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Most news come either from news agencies ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency ) and and are rewritten by news sites and papers.

Basically they get a text that states facts and they rewrite it.

This happens since actual reporting is costy: paper press has no money to send people everywhere. In fact many websites dont even pay to the agencies - they just parrot the news from other paper or website. This article quotes the "Guardian" and few other sources. So it seems it is not an original source.

Being an original source is not only costy. Problem is that others will parrot you - and you dont get any money for that.

Putting some interns to sit all day and parrot 4 articles per day is surprisingly easy if you can get some photos.

On a side note: I read an article when a real reporter joined a boiler room website, where they were paid to manufacture 4-8 fake articles per day. Basically fake news, attacks on political opponents, "commentary" and similar. They basically were paid to invent lies all day - with one caveat - try to not get sued. Hard to debunk a room that produces say 6 x 4 = 24 fake articles per day. That's how those russian KGB propaganda mills operate. They mostly parrot and quote each other. Some unknown website writes blantant lies, this is parroted to an article - and then those fake news sites parrot it more and quote some source that nobody from Italy heard about (often the source intentionally gets lost in the cycle of quotes). You can easily generate lies that cause outrage.



Newsletters, especially paid subscriptions, are thriving right now. It seems some people grab onto actual reporting when they find it.


I can't think of any newsletter I have read that does reporting, as distinct from commentary/analysis.


Aka “malignant citogenesis” to the xkcd generation.




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