
An Airline Geek Trying to Build a Media Giant with No Reporters - raleighm
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-27/the-airline-geek-trying-to-build-a-media-giant-with-no-reporters
======
sgnelson
I have to ask a question,and this question has bothered me for a while: Do we
absolutely have to have breaking news at the speed of light? Can most people
not wait a couple of hours before they hear about the latest tragedy or event?

All I've ever seen from citizen journalists (on Reddit/Twitter/etc.) is a
bunch of typically wrong rumors, data and analysis. Every once in a while they
get it right, but that's the rare exception. The reason people watch CNN et al
is because biases or not, they're somewhat trusted to at least get the
majority of their facts correct (and see below as to why I think all of these
wishy washy adjectives).

I think this goes back into the curse of the 24 hour news cycle. It creates
demand for sensationalism, "breaking" news. The speed that these news networks
feel that they have to be have the exclusive does lead to errors, which leads
to less trustworthiness in their reporting.

I just don't see the necessity of constant up to the minute news reporting. I
consider myself a news junkie, but to me the important questions are usually
answered after the fact anyways: "Why did this happen and what does it mean?"

I also have to wonder if this is part of our Constantly Connected Culture.
People have to have their smart phone and be connected to every event
constantly. I don't know if these phenomenon are somehow connected, but I
would guess they are.

But again, are people that impatient about facts?

~~~
MR4D
Yes they are. Next time you're in a public place, look at all the people
surfing on their phone.

They're going after the immediate dopamine hit that you get from little tiny
updates of new information. [1] So, yes, many (most?) people actually do need
it, or they will suffer withdrawal symptoms from the lack of dopamine.

If you're a news channel without frequent updates, then you get lost in the
dust, apparently. Interestingly (from my perspective at least), it seems that
the info doesn't even have to be correct, but just what I call "gap-filler"
(think of all the talking heads who speculate on things endlessly before the
facts start to come in), and you can still make money - you just have to have
information (no matter how irrelevant it is).

To me it surely looks like a lost cause unless we can start to wake up out of
this trance. Where's Wesley Crusher when we need him? [2]

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/exploitin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/exploiting-
the-neuroscience-of-internet-addiction/259820/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_\(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation\))

~~~
5555624
> Next time you're in a public place, look at all the people surfing on their
> phone.

But are they looking at the news? While I see people surfing on their phones,
when I do see their screens they're texting, looking at Facebook, playing a
game -- they aren't on CNN (or some other news site).

Other than breaking news, how often does the news get updated on a newspaper's
web site? While FoxNews updates articles throughout the day (or at least moves
them around); I don't see a lot of new articles on "The Washington Post" web
site throughout the day.

------
pinko
Although I'm willing to believe this kind of low-latency news-mining tech may
be quite robust against noise, it seems like it would be difficult or
impossible to filter real news from intentional, hostile, targeted false news
injected by people who understand the basic principles upon which the tech is
based.

~~~
mc32
If you take that approach and add Musk's source truthfulness rating[1], then
perhaps we'll have something.

Something's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not
information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump
doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to
"counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted fourth estate.

[1]money.cnn.com/2018/05/23/technology/elon-musk-media/index.html

~~~
bilbo0s
"...If you take that approach and add Musk's source truthfulness rating[1]..."

Not sure resurrecting Pravda is the best way to ascertain the veracity of
facts with authority. Pravda was a joke.

That said, the unfortunate reality is that ALL of these proposals are
predicated on trust. Do you trust whatever news source you are consuming? Do
you trust whatever news source rating platform you are consuming? Etc etc.

Nowadays, it's probably best just to accept that every article or comment you
see on the internet is possibly part of a well tuned professional manipulation
campaign. This goes DOUBLY for any article or comment that is even remotely
political. Including this comment, your comment, and every other comment on
this thread.

That's just the nature of the world in which we currently live. A sad reality
is that, in the end, we'll all be effectively choosing the sources, the data
and the stories we wish to believe. And those choices will be largely informed
by our pre-existing biases.

~~~
mc32
Sure, I think he's frustrated with the media's reporting on him. And obvs the
Pravda moniker was a tongue in cheek dig at them. Still, I'm intrigued by the
idea of a news source rating system --like a seller's rating on Amazon, eBay.
Obvs those are skewed and unscientific, but something along those lines will
be better than what we have today.

From the reaction from some journos, it's clear some don't like the idea being
accountable for their reporting.

~~~
notahacker
> Obvs those are skewed and unscientific, but something along those lines will
> be better than what we have today.

Why? Surely what you'll actually get is one political faction dominating
[parts of] the site and doing their utmost to downvote anything that
contradicts their worldview to oblivion and (to a somewhat lesser extent)
upvote probably false stuff that happens to support it. It's very much a
winner-takes-all battle, because people that just want to read stuff or fact
check aren't going to stick around if it obviously skews alt-right or far-
left, and probably not even if it has an allegiance to one relatively moderate
political coalition or another. If you want to know what a particular faction
thinks are the important news stories of the day it probably has a subreddit
anyway. The alternative to winner-takes-all is top-down curation, which is
basically what the media does anyway, usually being more open about their
partisanship, and I'm not sure _write less unfavourable stuff about Elon Musk
companies_ is the best starting point for curation.

And if your site is started with the premise that the media cannot be trusted,
there's a good chance the people that choose to spend most of their time there
will be those with even less regard for truth and objectivity. (Case in point:
As soon as Elon posted about "who owns the press", his timeline became
dominated by people arguing that he meant "the Jews" who certainly had the
numbers to drown out any useful observations Elon might actually have wanted
make on the subject)

~~~
mc32
I think there is a large swath of Americans (presumable in other countries
people feel the way) who are moderate and would welcome a news rating system.
I'm talking about Bernie bros who broke for Trump, or Repubs who broke for
Hillary, for example. I'm sure there are volumes of regular people who would
like to know that what they are reading is based on fact, rather then
interpretation.

Just today, we had someone from the NYT RT a picture of illegal immigrants
during the Obama admin and pinned it on Trump --when people called it out, he
re-framed the issue. Of course with Musk it's about misrepresenting statistics
and making mountain out of mole hills from minor production issues. Then there
is the whole aspect of using a small unverified studies to call for one type
of action or another in favor of one group or another. News have become
something akin to a rumour mill and echo chamber than an organ which diffuses
unframed news.

~~~
bilbo0s
"... I'm sure there are volumes of regular people who would like to know that
what they are reading is based on fact, rather then interpretation..."

How would a news ratings agency tell you that?

The only thing ratings agencies tell you, is how the public voted on news
agencies. (Or if the ratings agencies don't allow the public to vote, then the
only thing they tell you is what THEY feel is "true".)

Either way, they are no more worthy of our trust than the media outlets they
purport to be "rating".

It's EXTREMELY likely that they'll be just another cog in the machinery of
professional manipulation campaigns. (For all we know, it's likely a
professional manipulation campaign that wants to start the "ratings agency" in
the first place.) That's just the reality of the world we live in right now.
You just have to be skeptical of everything you see like that.

------
Gravityloss
This is pretty damn dangerous. False news will spread extremely fast.

~~~
asdfologist
How's this any worse than Trump spreading falsehoods on Twitter to a massive
audience?

~~~
elsurudo
He never said it was worse, just that it is bad. Both of these are bad.

------
SadWebDeveloper
Isn't this what reddit already does? a media giant with no reporters but
instead of robots using humans scraping content for fictional internet points
(karma)

------
Jeff_Brown
Google's (now public) PageRank algorithm isn't that complicated, and it
brought an astounding improvement in our ability to find what we wanted. There
might in fact be a simple algorithm for determining who to trust -- but a
closed-source algorithm seems like it cannot by definition go very far to
improve media transparency.

If we had more kinds of metadata publicly available -- "[person] trusts
[person]", "[person] found [article] helpful for understanding [topic]",
"[person] testifies that [person] wrote a good PhD dissertation on [topic]",
etc. -- we could publicly experiment with algorithms like, "restrict results
to people whose writings have been contradicted fewer times than they have
been endorsed", or "to people trusted by people I trust," or "to persons X for
whom at least 50 other persons Y testify that X helped them understand
[topic]," or whatever.

Hypergraph databases (e.g. Grakn, HypergraphDb) and logic programming
languages (e.g. Datalog) already let us express arbitrary metadata -- anything
expressible, as far as I am aware.

Getting ordinary users to state their thoughts (and their search queries over
those thoughts) in an easily machine-readable manner might be tough. For that
purpose I wrote a language[1,2], extremely close to natural language, that
allows such machine-readable expression of higher-order relationship
information.

[1] Why use Hash: [https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text/b...](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text/blob/master/Hash/why-use-hash.md)

[2] How to use Hash: [https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text/b...](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text/blob/master/Hash/the-hash-language.md)

------
personlurking
FYI: The article isn't about aviation

------
rmason
If you want to be in the know when news is breaking I've found the Banjo app
to be invaluable. If something is happening in say Provo, you're patched into
the local newspapers, TV and radio stations and the Twitter from locals.

Sure sometimes there are errors but when multiple people are saying something
it's got a pretty good chance of being right. But the national media gets
things wrong as well. Often you're in the know thirty to sixty minutes ahead
of national media and with more details - if that's important to you.

------
jnaina
My brain somehow read this as an An American Greek Trying to Build a Media
Giant with No Reporters.

Maybe I’m reading too much Huffington Post

