On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)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.