While I think this is a great idea (and similar to things I've been slowly working on in spare time), I don't think that the execution really does "Fair" or "Fact based" justice.
The facts that are presented are pretty minimal - while I may agree with some of the conclusions that seem to be pushed by it, it doesn't feel like a general-use tool in order to provide better information. It feels like a presentation with specific goals.
EDIT:
I think a better way of phrasing what bothers me about this is:
It focuses on making the presentation of the data compelling. That's a good thing - if the presentation is compelling, people are likely to engage and learn. However, here that seems to have been accomplished in an "editorial" way - by hand-selecting things. Compelling presentation of data will be meaningful and honest when it can happen with minimal editorial influence. This is (or at least appears to be) completely hand-selected.
This feels like data porn. There's no love in here. I'm not sure why I should read through this data. I don't know what the point is, or what relevance it has to ... well anything.
Data display is not the same as analysis.
This is one of the reasons why i hate all the stupid supposed "data-visualizations" images that people always repost from the net. They don't provide people context for the information they're supposedly displaying, nor any way for people to view the source of the analyses.
In that light, i am delighted that a site like this provides ways to interact w/ the data and dive back to the source of the data. And I do hope that these guys will keep experimenting, but I kind of have a "what's the point?" reaction at the moment.
The material we currently have on the site is indeed hand-selected, and on multiple levels. We currently do all the research for the articles, which means the preference of news sources that my partner and I have comes into play. On top of that, we also choose which facts/data we feel are most relevant and that's what goes on the site; all of which gives the content a certain bias.
It is our objective to get away from that as much as possible. First, personal source bias is pretty difficult to escape, but if our users send us facts/corrections, with sources, this not only decreases the research we have to do (and likelihood we fall back on our defaults), but also gives a much wider range of sources than we would ever have ourselves.
Second, the information that appears in the Summary tabs will always be selected by us. The Minutiae tab serves as the catch-all for information we didn't think important enough for the summary tab, so that if you feel you aren't getting a complete enough picture from the Summary tabs, you can always go to Minutiae or even Sources for additional detail (and escape whatever selection bias we might have).
There's still the problem that we decide what's useful as far as user contributions, but I think that since we're aiming for factual info, this is easier than it might appear. As long as its accurate, we'll consider adding it, and the only question is a matter of relevance.
One thing that is missing from much mainstream news reporting is linking to/referencing primary data in an accessible fashion, which this site seems to do(except the links are not clickable), so that's a development in the right direction.
The links being clickable is a CMS issue, and one that's been on the "get to it eventually" list for a while. It's definitely something we intend to have though.
Currently, I wouldn't consider us much more trustworthy than any other news source, but this is something we intend to combat with user feedback/corrections. Every fact we list or paragraph of analysis has a small [!] link after it, which brings up a form to send in feedback on the item it's appended to. This is meant to make it as easy as possible for our users to contribute if they see a mistake, or feel something is missing, etc.
As far as selection goes, this is something that's hard to get away from; the main reason we have the Minutiae tabs is so we can push information we consider to be less important off the summary tab, but still have it available for those that want more info/details.
Other than that, all I can say is that we are extremely interested in presenting things accurately and completely (though with just two of us, we're rather pressed for time currently).
It's our (rndmize and my) attempt at creating a sane approach to the news. do you feel like something like this useful? if not, how can we make it more so?
This (fact-based news) has been at the back of my mind for a long time.
If you stick with it and it ends up working out, this could be the start of something really interesting.
What are your plans to monetize? It seems that the NPR model works somewhat, but maybe there are other ways.
I worry that the market for nonsensationalized news might be small, but again, you have NPR as an example, so at least there's a niche. Worst case, this could probably work as a hobby, facts are useful in that once you put them on your site, they don't have to be updated much.
We're aiming for a subscription model ideally; we've seen a good number of complaints about how a lot of ad-supported news often has link-bait titles, excessive internal linking, is sensational/poorly researched and so on, none of which is surprising given their primary objective is to increase pageviews.
On the flip side, we don't want to lock the majority of content behind paywalls, which seems to be the way a lot of better news sources seem to be going today.
We'd like to have all our content be accessible for free, and subscribers would get various additional benefits: no ads, the ability to manipulate charts and graphs more directly (perhaps a way to adjust the scope beyond what we display, make projections and share with friends), mobile app with nice interface that requires subbed account, etc.
As for the market - we think it might be possible to serve as a secondary news source for people that want hard info on an issue/event, or the background/context to get up to speed on something (hopefully the range of people interested in this would cross party lines and even into groups that don't have the time or interest to keep up with politics on a daily basis).
++ Supporting facts/sources: relatively objective news sources that back up their material are definitely an interesting idea to me
+ General visual style: clean, modern, easy on the eye, no major flaws that jumped out at me
And some hopefully constructive criticisms:
- Context/scannability: even if you're going to provide information in depth, I think some sort of summary and a guiding narrative would be helpful (by analogy with "inverted pyramid" writing style for plain text articles) or I'm not going to know why I should care unless I already know the subject anyway and I'm not going to find my way around fast enough to get into the deeper material
- Discoverability: because there is no narrative path to guide me through the content there is also nothing to highlight interesting patterns in all that data or key points unless either they stick out like a sore thumb on a graphic or I find a relevant bit of text in one or other of the tabbed sections; also, there are so many tabs and separate displays that I find it hard to browse while keeping track of what I've seen already
- Navigation: occasional visual details don't quite work, e.g., a two-tab layout with two columns underneath, where the tab labels look like misaligned column headings; navigation is generally rather complicated because there are so many show/hide options, and the navigation controls are not as visually distinct from things like static summary/heading information as they could be
That's an interesting way to put it. We've focused on the "pull" method for a few years with MuckRock.com, and I'd never thought of that but it speaks to why we've gotten the type of audience/userbase we have.
Selectable axioms and interests. If I choose "USA politics" and "deficit spending = bad" then feed me a short blurb when the US federal debt reaches the next $XT milestone.
The key missing from news is "axioms": fundamental notions which mold what the reader is interested in and how news is perceived. (Gotta run, more later if I can...)
Data is great, it lets you make your own conclusions. There still remains an element of trust though, in the provider of the data. It's certainly a step above bloat-filled news articles though.
Agreed. And I like the concept as well, but (even in just briefly poking around the few topics on the site) I also felt a lack of trust. This has less to do with anything particular to the site and is more so related to the fact that with pure data, and with little-to-no context, it is impossible to discern any potential biases that one could otherwise pick-up on. Furthermore there is no information on how data is selected (two guys sitting in a room copying Wikipedia? I’m not saying that’s the case here, but how would one know? And even if it were from absolutely reputable sources, any human intervention in selecting and deciding which data to include/not include makes it hard to claim real objectivity).
I think an interesting (though much harder to develop) implementation of this concept would be to have it powered by a complex algorithm that combs the web for sources and pulls consistent data from them. Such a system would essentially verify data accuracy through identifying consistency across a massive number of sources and prevent any selection bias. Just a thought..
Glad to see that more and more people think about data-driven blogging. We've done small project[1] in this area -- embeddable live trend charts based on Google Finance and Google Analytics data where trends can be commented right in charts. Initially, we thought this could help explain trend reasons. But we saw no traction and switched to another project.
[1] http://explainum.com
I really liked this. I liked how easy it was to see all the data, even if it wasn't the most relevant data, and if it wasn't very relevant I would have liked to be able to fish into sources. I just wish there was an easy way to for me to delve into those sources, or find related news from other sites. Like a "these articles give opinion on this issue".
I like it. It's a much more polished version of something I tried to do with http://www.facster.com back in 2005. I was writing blog style stories to go with queries of statistical abstract data. The stories are gone now, but you can still query the DB.
The facts that are presented are pretty minimal - while I may agree with some of the conclusions that seem to be pushed by it, it doesn't feel like a general-use tool in order to provide better information. It feels like a presentation with specific goals.
EDIT: I think a better way of phrasing what bothers me about this is: It focuses on making the presentation of the data compelling. That's a good thing - if the presentation is compelling, people are likely to engage and learn. However, here that seems to have been accomplished in an "editorial" way - by hand-selecting things. Compelling presentation of data will be meaningful and honest when it can happen with minimal editorial influence. This is (or at least appears to be) completely hand-selected.