just have to endure it for a little bit. But to myself, perhaps many, salad was iceberg lettuce and veganism was boca burgers. Couldn't be farther from the truth, in reality. There's even bigger money in some food industry sectors than green/vegan, I wonder who might have incentive to say being healthy is sooo expensive when the alternative is lots of their own products.
I'd very much like to find a news outlet that takes a STEM and systems oriented approach to news gathering, but as far as I'm aware no such thing exists. In my view the humanities oriented population has certainly failed to produce trustworthy news, or at least, failed to do so reliably over the long term. I attribute this to lack of systems designed to recognise that journalists have power, power corrupts and therefore journalists should expect themselves and others to become corrupted with time. News organisations seem to have little or nothing in the way of systems designed to keep them in check.
Fact checkers? No, never encountered any sign of them. And I would have done given that in the past I've been a go-to source for major news outlets on a technical topic.
References to primary sources? Journalists are by and large allergic to links, although I've noticed that the more modern the news source, the more linky they tend to be. When they use links they typically link only to their own coverage; presumably they value hits and ad views more than making it easy for people to double check their work.
Systematising how stories are selected and publishing that system? No.
Making it easy to follow a story and discover if previous stories were retracted? No. Stories are sometimes updated post publication to reflect that they were wrong, but such retractions are never publicised anywhere and short of manually polling previously visited URLs you can't find out that this has happened.
Unfortunately I believe that the lack of action taken to increase trust by the mainstream news outlets is deliberate. Journalism doesn't pay well, journalism thus attracts people for whom power is a part of the compensation package. Namely the power to influence the direction of society in ways more to their liking. I frequently encounter journalism in big league western outlets that is flatly misleading or fraudulent in ways that can only be deliberate. It has reached the point where I maintain a mental blacklist of topics, on which I automatically assume anything I read in the media is a lie designed to manipulate me (current number 1 position: anything Russia related, but there are others).
It's for this reason that I don't believe that existing mainstream media publications will ever be able to increase trust in themselves - being untrustworthy is literally a part of the job appeal. It will take a new generation of companies built along entirely different values, with different business models and which select their writers from different parts of the population (probably that means no 'professional' full time journalists, just lots of part time specialised writers).
Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to pay for it.
Let's not forget that fundamentally, journalism is little more than verified gossip (Have you heard that the UN Secretary is involved in a scandal) and its primary value is not in how it's written but the revelation of the piece of information in itself.
Sure we have investigative journalism, but most people aren't going to pay for that.
So at the end of the day, the only people who really care about journalism are journalists themselves.
The biggest change in journalism IMO is that it's finally become clear that the postmodernist was correct.
Context and perspective define truth. And so all transparency in journalism will ever do is attract the people who already agree with the context and perspective of the individual journalist as loyal readers.
What you describe is reporting, or perhaps creative non-fiction writing. Whatever you want to call it, it's not journalism.
The problem is simple: the definition of the word journalism has become kicked, bent, dented and corrupted. And no one questions it. Certainly the "journalist" don't.
Yanking tweets off Twitter - as if someone or some bot hasn't said somwthing at one time or another - is considered journalism. Having a blog (somehow) makes you a journalist. Positioning yourself as a serious and respectable journalist but then covering NYE in NYC's Time's Square - hello Anderson Cooper - is completely acceptable. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Most of what gets passed off as jounalism barely qualifies as appropriate for a grade school newspaper.
Journalism is a verb. It's what you do in the pursuit of the perfection of your craft (i.e., The Truth). It's not where you work. It's not that your work is published on the internet. No, excuse me for repeating this, journalism is a verb.
I describe both journalism and reporting. Reporting is (plane went down) journalism is all the perspectives put around it to create a story that is more than the simple generic observation.
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels.
So you're quoting Wikipedia to reference the definition of journalism? The irony of that is, for me, beyond imagination. Thanks for the laugh. Put another way...you're joking, right?
Would you use the term doctor and x-ray tech interchangeably?
Well if you want something else that says the same here is another link. If you don't think that fits with your own ideas then I am sorry I can't help you.
"Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It is also the product of these activities."
If you can get over your own arrogance I would be more than willing to engage in a discussion with you about what journalism is and isn't. But it does require actual arguments no just snarky comments.
Reporting and journalism are not the say thing. They are not synonyms. Yet, in a very Orwellian sort of way, that's how they are used. It's so effective that you are pushing back against me for stating the obvious. If that's what you consider arrogance then yes, we're done here. I can't help you. You're been sucked into the void.
How about we try this? Watch the BBC World News. Watch the French sponsored news. Heck you can even watch RT.
Then watch the non-local news of any of the major USA networks. Pay attention not only to how the work is done, but also the stories and topics covered or not. Notice too the substance vs fluff/noise ratio.
1) There is no case to argue. Obviously, I am stating the obvious. The fact that you believe otherwise proves my point. This is, half-assed hacking reporting is not journalism. Maybe you're confused because what you've been told, and you've been buying into the hacks' spin that they're doing journalism
2) "NBC News announces Hoda Kotb..." That leaves me speechless. Laughing, but otherwise words cannot express how perfect this is for this discussion.
I already provided you with links and explained the difference. That you still insist without providing anything but thruther rhetorics really says it all.
I don't want to waste my evening debating with som Alex Jones clones. I can go to infowars if I want the "mainstream media is lying to you" speech.
We generally perceive peer-reviewed science as being capable of approaching objectivity. Why can this not be true for the reporting of events as they occur as well?
The goal of science is for experiments to be repeatable. If I were to build a copy of the LHC under my house, presumably I would be able to verify any of CERN's results.
But I can't verify anything in journalism. If two reporters watched something happen and their accounts differ, who is right? No one knows, and both will be accused of bias.
Funnily enough, by at least one scientific definition of wet, water is very, very not wet. Water has an extremely low wettability, and in fact will even wet most other liquids.
I always find that phrase when used as an example of common sense funny in that regard.
"Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels."
With journalism (and propaganda) truth and falsehood are not as important as what you leave in and what you leave out and how you present it.
When it comes to propaganda it is always better to deceive people with truth than with lies because lies can be disproven. The art lies in framing snippets of truth in the correct way, leaving larger truths out, to achieve your desired goal of perception manipulation.
Objective journalism can be just as powerful as a tool of deception as it is as a tool of enlightenment.
"Plane goes down" is to some extent objectively true (disregarding philosophy for a while here) but reporting on it becomes highly subjective as the journalist in order to add more than the basic observation will be biased on what they choose to describe the event.
If that was so, there wouldn't be such a thing as the replication crisis.
Some scientific fields, math and physics, are pretty objective , but those that have been wide political interests or have fallen to post-modernism do not.
Saying they have fallen to postmodernism implies that that is somehow wrong. I think a more precise interpretation is that we live in a post-modern world where there is no objective truth and that this rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they don't want it to be a question of interpretation.
The good news is that we don't need objective truth to establish solid models.
> Let's not forget that fundamentally, journalism is little more than verified gossip
No it's not. "California Wildfire Spreads" and "USA Withdraws from Paris Agreement" are not gossip. Sure, the NYTimes will report gossip from anonymous trump aides, but that's not most journalism.
> Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism
This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up."
Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society.
"No it's not. "California Wildfire Spreads" and "USA Withdraws from Paris Agreement" are not gossip."
I didn't write it was just gossip. Read again.
"This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up." Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society."
You aren't harming society any less if you treat perspectives as if it's objective truth.
The other people who care are the people getting gossiped about.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that WSJ columnists and editorial board hacks are suddenly yakking about this topic on Twitter, at least as it pertains to The NY Times.
The public wants what the public gets. It's not the lack of a market. It's a lack of pride and effort on the part of the Fourth Estate to fulfill its duty to the democracy.
Put another way, why be a legit journalist when you can put in half the effort to be a hack and get paid nearly as well.
Not at all. The public wants what the public gets translates to: if you stop feeding the public shite they'll want that as well. So to say "there's no market" is not at all accurate.
If you need a reference look at Top 40 radio. It's on. It plays. The masses consume it. If you swappes out any 10 songs for example - which btw naturally happens - no one would notice. They wouldn't change the station.
The "there's no market" excuse was created by the media to cover their lazy asses. The Truth is they can't even analyze themselves. How are they going to properly serve the rest of us?
In the context of the concept of The Fourth Estate there is no choice. A _journalist's_ obligation is to seek The Truth and info the masses. Period.
The fact that there's excessive noise is no excuse for journalists giving up their standards and joining the noise - at which point they are no longer journalists.
Cost is not the issue. Availability and "brand reputation" is. Fox News can pass itself off as "news" because CNN and MSNBC are just as substanceless. What well know entity can we point to and say "now _that_ is journalism"?
Blaming the public for the lazy media is well...um...lazy. And clear indication of a lack of understanding if the responsibilities that come along with the right of a free press. The press has shunned their responsibilities. But that's the public's fault? Um...no!
Journalism is a lot of things. Seeking the truth might be a goal for some journalists but the be all end all definition of journalism it certainly aint.
Furthermore making truth the only way to define journalism basically render it non-existing as there is no objective way to define "The Truth". On top of that even if we interpret "seeking the truth" liberally you still end up agreeing with what I wrote as seeking is not the same as finding and thuse we are back to it just being interpretations.
You are proving my point and is in fact one of those who keep discussion journalism as something with some higher goal than what people want to pay for.
Again the market has spoken it doesn't care about your version of "high quality".
It's no ones fault it's just how it is and you just can't get to terms with that. That's a 'you' problem, nothing else.
We have what, six major news orgs in the USA (3 networks + CNN, MSNBC and Fox). And a handful of semi-relevant newspapers and magazines.
And aside from political leaning there is no difference between them. I take it you think that's because it's wise to swim in a red ocean? Because they are all chasing the same market? That doesn't make any sense.
I get it, not every outlet can be The Economist. But to call the fluff yacked out by (say) Newsweek journalism is pure fantasy.
In a democracy The Fouth Estate has certain responsibilities. These are responibilites that exist beyond the restriction of "market." To confuse this with commodity reporting is, at best, naive.
Again, I'll point you to Top 40 radio. There are a fair number of times where uniqueness - and dare I say quality - rises to the top. More importantly ulimately they accept and embrace what's there. The dial doesn't move.
I'll also point you to cable TV vs "traditional" TV. Game of Thrones, Sapranos, Walking Dead, etc., etc. The market went for that.
Star Wars was shunned and not expected to be what it became.
You're blaming the market and there's minimal - if any - opportunity for the market shows it wants otherwise. Instead we get "me too" reporting being passed off as journalism. And you believe this LCD approach is market driven. God bless you.
All this would be comical if the healthiness of The Fourth Estate wasn't so important. As it is, I'm having to convince someone of decent pedigree that journalism and reporting isn't the same thing. They are not. Cats are not dogs either.
I said SEEK the truth. That doesn't mean you'll attain it. But a journalist still seeks it. Why? Because that is journalism.
A reporter on the other hand parrots the press release spin that's fed to them. They gladly roll over and play stupid. They don't seek. They regurgitate. They do softball interviews. They skip the real questions. They can't be bothered. They also, because it's cool and prestigious call themselves journalists.
These reporters aren't real journalists any more than the bagels at Dunkin Donuts are really bagels.
I didn't say anything about "high quality." I'm do here. Have a nice day.
Yes, you did which as I said becomes meaningless statement which proves my point that journalism IS just perspectives regardless of intent. So thanks for proving my point.
> Journalism's biggest strength is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to pay for it.
I hardly think that you have identified journalism's biggest achilles heel.
Journalism as a business and the journalists who work within it, by and large, do not insist on the concept of quality journalism, or think that most people care, let alone that they care enough to pay for it.
If they did then they would mainly be producing meticulously researched and in depth content with no advertising and paywalls as default.
While this does exist, it is the periphery of journalism. The mainstream within the industry being the concept of presenting news as team sports to capture market segments for advertisers.
Also, context and perspective do not define truth. Logically, the whole truth regarding an event must contain the perspectives and contexts relating to it, rather than being defined by them.
I don't know, in the UK the discussions about the future of journalism centre more around press regulation and what are the acceptable limits of tabloid excess.
The discussion about the future of journalism is based on the idea of quality journalism and the fact that in order for journalism and medias to survive quality needs to be improved.
That's the same in the UK, the US or Denmark for that matter as all of them are struggling with the same issues.
or maybe you only hang out with tabloid journalists?
Do any search on google about journalism and the future of journalism and the majority discussion isn't about regulation or tabloid (tabloid is way to popular to be under danger)
I have been involved in several newspaper projects both one trying to be extreme high quality and one which was supposed to be free.
Regulation have never been a serious discussion point when it comes to discussing journalism, so yes perhaps we do hang out with different journalists.
Only two of them are tabloid. The rest are broadsheet and telly.
In the UK, regulation is a serious discussion point when discussing journalism, both from the perspective of things like the tabloid phone hacking and also from the perspective of restrictions placed on broadsheet reporting, e.g. the Trafigura super-injunction.
Also, what role were you taking in the newspaper projects you were involved with?
One I was responsible for advertising and digital strategy.
The other I helped create the entire newspaper both when it came to design and the content as one of my partners were lead investor in it.
They both failed for two different reasons, Despite the general love for the first newspaper and it's content (think International Herald Tribune) not enough wanted to pay for it.
The other was an attempt to establish a free danish national omnibus newspaper which failed because of problems with distribution.
I have also been advising a few online journalistic magazines. One of them is doing really well by following a donation model ala the one used on brainpickings.org.
Regulation is always a discussion but it's not the discussion that journalist normally discusses when they discuss journalism as tabloids aren't the only types of newspapers there are so I would still question the idea that regulation is really the core discussion when it comes to journalism.
One cost would be that this would make a special case out of investigation journalism, where the journalists often cannot reveal their sources. Especially in cases where retribution against the source could end in death.
Since that is probably the most important and consequential type of journalism, I'd expect facile attacks claiming investigative journalism "isn't transparent" if this takes off.
The obvious and easy protection against such an attack is to critically read multiple sources and be familiar with journalists' track records over time. So I'm afraid we don't have workable protections against this attack atm. :)
Why would they need to claim it? The way you've set it up it's vacuously true. The difference between Pizzagate and investigative journalism as you've defined it is reputation. And when trust in the press is lost what separates the curds and the whey is evidence which a fabricated story cannot provide.
The protection you offer even in the ideal case is worthless when there isn't trust that a journalist will bend to political pressure, financial incentives, threats, or to push their own or their publisher's agenda.
Saying that people need to "crtitically read" is just intellectual grandstanding.
> The difference between Pizzagate and investigative journalism as you've defined it is reputation.
Not with the example you've given. Investigative journalism is one form of journalism. I won't attempt to define journalism except to say the forms its stories take do not include posting a tweet in reference to someone's sentence fragment from a Facebook status. That may be a part of the "raw material" of a story that covers how conspiracy theories begin and spread. But neither that raw material nor the journalistic stories which essentially just tracked the effect of a wild conspiracy theory on a national election are examples of investigative journalism. (There may be pieces of actual investigative journalism wrt Pizzagate, but I haven't read them.)
But let's say we compare Seymour Hersh's story on the killing of Bin Laden and some random Facebook fake news story pretending to be a piece of investigative journalism. At least at present we're not at a point where a fake news artist can do a good enough job mimicking a piece of serious investigative journalism. But disregarding that, the main difference there would be reputation.
But that isn't a small difference. "Reputation" covers a lot of ground-- it includes the publication and the journalist. It also includes the age of the publication, its intended audience, its business model, and even whether the name of the publication appears to have been chosen to be similar to the name of a more reputable publication.
That certainly doesn't mean I reflexively accept all of Hersh's claims-- I do like other non-experts on the subject and withhold judgment until other experts begin to assess the veracity of his story over time. But it does mean that I can reject out of hand the viral Facebook link to some url that looks like "cbsnews.com" if you squint. I can save time and not read it at all based on reputation alone.
> And when trust in the press is lost what separates the curds and the whey is evidence which a fabricated story cannot provide.
It depends on why the trust was lost. If it was because a critical mass of journalists' track records got worse over time, then you're right.
On the other hand, if it is because a critical mass of readers can't tell the difference between a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation of media corruption and a click-bait website on Facebook, asking them to "weigh the evidence we're showing you for yourselves" isn't going to solve anything.
As I was suggesting in another post, perhaps there could be some sort of system for peer review of anonymous sources? So when news outlet A wants to use an anonymous source, they request a reviewer who'll be randomly assigned from another news outlet B, then this person will independently verify the anonymous source and give their approval.
Former news editor here. When I was working for a daily metro paper, we had toyed around with ways to expose some of this "show your work" information as metadata in the online editions. Sort of like EXIF data for a photo, but for a news story. If a story mentioned an event at a particular location, the metadata might include coordinates for that location. The benefit of the metadata approach is that it's much more easily consumable by machines, but we can still use it ourselves on the frontend (e.g. show a map of the location).
Google tried getting publishers to do the same thing, but I think it eventually realized that they weren't going to get buy-in if it meant reporters and editors had to do the extra work of compiling the metadata, so they decided to just automate everything and use natural language processing to extract the metadata.
For all the talk about transparency, there's not much about actually providing a source for your claims. That's something a lot of media outlets are failing at, with both offline sources and online often lacking proper source links or references and those that do have them preferring to link to secondary and tertiary sources rather than the original.
Still, transparency is getting better, and both source links and the other things mentioned in the article (like claims for comment, disclosing financial ties/free products, and talks about what they know/don't know) are becoming more common now.
A problem with this is regarding anonymous sources, in which it's often necessary to protect the identity of the source.
Perhaps some sort of verification network, in which one news outlet is randomly assigned another outlet who must also independently verify the anonymous source?
True, never thought about anonymous sources. In that case, some sort of verification network could work okay, though it's always going to be tradeoffs regardless of what route is taken.
However, there's no excuse for stories based on public sources not to link to or provide a reference for those sources. If your source is another news site, blog, wiki page, forum post, video, etc... then you should damn well be linking to the original. Doing otherwise is like taking ownership of someone else's work, especially if you do what some sleazy sites do and rehost the original work as well.
This is one of my biggest complaints with online articles.
If you mention a new research paper making a wild claim, why not share the publication info? By omitting the source, they make it harder for people to verify the veracity of their claims.
There's going to be cases where it's not feasible to provide all sources, but they could still make an effort. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.
It's deliberate. The journalists know they're making a wild claim, and by asserting in the story that it's based on a "study" by "experts" at the University of Whatever but not actually linking to the original paper, the story benefits from ambient trust in the scientific system regardless of whether it is justified in this particular instance. If the underlying study was easily findable then annoying comment posters might actually read it and discover that the claim which is getting so many juicy clicks is nonsense/misleading/etc.
This is one of the key problems facing journalism: if journalists started taking measures to improve the reliability of their output they'd take a short term hit to profitability which they cannot afford.
I recently did a bit of investigative journalism myself on this very topic:
Briefly, mainstream media (Times of London, NY Times, Economist etc) started claiming that there were hundreds of thousands of Russian controlled bots posting pro-Brexit tweets in the runup to the UK/EU referendum. It was outright stated that the vote was manipulated and this claim was picked up and repeated by the British Prime Minister.
The story was based on an academic study that was not linked to or even named anywhere. However the academics in question did interviews for the media where they bigged up their results. It took some digging but I was able to find an early draft of their paper online (the only copy anywhere) which immediately raised huge red flags: the paper appeared to be deliberately obfuscated, it made claims that weren't backed by its own data and the claims it did make were patently absurd e.g. they defined a "bot" as including anyone who sometimes posted after midnight. The low quality of the paper would have been detected by comment posters immediately if it'd been more easily discoverable. Indeed it became clear that the story's foundations were weak to the point of collapse.
Interestingly after I published this one of the journalists at the Economist reached out to me to ask some questions about it. He'd done a story based on that paper which came across as very biased and I told him that. He agreed with me, at least to some extent, and told me the story had originally been much more equivocal but it'd been taken out in editing. Still, we had a decent conversation about it. I also sent it to the author of the relevant article at The Times of London and got a response indicating he'd read it, but of course, nothing ever happened there.
There are of course many other examples from pop psychological, miracle cures and so on where primary sources are either abused or are actually weak/bogus to begin with, and where demanding a higher standard of accuracy would mean the stories never got published at all.
It's a new model of journalism in search of a rare breed of news consumer: one who cares to read reporters' profiles, source documents, and descriptions of how reports are gathered.
Good writeup and I agree with the sentiment that news sources need to disclosure their sources & biases.
However, we are entering into a strange age where information can be fabricated so well that we won't be able to reliably trust any information on a screen, especially as the timestamp exceeds what a Desktop computer would take to generate such data.
On the web, stories can still be quick and easy to read for those that want that, while providing a huge wealth of information for those that want more background or a better understanding of where a story came from.
I like the slogan 'show your working', I just think that it can be done in an even more radical way online than even this article suggests (and might also make people more prepared to pay for the work, when they can see what they're getting for their money).