Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

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.

A much better idea would be a curated news source registry that does objective fact-checking and scores news sources based on various criteria, with the relevant research/scoring mechanisms shown openly so people can verify the results themselves. Like Snopes meets Charity Navigator (https://www.charitynavigator.org/).

I want a system that rates journalists not news. I want to see my previous ratings of this journalist and be able to base it on that.

I want the ability to rate a pieces objectivity.

I want to see ratings from users who have been proven to know how to rate objectivity.

I want a system that uses Machine Learning to break me "out of" my information silos by promoting the opposite opinion, and saying as much. "Because you like, Capitalism here's an argument for Socialism."

I want a system that making ratings less of a popularity contest by limiting them in a meaningful way (this is pie in the sky I'll take the first two).

I don't think it's possible to create the things I want, but that's what I want. Not Reddit for news. I've seen how that works.