Creating Pre-Narrative News

What could the 10x better version of the New York Times look like?

●      Revision control for all articles

●      Open source NLP tools

●      Reproducible journalism with citations

●      Citizen journalists rather than corporate journalists

●      Decentralized fact checking

Maybe this is the "raw" news feed journalists and investors themselves read? This is what Reuters purported to be, a neutral feed. It is pre-narrative news. Sports scores or a stream of stock price movements are closer to this today.

This is a key observation: many pieces of media are words or video wrapped around public data structures. Sports articles are often wrappers around box scores. Financial articles are often wrappers around a company’s financials. Many articles and news broadcasts are wrappers around tweets.

News eventually will all be based on event feeds. Today many events are digitally logged to separate databases. Eventually, this will become one giant feed. Private data will be encrypted, and public entries will be linkable. This kind of global on-chain event feed would take over from newspapers as the true first draft of history.

Digital timestamps can be used to establish everything from the reality of a patent to the fakeness of a photo. Citizen journalists can take these emotion-stripped "raw" facts and then add their own narratives on top to make sense of them.

Another interesting idea is to downrank polarizing content. Content analysis to find and measure polarizing words and scissor statements can be done in real-time today. It's much easier than fact checking.

Facebook or Twitter could do this today if they wanted to. So could the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But doing so would hurt engagement, and therefore profit.

An "important feed" will be very different from the "news feed." What is important often is not new, and what is new often is not important.