On 27/11/2009, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably that you can't copyright information. You can copyright expression, but Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news reports.
I wonder how true that is, though. I'm sure people on Wikinews do sometimes cut 'n' paste, but I feel there's more to it than that.
It actually takes quite a bit of work to read an entire article and process it in your mind then put out a purely self-made version. And, let's take the *most* optimistic view of editors: you're still reporting a report. Some guy went out there, said what he saw, got money for it, funded by advertising.
Not always, no. Perhaps not even usually. The money often comes from subscriptions, classical example is the BBC. If anything, subscriptions are more reliable; there's less commercial pressure to bend the truth on things. And a lot of the organisations that use advertising pay companies like Reuters for their news, there's only very indirect funding by advertising.
And a lot of Rupert Murdoch's money comes from subscriptions also- he charges for satellite and cable access.
At best, all we can do is say "this guy saw what he saw and now I'm repeating it".
A lot of the time, that's all they're saying too; stories frequently aren't by reporters from their organisations.
Don't misunderstand me... I'm still on Wikipedia/Wikinews's side on this. But that's as a reader and editor, not as someone running a business.
Surely it must be true to say that Wikinews would be nothing without paid journalists from whom we aggregate content?
Not absolutely definitely. The Wikipedia doesn't have (m)any paid staff, in the unbelievably unlikely situation that the other news organisations completely disappeared, there's a reasonable chance that Wikinews could fill the gap. We also have other sites like Slashdot and Digg and so forth; these also find and disseminate news. They're not normally as reliable, but they're not *that* bad. In most news organisations, news finds them, not the other way around; and then they have a process that pretty much anyone could do, it's not to do with how they get paid.