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

[Delirium]

Jesse W wrote:

>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 at 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: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Original_reporting

-Mark