I'm not sure the primary value was due diligence. I think the value was more socially driven. You could ask anyone "did you see the front page story yesterday?" Much like you can talk about the weather and movies, newspapers were a way to connect and have a common experience.

Interesting point. I think I disagree, but if the primary value is that it was something to talk about, then it makes sense that it no longer has any value.

Also, no one talks about the weather or movies anymore either. Because people don't talk anymore. So nothing has any value now. :(

I had a similar idea in that an easy to install pre made news site + content source could help kill off the undue respect people give an article simply for it being an article.

Have it so in 5 minutes someone can have set up their own news site pre seeded with actual news, logo from a list, then all they have to do is buy a domain and write out their fake article.

Instead of putting the ideas you pulled straight from your ass in to a Facebook/reddit/hn comment box, you could make them seem like a source and just link them instead. It'd be glorious. Fake news getting flung everywhere by everyone.

I like it. sort of like a a meme generator & fake email ID generator mixed together to produce credible news article. something thats not easily shrug-off-able as seeing an onion link.

It'd be glorious until enough people start believing it's real, demanding retractions from legitimate outlets, then people killing other people based on a lie.

People have been killing people over lies for a very long time. Fake news won't start any more of that.

thats the thing, let them believe it. there will be a transition period before it becomes common knowledge that the trust in a picture with caption & link is misplaced. you'll need real due diligence before I give you a slice of my attention.

>unfortunately with the rise of internet the anybody can aggregate thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users.

Worse still, this reduced revenue for high-integrity high-overhead traditional news outlets, and led to reducing the quality of their journalism because they couldn't afford to maintain the same standards.

So even the better news reporting institutions had to get worse to stay in the game.

I have to assume the money men in the business know what they're doing, at least in the short term, but it seems like many of the moves they made to cut costs reduced or eliminated their core competency as a business.

When I pick up a copy of the NYT I want to see hard news, not "lifestyle" crap about the hot new cocktails in New York bars or a piece weighing the advantages of a sous-vide machine. That kind of stuff I can get in more detail for free from blogs.

> thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users

Wait what? I still find blogs pretty distinct from regular news, in that regular news are mostly bullshit and blogs tend to deliver actual information in a reasonable format.

They're both very flawed in different ways.

Blogs have have plenty of incentive to be quick, but not correct.

From time to time they have incentive to be incorrect too. An apology, retraction, etc is just more ad revenue at the end of the day.

"Blogs" is a useless category to generalize about: it just describes a medium, and is on an axis entirely separate from content (even the NYT has blogs, for example).

There are blogs I read that put far more effort into attempting to ensure that their analysis is correct than papers like the NYT. They don't have the resources and connections that the NYT does for hard-fact, "did this incident occur" checks, but they're far, far less likely IME to (e.g.) misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent a recently-published academic paper, pretty much regardless of the subject. On top of that, they're a lot more likely to "show their work" and their comment sections are a lot more likely to have credible rebuttals to their main claims (hell, a link to a counterargument I made in a comment was recently edited in to an article on one of the blogs I frequent).

You'd think this would be a problem mainly for factoid-type, pop-science articles about space or wildlife, but the most egregious examples I can think of come from coverage of analyses in the social sciences. This is way more damaging, since people form their opinions on policy through the accumulation of their understanding of articles like these.

I understand that journalists aren't necessarily any smarter than the rest of us when it comes to things out of their field, so there's some baseline level of inaccuracy you'd expect, but some of what you see out of papers like the NYT is just flat dishonesty. And I say that as someone who's a fan!