I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
What do people think of a “journalistic integrity” rule? I know that’s also subjective, but I’m trying to think of how to phrase a rule that is basically “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”. I guess the rule could just be “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”, with some examples of what that means and community opportunities to in some way indicate that an article is incendiary crap.
Sorry about the duplicate comments. Not sure if it was the server or the app I was using, but I didn’t think they posted until it was too late and I re submitted it.
Anyway, I agree to this idea in theory, but only if there are extremely clear thresholds before the rule is invoked. For example: a limit on authors’ statements of opinion. Ways that are unacceptable for the article to refer to its subjects.
Basically I think we should debate the rules we want, but once we have consensus I wouldn’t want us also fighting about what does or doesn’t break the rules. Let’s please make the rules clear and measurable.
What did The Economist ever do to you?
Seriously, a hard rule (zero) on that excludes that pub and would exclude almost everything, but would still be far easier to implement than drawing a subjective line for each post that satisfies no one.
Personally I’m not opposed to journalists having an opinion and using it to shape their work. I think it’s essential.
I suggested this hypothetical rule as an example of a rule that is measurable. Also it’s about the discussion on what kind of news community we want here and I’m thinking about newspapers and the distinction between the news and opinion sections. Does that example make more sense?
I’ve written, edited and laid out both news and opinion, starting in the days of paste-up. The distinction is easy with a bit of learning and years of experience and involves very few hard lines.
The issue is with making rules for people who don’t know what news is. I understand the desire for hard, measurable definitions of news, but you’re going to need one hell of a shoehorn to make that feasible.
The problem I have with this is that sometimes anger and being explicitly angry is valuable and justified (or may be), as in for example opinion pieces about the responses to the recent refugee boat disaster vs the submersible story, or the news stories about, like, a known Nazi or child abuser running for political office, or about racism in policing, and so on.
At the end of the day, what counts as “incendiary” versus “reasonable reaction to a situation” is a subjective judgement that may be wrong sometimes, in both directions.
I also personally prefer news sources that are open about their biases, because biases still exidt even in publications that pretend to be neutral (looking at you, New York Times transphobia department).
My preference would be for flairs/tags like reddit has, so that individual users could filter out posts like “Opinion” and so on if they wish. But lemmy doesn’t allow this yet.
And maybe a rule against altering the original hedline of the article, since more often than not that’s used to rephase headlines to include the opinion of the poster.
Most places that follow an industry code of ethics prominently (in relative terms with dynamic layouts and such) display their affiliation on the site. If SPJ’s a bit too uppity for somewhere, they’re making a bad marketing decision or you’re rolling dice.