On Jul 5, 2006, at 8:39 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
On Jul 5, 2006, at 8:48 PM, Gregory Maxwell
wrote:
On 7/5/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net>
wrote:
Alexa shows CNN dropping like a lead balloon, No.
38 today (they are
ranked 27). Perhaps they welcome a dig at the competition. BTW we are
even with Amazon these days.
Alexa's numbers are inconsistent. Don't count on them for anything.
There certainly are some strange phenomena but there is a pattern.
There is a generational change with canned goods going down and
participatory sites going up.
CNN *is not* our competition! Not even of Wikinews! We are *tertiary*
sources, i.e. we summarize and coordinate what secondary sources make
of actual facts on the ground (i.e. primary sources). We'd be
impoverished and in trouble without CNN, the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy and all the rest of the "mainstream media" - We Don't Have
The Money To Pay Reporters - and even if we did, that's not our
purpose.
Wikinews explicitly *does* permit, encourage, and conduct first-hand
reporting, and doing that *is* part of its purpose. It's true that it
doesn't *always* do this. Many of the articles are written by
summarizing/distilling existing reports, but that's actually true of
most organizations---a huge percentage of news articles even by
traditional news organizations are either outright syndicated from, or
at least based on reports from, major wire servies like the Associated
Press and Reuters.
See: