On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
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.
I think the BBC comparison is quite a good one. Rupert Murdoch would like to kill the BBC. Yet the BBC does pay journalists to report stories. We only really report reports.
Again, as a reader, I found Wikipedia amazing with its article on the flood in New Orleans. I found our article better than any news story. But we are rightly perceived as a threat and I'm not sure we can hold the moral high ground. I'm happy that we compete with Britannica. I'm not sure we should compete with newspapers.