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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

Yes! There is a need for more people in journalism who understand the principles of data relationships and are comfortable with modern technology. Whoever takes this job or one at another newspaper, here's a subset of my desiderata for modern journalists:

Every article should have machine readable metadata including:

* The author

* The geographic and political point(s) or region(s) discussed in the article

* URLs of related content (serious news outlets need to fight their desire to keep the user from leaving the site)

* A boolean that indicates if the article uses anonymous sources (tools could then filter out such articles when desired)

* Implicit version control showing each published revision of an article and who made the change

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These are all desirable, but IMO also really miss the point.

Jobs like this are about the input of a story, not the output. Ensuring that a health story is backed up by thorough analysis of government data. Or a story created entirely from scratch because a bot noticed an uptick in some particular dataset.

That has the potential to be really powerful journalism. Metadata isn't unimportant, but it's not more important than the story itself.

(IIRC, the NYT already has APIs that fulfill almost all of your requests, incidentally)

I don't disagree that what I describe may not be what NYT is looking for. I'm excited enough about their commitment to devote programmer resources to news that I am eager to provide that feedback.

> (IIRC, the NYT already has APIs that fulfill almost all of your requests, incidentally)

Really? I poked around and just now registered for an API key. I see no documentation more detailed than "Data is returned in JSON". I'll keep looking.

Hm, the site has changed since I saw it last, seemingly to only include automated API documentation. That's a shame.

IIRC it's the Article Search API - it has a field named "fl" that controls what fields are returned, but it now the documentation doesn't seem to specify what fields it can return.

> Jobs like this are about the input of a story, not the output.

> Metadata isn't unimportant, but it's not more important than the story itself.

I see redefining what a modern reader should expect of serious journalism as a forcing function that would prompt the writer/editor to provide that data. It would affect how they report and provide better input.

I agree, but I wouldn't expect to see news orgs provide this data until readers actually do demand it. Most are (slowly) going out of business, so they're not about to spend very expensive developer resources on features few people are asking for.

Unfortunately, I think you are correct. No newspaper is likely to invest in raising the bar and I'm in a small minority that wants these features. I fear that all providers of serious journalism will keep chasing advertising revenue instead of serving readers.

@untog's got this one right. There are other teams that focus on improving the CMS, website and apps — but this job posting is specifically geared towards research, data analysis, reporting, tools for search/viz/compare, databases for journalists to rely on, and so on, and so forth. As he says, the input.

I think I understand the distinction in what you're looking for in this opening. I'm still excited about the idea of journalism taking it's output more seriously. Until news organizations get that, how will they know what the input should be?

I'm serious about wanting an attribute for unnamed sources. I would love for NYT and The Economist to have a preference setting where I can tell it "don't show me articles which use unnamed sources".

I agree.

You can still have a masterpiece newspaper article without metadata dripping all over it, but no amount of metadata is going to fix shoddy journalism. Fortunately, the metadata stuff isn't rocket science.

What is rocket science, however, is computational journalism. I think the NYT is onto something here. What happens when you pump up great journalists with the ability to mine data, create visualizations, and explore complex relationships that are intractable without computational assistance?

> * Implicit version control showing each published revision of an article and who made the change

That last one made me laugh. With traditional print, you'd have a newer version of an article (say the afternoon edition) highlight the changes or the newspaper would publish a correction in a separate section of the paper.

You'd think with modern technology there would be a better way of presenting that type of information but it seems like the real response from the publishing industry has been to simply perform ninja edits and hope nobody notices.

Yes, I've noticed the same thing and it has annoyed me. Newspapers are historical artifacts. They have a duty to history to be accountable about such changes.

This seems like it is exactly what a blockchain is for...

hNews Microformats:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hnews

Support this. ALL MEDIA, please.

Actually, I'd love to see Google require this (and possibly, additions), for qualifications for Google News listings.

Most especially: reputation tracking of reporters, authors, editors, and publishers, most especially on accuracy (inclusive of corrections, which reduce but don't eliminate error penalties).

> Actually, I'd love to see Google require this[...]: reputation tracking of reporters

I'm pretty sure I do not want my search engine to assign some "reputation" values. Instead, I'd prefer people to get educated about their news sources and make their own choices.

Your search engine is assigning reputation values, that's what it's all about.

I'd like to see those have some foundation in truth and fact rather than SEO inflation.

SEO-based "reputation" is just a misnomer; asking for actual people being rated opens the door to easy silencing of critics.

The problem is not the media, but our consumer attitude to news: Only a few track down the source of a news and read the actual ticker message or scientific paper. Even fewer understand the background of a media outlet, its tone/agenda and business relations.

In your Utopos the "truths and facts" would not be your own, it would be those of whoever controls the reputation database. You can watch a system like this unfold in China[1] - and because it is China, we all agree without a second thought that this is a tool for oppression...

[1] https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan...

Criteria of Truth isn't a greenfields. There is extant literature and authorities to be consulted, and, perhaps, questioned:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth

Any reputation or recommendation system is subject to gaming. The questions are: what fundamentally does it promote, what are its internal incentive structures, and is it fundamentally trustable.

You don't get away from any of those questions (or concerns) no matter what you replace it with. Aiming at truth itself strikes me as vastly preferable to the extant model.

Understanding that truth itself can be imprecise, and building considerations of this (say: through fuzzing or randomising SERP) into the system also helps.

What significant amounts of research, ranging from highly formal to informal, have show, is that the lack of accountability by reptuation has lead to numerous actors hijacking our epistemic systems. Lauren Weinstein, Pew, Snopes, ProPublica, and others, have reported on this at length.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...

Would you pay for something like this? Because if not, I see zero reason for publishers to implement this with their already limited amount of developer labor.

Yes. I already do pay for subscriptions to various newspapers/periodicals. I see plenty of reason for publishers to rise above what other publishers are doing and provide more value.

How much more would you pay a month for this though? Newspapers don't have enough subscribers to be profitable as it is.

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