Improving the news

I haven't watched national news in a long time, and I'm cautious with the local news. This is because I know how the American media works. Everything is skewed to suck up to the east and induce fear so that they can maximize their ratings.

Having the news run by businesses does not work, and it never will. Government-run media suffers similar problems, but with different motives. Businesses want money, and manipulating the public can help their cause. The government wants power and to maintain control over citizens.

I recently posted about a desire to find a better, but I didn’t go into any detail about how things should be. I couldn’t resist a slight expansion.

We might actually have a few things going for us that we could use to replace our corrupt media in the next millennium or two... if we handle everything properly and evolve. In short, the Internet is our best hope right now.

What I would like to see is to open news to the people involved. We need to open channels for news contributions and allow people reasonable access to these contributions. We could develop some tools to find the information that we need.

A few sites have tried to put the news in the hands of the public. The problem with these sites is that they have too much control reliant on a single central service. This means that different sites have different content, and very few people are going to bother to visit every one of them for information.

We should develop some open standards. Different news sources (websites) could register in public databases to allow searches from external sources. News items could be attached to writers (or photographers, or any other kind of news contributors), reasoning behind contribution (familiar with the area hit by a natural disaster, voter with expertise on an issue, under-represented opinion, etc), locations of events, proximity to events, and more. Sites could develop reputations, writers could gain their own, and even individual articles could have opportunities to establish themselves as the best to read. Tags could be attached, with some being created specifically for certain topics. Some tags could be created by businesses (product releases, sponsored events, and any other stories that they want people to talk about), nonprofit organizations (fundraising, organized events, and anything that they find to be worthwhile), government (voting, law changes, etc), and the group responsible for the public database whenever an item shouldn't be controlled by anyone else (natural disasters).

Search engines could search all the major news sites and provide customized results based on interests, location, significance of local events, and just about anything else. Tags could be used by non traditional news sources such as social networking, allowing searches to incorporate suggested reading from friends and add personal updates if friends are somehow involved in a news story.

The bottom line here is that I would personally prefer to read about an incident in Washington from Washingtonians rather than from the east coast biased media. If we are willing to make a few changes, this might actually be possible.