On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Ian Woollard <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It actually takes quite a bit of work to read an entire article and >> process it in your mind then put out a purely self-made version. And, >> let's take the *most* optimistic view of editors: you're still >> reporting a report. Some guy went out there, said what he saw, got >> money for it, funded by advertising. > > Not always, no. Perhaps not even usually. The money often comes from > subscriptions, classical example is the BBC. If anything, > subscriptions are more reliable; there's less commercial pressure to > bend the truth on things. And a lot of the organisations that use > advertising pay companies like Reuters for their news, there's only > very indirect funding by advertising. I think the BBC comparison is quite a good one. Rupert Murdoch would like to kill the BBC. Yet the BBC does pay journalists to report stories. We only really report reports. Again, as a reader, I found Wikipedia amazing with its article on the flood in New Orleans. I found our article better than any news story. But we are rightly perceived as a threat and I'm not sure we can hold the moral high ground. I'm happy that we compete with Britannica. I'm not sure we should compete with newspapers. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
