Don’t believe everything you read

This is why reputation and reliability matter. While the example in this post is the equivalent of "I got major news outlets like TMZ to think that Paris Hilton was getting married" many types of news aren't so inconsequential. In the first few days after the Connecticut shooting, there were so many inaccuracies it made me reconsider other "facts" I heard which were never obviously wrong (e.g. it became obvious that the shooter's name was wrong when he was in New York - most inaccuracies aren't like this). Like many blogs, the "source" of misinformation often originated in a single benign inaccuracy that was then propagated through other news agencies.

What I would love to see is a method for tracking or indexing reputation of a site by some automatic method. As it is, I can kind of infer how reliable a site is based on the language I see, and the types of headlines, and whether others have told me it's reputable. I would love to see that automated somehow. News aggregators try to solve this via upvotes, downvotes, or flags, but there are plenty of reasons to upvote that have nothing to do with reliability per se, and trying to use multiple upvoting buttons seems silly, because at the end of the day rank is a one-dimensional property, so you'll have to combine "funny", "reliable", "interesting" into some single number.

It's a "hard problem" but since the value of information depends so heavily on its accuracy, solving it would appear to be very lucrative and valuable to a society in which the quantity of available information grows by leaps and bounds each year. Google seems to have solved "relevance" and I would love to see someone solve reliability.

Do the ads in print or broadcast radio/TV pay much more than that?

Seems that a Super Bowl spot goes for about 4 million USD, reaching 100+ million viewers [1] - that comes out as about 40 bucks per thousand impressions, but this "impression" is an interstitial one for 30 seconds. This is apparently the highest USA TV price ever.

And, for print, most anything that is not paid research has a cover price mostly to pay for distribution (in particular, to get news stands paid for carrying it).

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/business/despite-4-million-price-tag-...

In sentences like that, I tend to ignore everything before the 'but'.

To my admittedly uneducated eye, nothing in the rest of that article indicates any kind of remorse or regret over the author's actions.

The clause before the 'but' is how the author gives themselves permission to say what's after the 'but'. This does not necessarily impart any emotional (or even semantic) meaning onto the first clause.

This reminds me, a few years back, I wanted to have a site linked and spoken about on major internet news (tech) sites.

Submitted the story, never saw anything about it. Probably not sensationalistic enough. Then I figured.

Sent the story to a few smaller news sites. ONE took the story. Next day, ALL sites including major news sites had the story.

Of course, these days its expected that news site leech stories and perform zero journalism, but back them, even thus I wouldn't say it surprised me a lot, it felt wrong hehe.

That the news agencies are too quick to run with a story is an old complaint. That doesn't make it any less real, it simply makes it less novel.

"Bad guys" exploit this effect to create false perceptions. It is used a lot in politics since perception is effectively reality if the next step is getting a vote. Sometimes it is used for espionage (corporate and geopolitical) to create a diversion. It has been used to make money in the stock market with option manipulation.

Because being "first" on a news story conveys additional profit (views, ad clicks, publicity) there is great incentive to be first, which will always be in tension with being accurate. There also seems to be a sliding scale on verification so leaking a rumor that the Prime Minister has died is less likely to run without verification than leaking a rumor that the Prime Minister has been photographed in a compromising situation. National impact vs scandalous impact. No doubt every publisher thinks "Hmm, what if this is a prank what is the worst that can happen?" Maybe I give them too much credit.

Reputation is important, takes a long time to build though. Can be lost quickly.