Edit: Even MBFC rates dropsitenews as a reliable source https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/drop-site-news-bias-and-credibility/
MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY
There is no rule about ‘blog sites’ on worldnews. Jordanlund has made this up and proceeds to classify anything he does not like as a 'blog '.
There are different links that have his last article.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/hossam-shabat-journalist-killed-gaza-last-article
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hossam-shabat-s-last-article/ar-AA1BDeXT
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/outrage-as-israel-kills-another-truthteller/
Dropsite is another Substack blog and would be removed.
MSN might be tricky because they basically steal content with a link forwarder. Looks like, in this case, they’re ripping off ZNetwork:
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hossam-shabats-last-article/
Znetwork is solid, MSN? Eh, I’d treat it as a link forwarder and remove it.
Jewish Voice For Labor looks good though!
I would say if you are removing dropsite, the rule is missing the forest through the trees. I get the need to have standards.
I think we can all acknowledge that we live on a shifting plane of mediums and media, and really, we are seeing a resurgence of what I would call “blog-type” news sites. This has coincided with an almost complete collapse of where most of these substackers were formerly employed, eg, digital media companies. Digital media’s collapse isn’t new news, and many of these substacks came about as a direct response to digital media companies going under. Many of these stubstacks are the journalism one would have found at those companies.
I guess the point I want to make is that being a legacy media site doesn’t a valid news source make, nor does a news outlet which is effectively a single/ small group of journalists not valid news it make.
And especially in the context of the near total collapse of digital media over the previous 4 years, by insisting things be from effectively legacy digital media sources, we’re really winnowing down the options, from even, a year ago. It would seem like editing and fact checking, and abiding by some set of journalistic standards are more important.
The reason we remove all substack blogs is we aren’t going to be drawn into a debate over “Buh, buh, you allowed THEIR link!! Why not miiiiiine!!?!?!?” as I explained in the other PTB thread when this came up.
If it’s a legitimate news source, great! Hats off to you. If it’s not a legitimate news source, it’s getting removed. We don’t care who wrote it.
If the story is ONLY available on bullshit sources and you can’t find it on a reputable news site, you need to step back and ask why rather than yell at the mods.
I know, I’ve been there before… super juicy story broken by… checks notes… “New York Post”, well fuck me, right? Let’s wait a day or so and see if a real paper picks it up.
I get the spirit of the rule and I also agree in the importance of a degree of editorial over site. But like, something like 60-80% of digital media companies that existed 5 years ago are gone. And substack has grown to fill that void.
Its really, really difficult to make the claim that sub-stack isn’t news at this point, when its where like, the news is actually happening.
It seems to me that a list of pre-approved substacks which either a) undergo editorial review, or b) demonstrate that they follow a certain level of journalistic standard. That same standard could be used to put news sources that don’t meet those requirements could be added to a ban-list.
If its a legacy media enterprise, they are assumed editorial until proven to fail in that regard. If its a substack/ blog, they have to demonstrate they do journalism to a certain level of quality.
So like white list for some blogs/ black list for legacy media.
That sort of whitelisting is going to be beyond what a volunteer team is capable of doing. If there’s another source that does something like that on blog pages, we’d be happy to utilize it, but man, look at the grief we continue getting every time we mention “Yeah MBFC marks it as questionable.”
Coming back to this a day later because I was just reading an article about the killing of a dropsite contributor on dropsite, and I realized, they have editors.
So returning here:
Dropsite has it’s own domain.
It has editors.
But you don’t want to allow it because they rely on substack for the underlying publishing technology?
Yep and they’ve been tripling down on that too.
Seems like a whitelisting/ blacklisting system should be fairly straight foward to implement.
A wiki run to list valid news sources and why they should be listed, that can have discussions in the talk page, might be helpful to address many of these issues.
I used to help mod the largest Reddit news community back in the day, and it was easy to use the approach you talk about.
Now, I doubt I could. The news industry has really collapsed or been nerfed. There are small sites never heard about before doing heavy lifting and they need to be validated in a way it’s easy to use those guidelines in moderation.
To not do that is to either become increasingly reactionary to sources or get in fights about what is or is not valid.
The rule should be about where it is posted if that is the important part.
All the other sites copied it from drop site news; personally I’m ok with a mirror as long as the content is not altered
The rule is explicit: News Articles Only.
Blogs aren’t news articles.
This is an article, by a news org. Highly trusted. With editors, with their own hosting… But they use the tech stack that other blogs use? What if I told you many reputable news sources uses blog tech stacks?
Then it shouldn’t be on a blog site. ;)
But how is it on a blog site? I still don’t understand the last leap of logic in your chain of thought. When confronted, you reiterate that it is a blog, even though you know it is an article from a reputable news organisation, then you say but it’s on a blog site, when it is not, then you loop back. It’s not a blog, not on a blog site, it’s domain is not a blog domain. What makes it a blog exactly?
A blog site is a host of personal opinion. It’s an online diary. Some of it is interesting and useful, most of it is not, none of it is journalism or news.
If a journalist is sharing space with blogs, we aren’t going to allow any of it, because we aren’t going through every fucking author going “is this one valid? What about this guy talking about how their dog just took a dump? How about this guy convinced robots are stealing his luggage?”
Same reason we don’t allow bullshit social media like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
There’s too much content to say what’s valid for the community and what’s not.
Does the New York Times have a Twitter account? Sure. Do we allow it? No, because fuck you Twitter. Does the Washington Post have a Facebook account? Sure. Do we allow it? No, because fucking Facebook.
The same goes for Substack, Blogger, Blogsite, etc. We don’t care who is doing the writing. It’s not a valid source.
Yeah, I get that point and agree totally. But the question is that this one, that is validated. That has been gone through. That you obviously have now the choice and loop back again. Why in his case do you loop back to “it is a blog” when you know now it isn’t? Then when asked swap back to argument 1?