I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
Rules make for great starting points, but consider that people are at different levels when it comes to their understanding of what news is.
Good rule unless the hed is useless or sensationalized. This likely means you have the wrong source, but now we’re in the realm of editorial discretion, which is not historically the strongest skill the public at large has developed.
Subjective. Doctorow’s piece on enshittification was a blog post.
Again, expecting people to know the difference is a big ask outside of a newsroom.
Same URL, sure. But tick-tocks are not the same as analysis and generally garner a different sort of discussion.
Varying levels of user sophistication is definitely something to consider, thanks for mentioning it. I personally would rather see some dubious articles than chase away people who don’t understand why I consider those articles dubious. I think that also covers articles with bad heds. “The title tells me something about this story” is a good starting point for a discussion about source reliability. Rephrasing a title also expresses an opinion, and it sounds like we’re not looking for the poster’s commentary. (I could go either way on that, myself).
I’m not sure I’m with you about “blog spam,” though. I agree that it’s a subjective characterization, but in my opinion, Cory Doctorow’s piece on enshittification is not news. It’s certainly not spam, and it is worthy of discussion, but it doesn’t serve the informative purpose that a news article does, and I don’t think it’s meant to. That piece is an analysis of patterns of events over the course of many years, and its purpose is to identify and describe a pattern shown by those events, not to present a detailed, factual account of any of them.
I do think there are blogs that contain news, if that’s what you’re getting at, and I am open to the idea that certain kinds of commentary might belong in a news forum even if they don’t count as news, but I personally would stop short of grouping high-level conceptual pieces with standard news items. I also don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with blog posts, but I do think they’re usually commentary or personal anecdotes rather than straight news, so if we’re looking to avoid commentary and anecdotes, prohibiting blogs might be a step in that direction. (As with commentary by OP, I could go either way on discussing editorials/commentary).