9-year-old reporter breaks crime news, posts videos, fires back at critics | Hacker News Reader

9-year-old reporter breaks crime news, posts videos, fires back at critics

washingtonpost.com

380 pointsyurisagalov127 comments

This is not a sign that "news organizations should try harder" (quoting another comment).

It's a sign that good local news is not profitable to produce — e.g. a failure of the free market to provide a critical public good. As a corollary, it's a sign that a prerequisite of functional democracy is failing.

One potential solution is directly government funded news, but then the government can control the news, which is a potentially worse scenario!

A more effective alternative might be a universal tax rebate of say $100, which can only be allocated to news organizations. (though of course there are lots fiddly details to make this actually work)

I would posit that all news companies (some legal definition) should be required to be non-profit entities. They could also operate with some portion of subsidization if necessary. The public allocation model would be interesting, if difficult to implement.

If they're subsidized, they know where that money is coming from, and they'll be less likely to report on the misdeeds of the government subsidizing them.

> I would posit that all news companies (some legal definition) should be required to be non-profit entities.

That's not really compatible with a free press. In terms of regulating the broadcast spectrum you have more latitude because its a scare public good. But I think you'll have a hard time getting Pinch Sulzberger and Rupert Murdoch to stop publishing.

Another view has it entirely consistent. Universal access to the press, not merely those who have sufficient financing, based on actual quality of product, not dopamine-inducing crap, could be an improvement.

Using the force of the state as an editorial voice is the opposite of a free press. I understand that a case can be made for what your saying, but make no mistake - it is a case against a free press.

This isn't the "force of the state". It's the capability of the state to channel funds into vital infrastructure and services the private sector does not, and can not serve.

We disagree profoundly.

That seems like a nightmare as far as freedom of speech goes, and an even bigger nightmare as far as enforcement goes. I mean, there are an awful lot of internet sites offering news, so would that mean setting up a blog reporting news to make money from ads would suddenly be illegal?

We really don't need most news orgs like we don't need 1000 versions of Wikipedia.

The AP and my regions local press version of it are good enough and I'll be happy to fund them. If I need something deeper I pay. Like Bloomberg for example.

The rest of it is all entertainment and opinion which like the content of the porn industry/facebook/youtube/reddit (thanks to advertising) will always come for free.

I'll grant that we don't need locally developed news platforms. For all I care, local news could be distributed by reddit.

What we do need is some way to keep our local government and businesses accountable. We need reporting on that factory that's spewing waste which affects the health of 20 families. Or about that town government decision to buy cheaper water (and how it looks brown and might have lead in it). Or about that corrupt police chief.

If there is a local AP equivalent in your area that does this, then that's great. But in most areas this would not be profitable.

Someone needs to do this work, and if we want it done reliably and done well, it needs to be payed for.

Well...government does have mechanisms to address all those issues and keep itself accountable. And we do pay people already via our taxes to stay on top of these things. Do we need to pay the press too? I don't feel too happy about that.

Most of the issues you are talking about required the press to amplify them in the good old days. Today there are many more avenues for people to shine a light on stuff. I mean if a 9 year old has worked out how to get her message out others will too. And the role of the press as an amplifier will reduce. My sense is propping them up artificially might create other headaches.

Self-policing has never worked.

An external authority with an incentive to break news that matters is crucial.

>"What we do need is some way to keep our local government and businesses accountable."

Why must that be exposed as "news"? You should have that baked in, with repercussions for individuals that break laws/regulations within a public entity, etc.

Really, I think a lot of society's ills would be solved with adequate oversight and repercussions of public institutions and individuals.

Ironically, I find government funded news - e.g., BBC and the PBS Newshour - some of my most reliable news sources. The advantage of publicly funded news organizations is that they don't have to chase ratings (and they obviously don't).

BBC is going downhill lately

Their budgets have been squeezed for years now, the result isn't that surprising.

BBC suffers increasingly from D-notices (secret bans) on stories.

e.g. Unaoil scandal is glaringly absent from the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=unaoil

The BBC and every other mainstream media source, it seems.

I had never heard of this, and the only "major" source I could find was a Reuters wire story (that seems to not have been picked up by other media): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iraq-probe-claims-unaoil-corr...

Honestly, from reading that, it's not clear why this would be a story worth covering. Corruption in Iraq is like rain in Seattle: Depressing, but barely newsworthy.

Yes D-notices are applied nationally in the UK.

Unaoil is not intersting for Iraqi corruption but the foriegn offshore multinatinational beneficiaries.

Deserving of a least a column inch - the obvious D-noting makes it a LOT more interesting from a UK perspective.

Here it is covered in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-...

Since D-notices are not legally binding, if The Guardian received one but chose to report anyway, I'd be very surprised if they didn't mention a D-notice - the times government have overstretched with respect to D-notices, it has usually caused a major stink.

Isn't The Guardian is now based in the US, since GCHQ ground up some of their computers ?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-relea...

Nice catch.

Isn't The Guardian is now based in the US, since GCHQ ground up some of their computers ?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-relea...

No.

The Guardian is wholly owned by a UK trust, and its head office remains in London.

The only thing that changed was that reporting of the Snowden affair was shifted to their US office. The Guardian pointed out to GCHQ in advance that it made no difference as they already had copies of the data elsewhere.

Furthermore, it was The Guardian itself who "ground up" their computers, as they refuse flat out a request to let GCHQ inspect the computers and do the destruction. Instead they agreed to destroy them in the presence of GCHQ staff, exactly because it didn't matter, and let them avoid legal liabilities. And frankly being able to put the story in the paper probably didn't hurt. From the article you linked:

'"Three Guardian staff members – Johnson, executive director Sheila Fitzsimons and computer expert David Blishen – carried out the demolition of the Guardian's hard drives. It was hot, sweaty work. On the instructions of GCHQ, the trio bought angle-grinders, dremels – a drill with a revolving bit – and masks. The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment, a "degausser", which destroys magnetic fields, and erases data. It took three hours to smash up the computers. The journalists then fed the pieces into the degausser.

Two GCHQ technical experts – "Ian" and "Chris" – recorded the process on their iPhones. Afterwards they headed back to GCHQ's doughnut-shaped HQ in Cheltenham carrying presents for family members, bought on their rare visit to the capital.

"It was purely a symbolic act," Johnson said. "We knew that. GCHQ knew that. And the government knew that," He added: "It was the most surreal event I have witnessed in British journalism."'

Less than everybody else.

They are also not owned by billionaires with agendas or have to pay lip service to advertisers no matter what they do. News these days is but a joke and mostly simply public relations and propaganda, listening to it in my opinion opts you in to being coerced by other people's agenda. It's good if you are an idiot and need coercing to behave, but for people who can form their own opinions have no need for this.

While BBC is usually a decently produced news source, they still have levers than can be manipulated by the government. They were beating the war drum pretty hard in the run up to the war with Iraq after 9/11.

The BBC is not government funded, it is funded by a compulsory licence fee, and is independent. They have come under government pressure in the form of having their budget effectively reduced by the government resulting in a shrinking news department.

BBC news was not pro war in the run up to the Iraq war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Dossier#The_45_minut...

If someone controls your budget you are not independent.

That basically eliminates the concept of independence in media. As far as I know, all major media outlets are funded by some combination of government, corporate sponsors, and subscribers. I don't know of any profitable media outlet that does not have corporate sponsors.

> I don't know of any profitable media outlet that does not have corporate sponsors.

9 year-old girls, obviously.

This is kind of an apathetic mid-90s defeatist attitude is I think easy but not particularly nuanced or helpful.

With that attitude nothing is independent: money has to come from somewhere. I think it's fair to say that every organisation has some amount of independence, some have money structures that allow them to have more than some others, and the BBC is an example of a situation where they can be more independent than an organisation that is more directly government funded.

The BBC is certainly pretty much independent of the folk who actually compulsorily fund it (£3.65 billion tax-free income via the licence fee) even if they never watch or listen to it.

The EU chip in a bit too. Not much as a % but it was £3 million of EU funds (i.e., European taxpayers who don't have a say in that either) between April 2011 and November 2013.

To some extent, but people from all sides have thought about this a lot in the UK, and other countries with a state television that is supposed to be as independent as possible. They are a lot more independent than most commercial outlets.

The biggest political influence is the board, not the budget. Since it takes a while to change the laws governing how BBC and similar agencies are run, I do not think the economics is the most interesting part.

The change from a Board of Governors to the BBC trust was a big one and not something done easily, so even there you have problems with affecting programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_Governors_of_the_BBC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Trust

Could not the government's ability to increase or decrease their budget influence their coverage? This is exactly the complaint against government funded news.

The government can change the rules on how the BBC is funded any time they want. They can also change how the BBC is governed and can influence the actual people currently governing the BBC without changing any rule. The BBC is obviously fully aware of this and would be very careful about crossing the government about anything really important.

>One potential solution is directly government funded news

Where does the government get its money to fund news? Either from the local population which is enforced support for an economically non-viable business or it can get money from other people who have no interest in the local news of another place far away.

If good local news is not profitable, then that means there is not enough interest to justify the cost of making good local news. This is not a failure of the free market to provide a critical public good. The free market is working exactly as intended, and what YOU call 'critical' public good, isn't really that critical, according to people who would actually consume said good.

And then you want the government to enforce your personal idea of what is 'critical' by forcing people to buy things they don't want.

If all Internet advertising were paid just by the billion richest people of the world (essentially: the OECD nations, mostly the US, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, NZ), the cost would net out to $20 per $30k of income (about the per-capita median).

If you wanted to cover all advertising, it'd be $100 per $30k. Or an 0.3% tax rate.

And no more advertising or advertising-supported crap.

Giving money to retirees, giving medical care to poor people, having an FDA controlling what companies are able to sell that might harm the public (long or short term), and other regulatory organs are not economically viable either. Should we abolish those?

"Free market" might be a fun catchphrase, but everything judged through one lens is extremely narrowminded.

My opinions: Abolish social security, abolish medicare, keep the FDA but allow unapproved treatments clearly marked as such(possibly require signing a document confirming they know it's unapproved, or require them to file some paperwork with the local government in order to allow unapproved treatments). Of course, you'll never actually get elected advocating the first two, since the elderly have a stranglehold on politicians.

A more electable opinion: Allow people to invest their government-mandated retirement accounts however they want: SS is required to be invested in treasury bonds, which are not what I would invest in.

We don't need the government propping up the news companies, either. Professionals can stay informed to issues relevant to their work by subscribing to a trade magazine. Local communities often congregate at a church or similar(abolish tax exemption for churches, while we're at it), and that's as good a place as any to talk politics or gossip about celebrities.

For purely factual local community items requiring action(new sidewalk repair ordinance requires 30% of houses to replace their sidewalk trees, there's an upcoming mayoral election, a real estate investor just bought the last empty lot in the city and is building a huge apartment complex, etc.) can be reported by the government through the city or county websites, or by mailing notices to everyone.

I also wouldn't mind a government-operated television channel, intended for government matters(the president making his state-of-the-union speech, results of elections, warnings about emergencies, a brief summary of recent Supreme Court rulings as they happen, etc.).

Let the people die, woo!

Literally the entire point of a safety net for individual people is to prevent people from falling into despair and dying (of starvation or illness) due either to poor decisions or pure chance. To remove said safety net is to say that you value having a bit more money over people's lives - you would prefer that people die than lose money.

To put that a way you might understand - humans have an almost universally recognised right to food, water, shelter and medical care because these things are really, really important. To deny people those things is to say that those things are less important than having a little more money. You can't seriously be saying that.

The parent can seriously be saying that. People believe different things, many people believe that they have no responsibility to other humans that they do not know. Further there are those that believe humans may be in someway responsible for other humans that they do not know, but that the government is absolutely the wrong vehicle to address this responsibility.

Personally, I think for people like that, who think that "taxes are theft" and that they shouldn't have to pay for stuff they don't agree with, that we should allow them to opt out of paying taxes and the entire social contract.

In exchange, they give up all police protection. If someone wants to rob them or kill them, no problem, it's not a crime and the police won't intervene.

Norway solved (or tries to, anyway) this with substantial subsidies for newspapers based mainly on circulation (as in, there's extremely little latitude for them to vary the subsidy if there's a paper they dislike without facing court cases). Unfortunately it's been under systematic attack over the years.

Who's been attacking this?

According to this article (in Norwegian) cutting subsidies has broad cross-party support: http://www.klassekampen.no/61942/article/item/null/presses-t...

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support

Thank you.

To be fair, newspapers arent the preferred medium for news these days.

Yes, but there's been no attempt at providing an equivalent mechanism for online journalism. If the support was just shifting into new mediums it'd be a different matter.

For more background on the idea of "universal tax rebate," apparently the correct term may be "indirect subsidy." See the original proposal by McChesney and Nichols at http://www.thenation.com/article/death-and-life-great-americ...

An excerpt: "We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. [...]

Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

[...] Let’s give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. [...] In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper–this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. [...]

None of these proposed subsidies favor or censor any particular viewpoint. The primary condition on media recipients of this stimulus subsidy would be a mild one: that they make at least 90 percent of their content immediately available free online. In this way, the subsidies would benefit citizens and taxpayers, expanding the public domain and providing the Internet with a rich vein of material available to all."

For a collection of more "subsidy" options see: http://www.freepress.net/resource/98570/public-subsidies-and... . I'd love to see a free market succeed here, and maybe we should give it some more time — but I'm worried we may have already run out.

Damned interesting and thanks especially for the links.

I've been kicking around similar ideas, and it's interesting finding all the far better minds which have beat me to this.

Interesting, but implementing this idea, doesn't that mean that the government still needs to determine what is and what isn't "really a newspaper" for purposes of this tax credit?

There's a pretty broad spectrum of stuff close to the edge but still obviously news of some sort (say, InfoWars), stuff that I'm not sure how to classify (Fortean Times, Playboy Magazine), stuff that probably is not "really news" like a Marvel Comic--but what about a cartoon publication that employs satire on current events? (say like MAD Magazine?)

(there's probably better examples than the ones I name, I don't live in the US so I only comment about publications that I have seen or heard about)

Seems like another problem that would be solved by introducing basic income. There are already people working on news reporting, Wikipedia and other public goods and services on their free time. Decrease the pressure to make a living (i.e. give people more free time) and you will have enough volunteers.

I don't think that people would suddenly start paying for higher quality news. The ones that can tell the difference can afford to pay now and generally don't.

I don't think he says that people start paying for it but more people will help cover news that aren't covered now.

> The ones that can tell the difference can afford to pay now

I'm having a real hard time trying to charitably interpret what you're saying here.

    > I'm having a real hard time trying to charitably
    > interpret what you're saying here.

Presumably that the better educated are generally speaking the better employed?

There's a little classist asshole-ness in my implicit assumptions, I admit. I don't think high quality news is expensive until you go into semi-verticals like WSJ.

It's actually the implicit assumptions about the people that can or can't afford "quality news" that made me raise an eyebrow.

> The ones that can tell the difference can afford to pay now

It implies that if you are in the group that can't afford, you're not in the group that can tell the difference. Which is indeed quite classist.

Additionally, it (directly) implies that people in the group that can afford, also can tell the difference. I'm not sure that's classist, but it's definitely a statement I disagree with. There's more then plenty of well-off people that don't care about "quality news" (and then some more with very questionable ideas about what constitutes it).

(and I upvoted you for admitting, btw)

Reason why I'm putting "quality news" in quotes is because I doubt there's a singular definition of "quality news" that would agree with me and everyone. Additionally, over the years I have seen (Dutch) news outlets vary greatly up and down in their "news quality" (from my own perspective), but their relative prices have pretty much stayed the same. For instance (and this is very much my own opinion, other Dutch people may differ), the free public (state-sponsored) news TV-broadcast has taken a dive in quality towards utter blandness, while certain commercial stations' news programs have been doing some pretty nice journalistic research here and there--whereas before did way more celeb/gossip topics. Certain of the established newspapers, both "intellectual" right as "intellectual" left, used to be quite good but nowadays leave me with a nasty taste of last-century bias (left/right is such an outdated concept in a globalized world where it can mean contradictory things), whereas I recently find myself turning to a (large) Christian newspaper because they've been reporting relatively well-balanced and not-too-opinionated stuff (they also happen to be one of the Dutch papers that are working with the Panama leaks).

> government can control the news, which is a potentially worse scenario!

Many people think journalistic power should be open to anybody while physical power should be under government monopoly.

Yet a story, widely circulated, can ruin a life as thoroughly as a bullet to the kneecap.

If you think governments should monopolize sources of dangerous power, why not support a government monopoly on journalism?

Normally I would be inclined to agree, but where I live, in Ithaca NY, we have an all-volunteer online news source, The Ithaca Voice. It's probably more widely read than our two old papers. The Voice has been very diligent with reporting on crime, community developments, and as of late, the retrospectively obvious saturation of lead in our school water pipes.

So yes, while I agree that mainstream local news is broadly failing both itself and the general population, it is not an irreversible or geographically independent condition. Or maybe I'm full of shit and the only reason Ithacans read local news is because once you're here long enough you never leave, so you have some skin in the game.

You bring up a very good point. Towns with more long term residents are going to have a lot more people who feel the need/desire/interest to get involved. I live in New Jersey, and a lot of towns are filled with more transient folk. Partly because everything is on top of each other - if I move 5 miles away I might be 2 towns over.

The result is that I never planned on living in my current town for more than a few years and we just passed our 10th anniversary. Maybe it's time to get involved!

I disagree about this idea that local news is not profitable. What makes you belief this? Maybe very limited examples can qualify but it all comes down to having enough interested consumers to justify the expense. It has always been this way. With so many people posting stories to the net it likely the real need is an intelligent aggregator. From there a micro transaction system might arise that pays people based on views and such.

as for government, they already are too involved even in the US. Directly by manipulating what can and cannot be said as well using the threat of cutting off reporters who don't report as the politicians want. Indirect as journalist unions will guide donations to politicians who do what they want.

Universal tax rebate? While some may consider journalism part of the common good it does not mean it must exist to serve the smallest of groups. We have more journalism than necessary to get the news to all interested parties and much of it is free on the net.

how many signs do you need?

This is one thing I like about State Sponsored news. Here in the states, people whine about censorship all day and make a point to criticize whatever single party system sponsors said news, but that is just for government stuff. The C-Span type shit nobody cares about anyway.

For local news, regional, national news, and international conflicts, state sponsored news gets straight to the point without the sensation.

Plane went missing? Plane went missing and relevant details. Weather forecast? Its gonna rain.

keep it moving

Her name is Hilde? The same as the heroine Hilde Johnson in the greatest movie about journalism (yes, that includes All The President's Men IMHO), His Girl Friday? You couldn't ask for better journalism parents :).

BTW His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks, is not only one of the best movies of its era, it is one of the few great movies that are truly in the public domain. You can watch it on Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/his_girl_friday

Also a strong female figure from the seventh century: St Hilda of Whitby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_of_Whitby

>Hilda is considered one of the patron saints of learning and culture, including poetry.

Interesting detail. I always enjoy learning about who's the patron saint of this or that. Why did the tradition start, and how does each saint get assigned a domain? How offbeat it can get? And are "they" planning to update it occasionally to match how the world has changed?

I went to Catholic school and yes they do in fact update saints. There's a patron Saint for the internet (Isidore of Seville), movies (Genesius), and astronauts (Joseph of Cupertino). I would say the tradition combines derives from Greco-Roman theosymbolism where divine beings represent specific domains of contemporary life. Note that Protestant and Baptist denominations do not generally recognize patron saints.

You can see a list of all them here and the rationale for their patronage as well. Pretty interesting to see the swath of culture and technology they cover: http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/Saints/patrons.aspx

These articles are all so clichéd aimed straight at the masses.

A child seems to be doing something only an adult could do and better even! Stupid adults, kids showed them.

There exists an adult who's mean about it! OMG get out the pitchforks we get to be self righteous, the world is beating on a child.

Why can't we take things as they are. It's very cool she's writing stories. It's an interesting slant for her readers that she's a child. Leave it at that.

These comments are all so clichéd aimed straight at the HN audience.

A reporter seems to be reporting about a child reporter who is doing something noteworthy. Sensationalist reporters, HN commenters showed them!

There exists a reporter who wrote about it. OMG, get out the sarcasm we get to be condescending, the world is reporting a story about a child reporter.

Why can't we take things as they are. It's very cool that Tom Jackman is writing stories. It's an interesting slant for his readers that he's writing about a child. Leave it at that.

LOL

I bet even aaron is :)

When a 9 year old consistently does your job better and more thoroughly than you do purely out of enjoyment maybe it's a sign that you should try harder.

Granted, she's subsidized by her parents. Real reporters have to serve a business, even if they're not directly involved in discussions of revenue and strategy. Often journalists aren't given the time or resources to dig up stories and vet them thoroughly.

What is she getting from her parents that helps with digging up stories and vetting them? She's subsidized in the sense of receiving food, clothing, and shelter, but all businesses also provide those things to their employees.

This:

> Often journalists aren't given the time or resources to dig up stories and vet them thoroughly.

(my emphasis)

is not a response to the fact that she's publishing stories faster than they are.

Businesses pay employees with the goal of ROI. Parents typically expect a 0x return on their money (at least in the near term, by which I mean decades). Therefore businesses' employees need to do work that contributes to revenue (listicles) whereas children can do whatever their parents allow them to (in this case, local news).

You make a good point about the time competition, but I was responding re: "better" not "faster".

And they wonder where their subscribers are all going...

"She also publishes and distributes a print edition once a month, with paid mail subscriptions for $10 a year."

Doesn't say how many subscriptions, but it wouldn't take too many for her to contribute to rent. Impressive for a 9 year old.

$10/year would require an enormous number of subscribers before her time was competitively compensated -- 3,000 at least, and that's assuming no overhead. Her town isn't big enough to support that.

And thus, the sad decline of our media. Beholden to CPMs, CTRs, UPVs, CPAs, CPLs, CRs, and a dozen other acronyms that mean one thing - more eyeballs == more money. So they write in the fastest, most outrageous, most viral manner possible.

They're incentivized to do things like clickbait, and outrage/yellow journalism to keep people spreading it, whether they agree with the viewpoint, or dispute the facts, because it's better to get the eyeballs than have any kind of integrity or skill at the profession.

Why is that? Where does that incentive come from?

The funding model for journalism is advertisement. Advertisement generally follows the line of more views = more money. We call "clickbait" and "viral" stories that get viewed by the most people, regardless of their content. This means that journalists will focus on "clickbait" rather than a niche story that only a tiny fraction of their viewership will read.

Also, sourcing and vetting clearly take time, which could instead be spent producing more "clickbait" stories. Unless you're oversaturating the market, producing more "clickbait" is the rational action over producing quality journalism.

Furthermore, quality journalism requires expertise, which costs more. Compared to that, "clickbait" stories require adopting a certain writing skill which is in much larger supply. Thus follows that you would hire "clickbait" writers instead of journalists, because you'd be paying them less for more profit.

Really, pretty much every incentive in journalism fights the naivety of "professionalism" and "integrity", so it's little wonder that the state of journalism is as it is.

I am reminded of a short anecdote I read on HN the other day. People say they want sugarless yogurt, but every market research shows that they actually prefer the sugared variant. "We" say we want "good journalism", but clearly more people are reading tabloids and "clickbait". Whether that is because "we" are the minority, or because "we" are hypocrites is unclear, but that's reality.

Sorry if I wasn't more clear - why is the funding model advertisement? The answer is because we as users voted with our money so it is that way.

> And thus, the sad decline of our media.

Isn't Hilde's example exactly the opposite? That motivated individuals can do the basics as a hobby?

Two observations:

1. The barriers to entry have been dramatically lowered. i.e. Cost of distribution is slightly about $0.

2. For basic stories most people only care about the tldr: some drunk driver killed a man on ...; Or about aggregations of tldrs: i.e. 5 people we killed last week due to gun violence in ...

Regardless of the talents of Hilde or her more experienced competitors. When I'm only reading tldr, I really doubt I can tell a 9 year old, from a 90 year old, from some software.

Given the above: With enough motivated hobbyists, all we need is better software news summarizers/aggregators and you can have great aggregations at the local, regional, and global levels.

If your concern is the lack of substance, I would ask, what percentage of the time do you actually care? I'm willing to bet, its a small percentage of the time. I'd also be willing to bet that you only really care about substance for stories that hit the top of news aggregators (i.e. "viral" stories)!

Given that: It should be relatively easy for "real journalists" to pick and bring substance to this small number of stories deserving substance.

Actually, there could even be a BugBounty type exchange. How much do you care about this story? $10, $20? If we collectively reach $1000 a Bloomberg journalist will spend a day on it and so forth.

> "For basic stories most people only care about the tldr: some drunk driver killed a man on ..."

Without wishing to be offensive... perhaps that's a sign that stories like that aren't really newsworthy. Lots of things happen on any given day, including thousands of deaths, isn't the purpose of news outlets to select stories that have significance to their audience rather than going for stories where the main substance can be found in the title?

The actors who play journalist on TV news and the well indoctrinated writers who fill Newspapers on behalf of wealthy owners have no integrity at all.

This young woman does; Glen Greenwald, Dan Ellsberg, Bernstein & Woodward do.

Telling truth to power is hard labour, maybe jailtime & surveillance, or intimidation to reveal sources.

Real journalism is only produced by a passion for truth, it is dangerous work.

There are few true believers among those who choose the title journalist.

Journalism is not about money; rather determination & cojones.

The true subsidy vis-a-vis real journalists is the lack of consequence she faces for being wrong. It's unlikely she'd face a lawsuit regardless of what she said. If she were badly misinformed or made up elements of her story no one would care (nor should they -- she's nine) But 'real' journalists can have careers and livelihoods ruined by such events.

Sure, some journalists' careers and livelihoods are occasionally ruined for reasons. However, the vast majority of journalists are so routinely wrong about everything that such ruination seems unlikely to be at all related to that.

See, Gawker. Sure, they published thousands of articles that were wrong about their respective subjects. But it was only after someone actually had the money and time to sue them into oblivion that it came back to bite them.

The average journalist nowadays seems to have far less fear of being wrong due to not fact checking or poor sources, because it seems consequences for them are nearly non existent.

I think this may be a situation akin to that 9 year old being Mozart, though. Will love to see what she accomplishes once she is older.

Or maybe the 9-year-old is good.

That's not really fair (maybe you're joking and I'm just really obtuse)—she lives in a town of 5,000 people. Much larger markets than that have proven unable to support a local news industry in the past several years. It's not a better of journalists being lazy, it's a matter of there not being enough demand to support journalists in the first place. (As others have pointed out, this 9-year-old rightly lives with her parents and does not have to support herself.)

This sounds like an idea. Get your local school kids to cover local news. A subscription would be fairly cheap since you don't have to really pay the kids a salary. And some of the kids would enjoy it and learn something.

Yeah, like how to write well. Most adults these days can't seem to do that any more, so it'd be great to have kids learning this by being local journalists. Plus they'd probably do a far better job than adults since they'd be more idealistic and not lazy and not handcuffed by corporate interests.

> When a 9 year old consistently does your job better and more thoroughly than you do purely out of enjoyment maybe it's a sign that you should try harder.

Maybe it's a sign you should find another job.

That's super neat! It's really unfortunate people are being so negative. Sometimes the anonymous aspect of the internet, while overall a good thing, can lead to people being critical of others for no reason at all.

They were being mean on Facebook, which means they were being mean under their real names and photographs to a nine year old child.

Interesting. I saw her video and they didn't list any names so I assumed they were anonymous comments.

Ah, the Facebook link is buried in the article.

> But her reporting did not impress some of the good people of Selinsgrove, and they let Hilde have it on Facebook Saturday night. “I think this is appalling that u would do a story like this when all the facts are not in yet,” wrote one commenter. Her parents were attacked too: “does no one realize that this is a 9 year old reporting this type of graphic information!” wrote a Facebook poster. “I mean, what parents are encouraging this type of behavior!”

I'm not sure which video you watched, but the first video on the page lists the names of each of the comment authors.

“Because she’s the only one doing community news, she’s developed sources who trust her to cover the news. One of her sources contacted her, and she was able to confirm it with law enforcement. She knocked on every door, like she’d seen me do with the Daily News. There were no other reporters there.”

Old school journalism. Ask questions, check with sources, get independent confirmation, write it up. Woodward and Bernstein had to get confirmation for three different independent sources before the Washington Post would run their major story that took the President down.

Reminds me of the Wonder Showzen segments called "Beat Kids" https://youtu.be/IwvrGHsjD7g

Wonder Showzen was so incredibly insulting to everything and everyone, I will forever be amazed that it aired at all.

I like the creators' take on this:

http://www.avclub.com/article/wonder-showzen-13983

> Standards are such a weird thing at a network like MTV. What's your moral standard when you're celebrating 16-year-old kids spending $2 million on a party? That's always our argument—"You show this stuff that's actually offensive!" There's not even any satire to it, just people yelling at workers.

I'm not sure whether being 9 makes her more vulnerable to manipulation by figures who want to make themselves look good in the news, or less. It's certainly different, ie unlikely to have the same sorts of biases as other reporters, which can be quite valuable.

Well, MY 9-yo can tell you how to beat lots of Pokemon gym leaders and Elite fours.

Like: little girl already takes something that serious and works hard on it.

Not like: Hard to believe that a 9 year old kid gets these ideas really by herself. I worry a little that her father is pushing her too much. Also investigating murders is maybe not something a child should do.

Not understand: Why is it such a big deal that someone reported something first? Never really got behind why that's a deal. Maybe this way you can understand your "job" more as a "game"? I don't see people switching from newspaper/blog number one to newspaper/blog number two, because number two reported one story faster.

I'm not sure about her not getting ideas like that herself. I'm a step-parent to four kids, and one in particular has an imagination that most people would kill for. She takes it upon herself to get into all sorts of things, writes stories with real depth of imagination and concepts behind them, and has recently taught herself to do stop-motion animation to tell these stories. I'm sure if she'd taken to journalism it would have been a similar story, so here I see a kid who has real ability and has taken to the role model she has in her father. Maybe Dad is pushing her too much, but maybe she's really into it.

Reporting first seems a big deal to me as everyone else could well be copying what's already been reported. I would think that the first person to report it accurately is serving the most purpose (subject to being correct, etc).

The article available without a paywall on this news site:

http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2016/apr/05/9-year-old-repo...

What a promising young woman, I'm sure her parents are very proud! Sadly, it's not very hard to beat the local paper anymore. Now that we consume most of our news online for free, media companies rely entirely on ad revenue and simply can't afford to provide good local coverage. Ad-supported professional journalism just does not work for local stories that can't attract a huge audience.

Some of you have suggested Government funded news - while I agree that quality local news is a critical public good, I believe that Government intervention in the industry is dangerous. I'm confident that the free market will eventually solve this problem with a creative new business model.

Such a shame about all of the online trolls targeting a 9 year old girl. I'm so glad she has not let it faze her and stood up to the bullies!

[Here's a link to the original response video which the article failed to include.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ShfNQOUeAY) Probably to reduce bounce rates or something.

I love this kid

At one side I am happy to see this new kind of journalism where people would get news from genuine sources instead of some _madeup_ stories while on other hand I am sad for this kid who got into such things in the age where she should get involved in things that help her to enjoy life.

That's an odd statement to make. The whole article is about how she is doing exactly the thing that helps her enjoy life.

I remember hearing about a startup that tried to crowd fund the news. I don't think it worked but it's a cool idea.

Probably better than the typical sensationalized crap, that's for sure.

I am sure she has better content than Buzz Feed

way to go!

Cute

why the downvote? I actually meant it's cute, not the cynical 'cute'

I didn't downvote you (else I wouldn't be able to post a reply!) but the downvote comes from not adding anything substantial to the conversation: it's the +1 of github issues - any "thanks for posting!" kind of comments tend to get killed (again, it would be better to post something more substantial, like why you liked it etc etc). Your reply to yourself got downvoted, 'cause "no complaining about being downvoted" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ahh, wasn't aware of the guidelines!

> I didn't downvote you (else I wouldn't be able to post a reply!)

Eh? Yes you can. Why do you think you can't?

In fact if you downvote you are encouraged to post a reply to explain why.

It's actually the opposite: You can't downvote people who reply to you.

"Her father is an author and former New York Daily News reporter who took Hilde to his newsroom and to stories he covered around New York and hooked her on the rush of chasing news."

Welp.

Well yes, talent doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's still an awesome story.

Well, yeah, someone had to teach her that flawless inverted-pyramid writing style.

Please don't post things like this here. On HN, comments should be civil and substantive, not snarkily dismissive.

Fortunately, good examples are close at hand—you got two fine replies from fellow users. Be that way.

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