Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's early days, so we haven't filled out a lot of our content. While our main newsline is on Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter, there is not much fake news or bias surrounding him. A far better example is to look at the newsline for Emma Sulkowicz, the so-called "Mattress Girl" [1]. Ms Sulkowicz, at that time a student at Columbia University, claims she was raped and in protest at what she saw was the University's lac…
Thanks for responding. To be sure, I'm asking the following questions in good faith as I want your site to work. > Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events. If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground f…
We don't simply cite the source. We extract the factual information in the source into the post. When New York Times reports "Evil Trump is coming to the UK" and Breitbart reports, "Our friend Trum is coming to the UK", the news event that Trump is coming to the UK is the same in both cases.
Now, the facts may be misreported, but that's a different issue. We do some tagging for obvious rumors, and we hope to improve our tools for labeling the veracity of how each new event is reported. But we belive we have a solid base to work from.
>Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial
We use a combination of paid and crowdsourced staff. It doesn't really matter who "we" are, because the process is the same in either case to extract the factual information. You only need to trust that we are transcribing from the source correctly, and readers can always go back to the original source to check. So you may wonder, what's the value in that? The value is the creation of the unbiased timeline when all the summaries from diverse sources are compiled.
>Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.
While Wikipedia acts like a news archive, its software and policies are not up to the task. There are similarities to what we do compared with Wikipedia and at first we considered ourselves to be a "Wikipedia for news". However, we take a more formal approach to adding sources that Wikipedia, which leads to more consistency in the final result. You may want to read my analysis of Wikipedia's failings: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/