[WikiEN-l] Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Reuters

[Jesse W]

On Jul 5, 2006, at 9:12 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
> On Jul 5, 2006, at 10:06 PM, Jesse W wrote:
>> 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.
> We are, in a sense, parasitic on them and other original content
> providers.
Parasitic isn't the word I'd use...  Dependent, maybe.
> But they provide no significant opportunity for
> participatory input. Besides, they don't cover Pokeman nearly as well
> as we do.
Yes - those are benefits we provide, and they are important; but they 
also have benefits we lack- personal/institutional authority and money 
to hire investigators/reporters being big ones.

If you say that we should be aim to be a better first step in research 
than CNN, I might agree with you - I think we can get to that; but we 
certainly can't be a replacement.

We work best together.

Jesse Weinstein