I would like to see journalists be more transparent about what in their statement is fact vs. opinion, since lately I've seen pretty clear examples of the opinion as fact on both sides of the aisle. But this sort of a solution sounds terrible - what would prevent the overseas bot farms from downvoting articles that hurt their agenda and upvoting divisive articles?, and why do you, as a company, want to adopt responsibility for trying to police this knowing full well that it'll be on your heads if your efforts fail (or work too well and prevent outspoken parties from being able to boost their favorable news).

This just seems like the absolute worst place to position yourself in the modern world.

PS: Also, aside from all the politics... think about the swarms of bots ad companies would hire to upvote their sponsored content...

I'm a life-long (but intermittent) NYT reader. Coverage of SpaceX (in NYT, WSJ, and WaPo) changed how I think of journalism.

Faced with the usual issue of good newspapers getting every topic you know about not-quite right, variously wrong, I used to explain it by an analogy. It was like when newspapers closed their foreign offices. Loss of ground truth, of sanity checking, of insight and nuance. An abundance of misinterpretation and missing the point. My analogy was that for science, and tech policy, and diplomacy, and engineering, and manufacturing, and so much else, the foreign offices were closed. Generalist journalists, not embedded in the various professional communities of expertise, writing from afar, and getting it variously wrong.

What struck me about SpaceX coverage was the process failure. Not the getting things wrong - that was unsurprising. But there was no sign of learning, of process improvement. For instance, there was a successful short-term disinformation PR campaign targeting the press (around Zuma satellite failure attribution). But afterwards, there was little sign of recognition, reflection, remediation. No sign that they wouldn't fail just as hard if the same thing was done again a month later. And journalistic devices to pursue quality, seemed not just poorly executed, but inadequate to need.

So my new analogy is with medicine. Like journalism, medicine has long had folk practices for pursuing quality. But medicine has had it's "oh, shit" moment. The realization that medical error was a leading cause of mortality. That even easy and important standards of care were failing to be consistently executed. That there were decades of experience in other fields, on how to engineer process to systemically achieve quality and avoid failure, to which medicine had been oblivious. Journalism seems still oblivious.

So I suggest that journalism as a profession, and even the best of newspapers as institutions, have not yet realized just how badly they are failing. Or recognized the need for, or even the possibility of, systemic process improvement.

Perhaps the existence of the OP project might help with that.

Feel free to write your own content - publish your own knowledge by contributing to the media outlets - NYT has tons of contributing writers who's full time job is not in journalism!

Nifty. This suggestion seems to nicely illustrate what journalism seems to be missing. I see it as analogous to...

Think you can operate our press without losing fingers? Great - we're often looking for replacement operators. Does the machine have guards? Well, we have both a day and a night watchman, why?

Think you can operate without ever leaving sponges and instruments behind in patients? Great, set yourself up as a barber surgeon and go for it. Do we count sponges? You'll have to talk to accounting, but they're not that expensive, why?

And so on.

Responding to operator errors with "well, just stop doing that". Responding to pervasive systemic failures with "well, maybe we need better operators". That's being oblivious to a half century of progress, to minimum standards and best practices, across multiple industries.

Some years back, someone said their first-tier newspaper didn't even have a process for tracking errors. Despite an institutional self-image of caring about quality. ISO 9000 has not hit journalism yet?

    > Rating news is a terrible idea.

Yes, it's like "Stackoverflow for news".

Certainly, Stackoverflow-type systems do have their benefits, but those benefits are for a very narrow use-case and there's an awful flip-side that the rhetoric and rules in stackoverflow have ever-increasing perverse incentives to reward strange, persnickety behavior. It's great if you're missing some pieces of information here-and-there, but it's awful to use as a tutorial or as a way to understand subject-matter in a holistic fashion.

The idea that you can have any kind of self-policing or crowd-sourced mediation of journalistic "facts" vs "baloney" is a pipe-dream.

IMHO, the problem is not whether or not a piece of information is "a fact" but rather what other facts are missing, and context of these facts as a whole, and the intention behind the entities brokering facts on your behalf. It's all very easy to point out horrendous bias, and outright lying (just watch "Fox and Friends" for a few minutes), but what about a set of facts which is incomplete? That's just as bad as no facts and it has a name: "disinformation".

What we need as consumers of journalism is not necessarily "just the facts" but intelligent and rational analysis that can function even with incomplete information, that draws on not just "available facts" but also a historical basis, that is brave enough to adjust itself as reality warrants. This is necessarily and intrinsically subjective and it will often NOT be recognized as true and be, at times, incredibly unpopular.

You're all almost never purely doing your own research, though. There isn't enough time for that. It's a sliding scale of deciding where to stop and how much to take for granted and who to take it from.

This is why the problem isn't "doing your own research" vs "trusting someone". It's always both; the magic is in choosing which at each particular step when finding things out.