Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if you could create a journalist certificate system which allowed you to sign your news stories with your journalist's private key. Then places like facebook and twitter could check the registry to see if you were in fact a "certified" journalist. Then people who read your stories could vote for or against their truthfulness.

The sign up process would be open to anyone, with or without degrees or training, but it would require enough information and be costly enough that you wouldn't have people send out a fake story get banned, get a new cert, and do it again.

I don't doubt there are people out there who don't "write the news" for a living who would be outstanding journalists and those who do that would get banned for their lack of accuracy.

The idea being that in the past a brand such as the New York Times would carefully manage its journalists such that its content was viewed as accurate and authoritative, it has in the past loudly fired employees who "broke the code". Aggregators like Google and Facebook and Twitter could use the 'newsy score' to trend stories from respected journalists and de-emphasize or spike stories from discredited or non-journalists.

So pretty much Facebook likes? People vote on what matches their worldview.

A I mentioned below I'm wondering if it might work better if rather than likes you focused on "rejections" or people who felt the story was false. That would subject it to review and that would then trigger more rigorous inspection.

So they reject things they wish weren't true. Same deal.

What do you do when some group, like 4chan trolls, decide to go upvote garbage or downvote a legitimate journalist?

Interesting concept, but what gives readers any authority to vote on the truthfulness of a story?

Good question, other journalists could vote on each other? That would present challenges if WaPo decides they want to collude to torpedo the top journalist at NYT.

Perhaps a system where readers could 'endorse' or 'reject' a story and if a rejection threshold is reached it is evaluated double blind by a randomly selected pool of journalists with an accreditation score higher than some threshold (perhaps adjustable by the accreditation score of the challenged journalist as well). If a simple majority of the reviewers uphold the rejection it gets noted, and perhaps the accreditation score gets reduced of the journalist reporting poorly.

I'd have to run some simulations on that to see how whether that would be workable or result in overworked 'reviewing' journalists just rejecting or accepting everything enmasse.

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