Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcist | Hacker News Reader

Thank you! I never understand why journalists don't link to court documents.

They probably do but the editors remove them.

It seems that rule number one of running a news site is to never have any external links. It's like a casino, they want you to come in and get lost.

That seems to be the case for US media... here in Germany, it's a bit different at least for quality media. Spiegel, Heise, Die ZEIT and T-Online all happily link to sources, even up to competing news media.

I'm not if Reuters has a main country now, but it's originally English.

thesmokinggun.com already does provide a fine repository of current and past court filings of interest. They've been around for years, and some journalists do link to them. Intriguingly, the one ad on their site at the moment is for diamond engagement rings.

I suppose that ad's positioning could be just random programmatic placement. But if anyone in the HN community can figure out why court-filing enthusiasts are especially likely to want to buy an engagement ring off an unverified website, I'd love to know more

newspapers can't sell ads on a remote court document site

which leads to a great business idea, run a mirror that republishes legal / government documents in a syndicated fashion with [your ad here]

I like that idea. A homepage that lists the top 20 stories of the day that are about a document that probably isn't actually linked to. Go to our site (www.readtheactualdocument.com) to see it -- and get served ads.

Additive would be some highlighting and annotating of the document (as nytimes sometimes does) to point people to salient points.

Scribd already does that, but with subscription/one-time payments instead of ads.

I guess it's only works with leaked or hard to find documents.

But why would a media website upload docs to your site, when they can serve it from their own?

if I get a commemorative lucite block with "Leader in Innovation" someday, I'll know it came from your startup as they went public, good luck!

100% of readers will not read the source document.

My favorite are the news articles with links to other articles, that link back to the original, thus cyclically references itself as a source.

Because 99% of readers probably don't want to/won't read them.

if news organizations did a good job of quoting/summarizing court documents, I would be happy not to read them either

Reply on news.ycombinator.com