I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
What do people think of a “journalistic integrity” rule? I know that’s also subjective, but I’m trying to think of how to phrase a rule that is basically “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”. I guess the rule could just be “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”, with some examples of what that means and community opportunities to in some way indicate that an article is incendiary crap.
I think this is good in theory, but we would need to have a clear line and ways to determine when the line has been crossed. This also relates to discussions on news vs opinion and editorial. I could imagine a rule limiting the number of statements of opinion in an article before the rule is invoked. That’s just one idea, but whatever is decided should be so clear and measurable to help prevent fighting about if something broke the rule or not.
Sorry about the duplicate comments. Not sure if it was the server or the app I was using, but I didn’t think they posted until it was too late and I re submitted it.
Anyway, I agree to this idea in theory, but only if there are extremely clear thresholds before the rule is invoked. For example: a limit on authors’ statements of opinion. Ways that are unacceptable for the article to refer to its subjects.
Basically I think we should debate the rules we want, but once we have consensus I wouldn’t want us also fighting about what does or doesn’t break the rules. Let’s please make the rules clear and measurable.
What did The Economist ever do to you?
Seriously, a hard rule (zero) on that excludes that pub and would exclude almost everything, but would still be far easier to implement than drawing a subjective line for each post that satisfies no one.
Most places that follow an industry code of ethics prominently (in relative terms with dynamic layouts and such) display their affiliation on the site. If SPJ’s a bit too uppity for somewhere, they’re making a bad marketing decision or you’re rolling dice.