Bug bounties for news - great idea. Many eyes make bugs shallow, and news is more 'open source' than code in one respect: it's much more easily and broadly comprehensible.
> We'll try to present stories almost in the form of Wikipedia, if each page were managed by a really engaging writer with a good grasp of the subject, who was being fed high-quality feedback.
Yes! I've thought about that: News sites are still newspapers printed on the web: Articles are generally static. Beyond a few corrections and additions, they don't take advantage of the new medium.
So a Wikipedia-style, continuously updated article would be great. Using the current static articles, if I want to learn about an issue I have to track down and read lots of articles which contain much redundant content. Wikipedia is not reliable. Why isn't there an article from a reliable source with the current state of things?
The one drawback is that readers need a way to learn what changed since their last visit - whether that was an hour ago, yesterday, or a month ago. I'm not re-reading the whole thing and trying to divine the differences. Diffs are too hard to read. A micro-blog of updates is my first approximation solution: Edit it to reconcile updates-of-updates and to prioritize them (a minor correction should be listed behind major new information). 'Here's what happened since you left: ...'
> Their whole culture is "ship and move on" at a deep level. And that kinda-maybe made sense in the paper distro days. But it doesn't really serve the reader now compared to what a truly native digital solution could look like.
I agree, and that's another element I would like to see added: A feedback loop with readers, like any blog would have. The NY Times has the potential to be the forum of real experts and leaders. Imagine an international relations article with comments from former ambassadors, people with direct experience of the immediate situation, even prominent leaders, along with high-quality public comments (higher than anything else on the web - serious comments only); add to that responses from the authors and editor, and appropriate updates to the story. That would be as valuable as the article itself, and the NYT would become the leading forum, arguably the only serious one, on the Internet.
The NYT (and other publications) do themselves a great disservice by allowing comments that are beneath the quality of the article, diluting the content on their sites. If they provided a high-quality, serious discussion forum, experts and leaders may think it's worth their time to participate - and may feel compelled or be left out of the debate.
> public editors
I paid attention to the NY Times' public editors. IME and IIRC, they weren't practicing journalism, they were more like unempowered customer service: They would report information that fell into their laps, not seek and investigate it, and they accepted responses from NY Times' employees in the same way - 'the editor didn't respond', and that was it. I don't miss them.
Maybe it's just too hard to do it politically within the organization. The news organizations do have plenty of outside critics; it's arguably redundant to have an internal one.
> rich entrepreneurs
Hmmm ... hardly victims. Arguably the most powerful people in the world right now. The trend of protecting the rights of the powerful is a bit bizarre to me. The people who need help aren't on Facebook's board.
Bug bounties for news - great idea. Many eyes make bugs shallow, and news is more 'open source' than code in one respect: it's much more easily and broadly comprehensible.
> We'll try to present stories almost in the form of Wikipedia, if each page were managed by a really engaging writer with a good grasp of the subject, who was being fed high-quality feedback.
Yes! I've thought about that: News sites are still newspapers printed on the web: Articles are generally static. Beyond a few corrections and additions, they don't take advantage of the new medium.
So a Wikipedia-style, continuously updated article would be great. Using the current static articles, if I want to learn about an issue I have to track down and read lots of articles which contain much redundant content. Wikipedia is not reliable. Why isn't there an article from a reliable source with the current state of things?
The one drawback is that readers need a way to learn what changed since their last visit - whether that was an hour ago, yesterday, or a month ago. I'm not re-reading the whole thing and trying to divine the differences. Diffs are too hard to read. A micro-blog of updates is my first approximation solution: Edit it to reconcile updates-of-updates and to prioritize them (a minor correction should be listed behind major new information). 'Here's what happened since you left: ...'
> Their whole culture is "ship and move on" at a deep level. And that kinda-maybe made sense in the paper distro days. But it doesn't really serve the reader now compared to what a truly native digital solution could look like.
I agree, and that's another element I would like to see added: A feedback loop with readers, like any blog would have. The NY Times has the potential to be the forum of real experts and leaders. Imagine an international relations article with comments from former ambassadors, people with direct experience of the immediate situation, even prominent leaders, along with high-quality public comments (higher than anything else on the web - serious comments only); add to that responses from the authors and editor, and appropriate updates to the story. That would be as valuable as the article itself, and the NYT would become the leading forum, arguably the only serious one, on the Internet.
The NYT (and other publications) do themselves a great disservice by allowing comments that are beneath the quality of the article, diluting the content on their sites. If they provided a high-quality, serious discussion forum, experts and leaders may think it's worth their time to participate - and may feel compelled or be left out of the debate.
> public editors
I paid attention to the NY Times' public editors. IME and IIRC, they weren't practicing journalism, they were more like unempowered customer service: They would report information that fell into their laps, not seek and investigate it, and they accepted responses from NY Times' employees in the same way - 'the editor didn't respond', and that was it. I don't miss them.
Maybe it's just too hard to do it politically within the organization. The news organizations do have plenty of outside critics; it's arguably redundant to have an internal one.
> rich entrepreneurs
Hmmm ... hardly victims. Arguably the most powerful people in the world right now. The trend of protecting the rights of the powerful is a bit bizarre to me. The people who need help aren't on Facebook's board.