Abusive newsrooms with no recourse aren't exactly innocent parties. There are still thousands of people desperate to be reporters. The newsrooms certainly aren't being damaged by this sort of site.

I agree that abusive newsrooms are bad. But the question remains: how do you discriminate between genuine anonymous allegations and false anonymous allegations? People, regardless of their positions in society, can be shitty. Heck, for all we know, the only people writing on this site are the abusive newsrooms themselves trying to smear their competitors - thus funneling more people towards the abusive newsrooms.

> Sistrunk reads all reviews before they are published and verifies each author’s email address to make sure it’s not being reused to submit reviews for the same station more than once.

Sounds like they're partially verified. Does that change you how you feel about this at all?

Not really sure how that is considered as verification. Sistrunk is spending effort that does not give confidence that the reviews are based on factual events and reviewers are accountable, but that is a tough ask even for established new sites.

Obviously that's not verification of the factual contents of a review, but it does prevent sockpuppeting and Sybil attacks and the like.

Do you really limit yourself exclusively to corroborated facts when judging things? That seems untenable; you just can't find enough information that meets such a high bar to make everyday judgment calls. They should obviously be given much more weight, but would you really plug your ears and close your eyes to unverified word-of-mouth rumors from the grapevine? This site may actually be more reliable than word-of-mouth rumors, because it can be difficult to know if it's one person with an axe to grind spreading a rumor to many, many people, or actually many people reporting the same thing.

We could say the same thing about news sites themselves.

If we allow our news to be unverified, surely we can allow unverified opinions of the news makers themselves to stand.