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