And for accusing someone of dropping links you sure seem to drop a lot of links to your news site Newslines. Newslines seems to be little more than a celebrity gossip engine. Are you attacking Grasswire because you see them as a competitor?

My site is not a competitor to Grasswire. Grasswire is an attempt to fact check news streams. Newslines is a news archive with no fact checking at all. As I said, I used to run a fact-checking site, so I have some experience in the area, and a continuing interest in how fact-checking may work.

I am interested in all of the new news entrants, and you will see my comments on posts about Infobitt, Grasswire, Inside.com and other sites in many places across the net. That said, I have not directly criticized his site, and only said that I think fact checking in general is over rated. Unfortunately, Austen has taken my comments as a personal attack on him. He should grow a thicker skin.

I think getting feedback, positive or negative, from the community is extremely valuable. Your observation that my site is "a celebrity gossip engine" is useful to me, even though you intended it as an insult. Thanks.

I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valuable enough to waste time on. I'd like to think that if he could spend 30 seconds to get that .01% of important news he would feel differently. But, of course, we'll never know.

How is this addressing the frustrations you claim to have in common with Swartz?

Many people think the news is completely junk:

http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informatio...

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...

http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-Episode...

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. 99.9% of news is garbage, .01% of news is valuable. I want to make it easy for people to get that .01%.

> Perhaps you should take Swartz advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.

I think news is badly broken, and I'm trying to fix it. I don't understand what problem you have with that.

As for Grasswire, I think your solution to trying to improve the news won't work. As someone who previously ran a collaborative fact-checking site (which included a factcheck watch that monitored the main fact-checking sites), I think fact checking is over-rated. Most people are not really that interested in fact-checking the news, or in even reading fact checks. Fact checks themselves are in most cases just as biased as the reports they claim to fact check.

Nonetheless, I am genuinely interested to see how it works out for you.