
Fact based, data-oriented news - rndmize
http://s0rce.com/issue-event/copyright-and-piracy-legislation
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moxiemk1
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.

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knowtheory
I have the opposite criticism.

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.

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chrishenn
Fact based, data centric news can still be quite biased through selection of
detail, so Im not sure its any more trustworthy than an article.

Love the site though, really well done.

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phreeza
I agree on both points.

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.

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rndmize
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.

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arizerg
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?

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drx
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.

Good luck.

Edit: minor point: sources could be clickable.

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rndmize
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).

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aaronsw
Can we see this in real dollars? Hard to understand the actual trends the
industry is facing in nominal dollars.

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acuity12
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.

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simba-hiiipower
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..

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dgudkov
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>

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ramy_d
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".

Great stuff.

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jackfoxy
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.

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hyperdreams
Now that is an impressive chart. A little tough to quickly sort out at a
glance but informative nonetheless.

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ggchappell
Now that is quite an amazing site. I'll definitely be checking it out again.

BTW, a minor correction. From the "Instant Tour":

> The right column of any Summary tab is facts, the left is analysis.

I think you got "right" and "left" backwards.

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rndmize
Thanks, fixed.

