Talk:Raw Story

Additional campaign theft exclusive

• Specific text to be added or removed: Levinthal also revealed that a thief stole more than $10,000 from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) campaign account.
• Reason for the change: As noted by The Daily Beast, the incident is "the latest and probably highest profile incident in a growing trend of thefts targeting political organizations on both sides of the aisle." The suggested text might be added to the paragraph outlining reports of prior thefts.
• References supporting change: https://www.thedailybeast.com/check-thief-pilfers-chuck-schumers-campaign-committee-report-says, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2023/04/04/trump-v-new-york-tbd-00090292, https://morningconsult.com/briefs/morning-consult-washington-trumps-gop-primary-lead-widens-ahead-of-arraignment/?from_subscribe=true

Thanks for your consideration! JByrne404 (talk) 16:43, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

 Not done These are just three précis' that contain routine aggregation credit to TRS. One of them is just 14 words long. I'm at a loss to find many, or any, articles we have on other media outlets that try to contain an exhaustive list of every story they've filed, which is the direction we're headed here. I think our essay on WP:EXCESSDETAIL provides a cogent argument for declining this edit request. That said, if TRS' story on the Schumer campaign committee becomes, itself, the subject of reporting (e.g. the CJR does a feature on the process of newsgathering that went into the development of the story, the story wins the Pulitzer, etc.) I think that would be a different matter. Chetsford (talk) 17:36, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Chetsford, this is fair and I follow your logic. I appreciate your taking a look. We'll try to reserve our requests for more material items. Best, JByrne404 (talk) 18:03, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Removed hyperpartisan sentence

I removed the sentence "Some consider Raw Story a hyperpartisan media outlet" and its three citations, which 5 months ago I had tagged as "verification needed". No one else took it up, so today I've taken a stab at it.

Pennycook doesn't mention Raw Story at all. The document includes one figure/chart with 60 domain names (one of which is rawstory.com). That's it. No context. No content.

Xu is not available online through Wikipedia Library Taylor & Francis; it's just not there. I cannot tell if the not-logged-in version is ONLY an abstract, or if the whole thing was yanked from Taylor and Francis. A search by author does not find any similar content under another title or DOI although there remain 3 other articles by Xu.

Benkler mentions Raw Story and 'hyper' in passing; no context or explanation, like it's a foregone conclusion. This is all you find in the article that mentions Raw Story:

• "Moreover, younger, more net-native, more frankly partisan sites gain significantly in prominence. On the left, Daily Kos, Politicus USA, Raw Story, and Salon gain visibility relative to their place in the link economy."
• "Media sources most frequently shared on Twitter. 16 Raw Story"
• "Media sources most frequently shared on Facebook. 13 Raw Story"
• "Palmer Report and Raw Story, other left-wing sites, saw more attention on Twitter in 2017"
• "This did not prevent a hyperpartisan site like the Palmer Report or Raw Story from joining the Huffington Post as the three most tweeted sources in the left media set."

I'm just not seeing any WP:WEIGHT to warrant using the term "hyperpartisan" in Wikivoice or including it in the article. Grorp (talk) 01:36, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't think, but am open to correction, that "Some consider Raw Story a hyperpartisan media outlet" is Wikivoice with the qualifier "some consider" preceding it.
Pennycoock and Xu include TRS in graphs charting "hyperpartisan" outlets. WEIGHT is not a black/white determinant on whether something is or is not included in an entry, but how much emphasis should be placed on it. I think it's a challenging position to stake that a seven word sentence sourced to three RS in an sprawling, 1600-word article, is wildly out of proportion and violative of WEIGHT. Chetsford (talk) 06:22, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm referring to weight in the source articles (how much), and weight of reliable sources (how many), not the percentage of characters in an entire Wikipedia article. None of the sources explain their "label" directly tied to Raw Story. (Let's make that 2 sources since Xu is missing online. If you have a copy of Xu, please email it to me so I can read it.)

When writing something that is potentially controversial in Wikipedia, we want to get it right. Here's an example of why it's important to get it right. Let's take bing.com's AI/Chat tool. If you ask "Is raw story hyperpartisan?" you will get the answer yes, with citations to Wikipedia. (Clearly those 7 words have a weightier effect than expected.) If, on the other hand, you then click the proffered question "What are some examples of hyperpartisan media outlets?", you do NOT get Raw Story. You do, however get "Fox News, MSNBC, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and The Huffington Post". Not one of their Wikipedia articles use the word "hyperpartisan". I also notice that 3 of those 5 are on Pennycook's "mainstream media" (oops!) and only 2 on "hyperpartisan". Pennycook doesn't appear to have a "partisan" category; just main, hyperp, and false. So how useful or precise is Pennycook's chart, then?

So you ask yourself: Is the usage in sources merely in passing? Is it explained or expounded upon in the source? Do other sources regularly use the label when writing about Raw Story? Is it a controversial label? These are questions you might ask when deciding to include or not include content (even 7 words) in a Wiki article. Per WP:ONUS, While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article. Such information should be omitted or presented instead in a different article. The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. Grorp (talk) 07:31, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not even sure where to begin with this. We don't typically rewrite WP articles to make them more compatible with a private company's data response products. Your complaint about bing.com's chatbot output for TRS is an issue that is more properly addressed to Microsoft customer service, which this is not.

"When writing something that is potentially controversial in Wikipedia, we want to get it right." You haven't enunciated that this is somehow incorrect. It's triple sourced to three RS.

"Let's make that 2 sources since Xu is missing online." Let's not. We don't remove sources because they're paywalled; see WP:OFFLINE. I am able to read the Xu article and can confirm its presence. The editor who added it was, presumably, able to confirm its presence. You have the option of requesting a courtesy copy from Xu, Sang, and Kim via ResearchGate [1]. At this point, it feels like you're stretching to get this sentence excised, for what reasons I can only imagine. Chetsford (talk) 19:55, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I have made a request through ResearchGate. Thanks for the suggestion. I hope they send me the text. My example using Bing was a quick illustratation of the consequences of getting it wrong in the Wikipedia article. I'm sure Wikimedia Foundation wouldn't enjoy lawsuits from any organization who was slandered or libeled (see WP:LIBEL). There are more important reasons why we have certain policies we must follow as Wikipedia editors; and it's not just to keep the peace between wikieditors with differing viewpoints. Grorp (talk) 03:47, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

"I hope they send me the text." Me too, but we can't wait for that. I've restored removed content correctly cited to WP:RS per WP:NOTCENSORED. Chetsford (talk) 07:16, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Trim content section?

Due to frequent requests by TRS' editorial staff, the content section is running afoul of WP:EXCESSDETAIL and is turning into an exhaustive index of TRS' past articles. Most of these are sourced to a single outlet aggregating a TRS story and providing a link credit to TRS. Using this as a standard, the Content section will quickly spin wildly out of control; this is a level of detail we provide to no other media outlet. Should we remove mention of articles in which the article itself (versus the content of the article) is not the subject of a story? By my count, using a very generous interpretation, that would preclude inclusion of these:

• "In 2011, Raw Story was among the first outlets..."
• "In 2014, Jennifer Mascia published a column ..."
• "The same year, the outlet broke news of the connection..."
• "On February 15, 2021, Raw Story reported ..."
• "In 2023, Raw Story was the first outlet to report ..."

Chetsford (talk) 20:05, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm too tired to go into any great lengths or depths today, so I'm responding off the cuff, here. And I'm not interested in arguing for each and every entry under "Content" (though I could be goaded). I referred to WP:EXCESSDETAIL in my edit summary because you had used it before, so I figured you had some familiarity with it. I have no great plans for the article, nor the section, but your recent addition [2] was out of line.

The state of the article when I first encountered it (around 6 months ago?) was atrocious. It seems an activist had deliberately googled "raw story" and added an enormous list of anything that was ever said bad about Raw Story that filled 2/3rds of the page. The content was a "list of incidents"; no source covered any such trends. That's not how we write articles in Wikipedia. I'd found a wiki policy on it at the time; can't think of it this minute, but I likely mentioned it in an earlier talk page discussion. I spent an enormous amount of effort trying to put the article at least in some sort of neutral POV. I researched and removed all the ridiculous paragraphs made by that one editor (Brandolini's law in play). The remaining 3 under "false claims" are from a different editor; I just never dug into those because of the tedium involved in such work.

Your new addition to the section was way off and fits the pattern of the earlier activist-added content in the article. Your rendition of the source was a misinterpretation, skewed to infer things about Raw Story that the source didn't even suggest. That is WP:SYNTH.

There's a large difference between mentioning content that a news outlet publishes especially if it was lauded or mentioned favorably by a third party, compared to mentioning individual digs or criticisms about individual incidents. Note: In most of the cases, the 'false claims' were content from syndicated sources and were corrected or removed from servers after discovery of falseness; a standard industry action. The only reason Raw Story was called out was because it was one of the outlets with far-reach, like most clicks or shares or similar, and the studies were analyzing reach and trends so of course they used examples drawn from Raw Story instead of one of the lesser-reach outlets who had published the same exact articles. But that editor tried to make it seem like Raw Story was making false claims deliberately and negligently, neither of which was true, and none of the sources cited had alleged that, either.

Your recent addition was in the same vein. You took some content where the authors used an example of a Raw Story article to illustrate how something could potentially be misleading, and wrote it like Raw Story deliberately did something bad. That's not what the source said.

I will leave you with this. No one is going to subscribe to or read Raw Story because of a Wikipedia article. However, people could be convinced not to subscribe or read Raw Story because of Wikipedia's article blowing all out of proportion individual incidents to give the impression of such 'false claims' happening all the time. Wikipedia requires us to source what we write and mandates it is verifiable and reliable. Unless one has a source (several, actually) indicating the negative reputation like that activist tried to paint, it's just not going to fly. Controversies and criticism need more reliable sources than praise or neutral content does. Grorp (talk) 03:47, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

That's not correct. Chetsford (talk) 07:06, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Hey @Chetsford. I was thinking to chime in on possible content but first wanted to take up the conversation here because I agree with you, particularly when looking at other pages. I think as @Grorp noted, part of the reason there were a lot of requests on the page for additions was to try and balance the page after it swung in an one-sidedly critical direction, without note to Raw Story's reporting.

While I'm wary of suggesting deletions, I think that some of the content is somewhat random and not necessarily useful for a Wikipedia reader. We may disagree on some of what we think is important to include, but of those that you mention I would say that it would be reasonable to remove:

• "In 2012, then-executive editor..." I'm not sure why this is included. I suppose Raw Story is the subject of the story, but it doesn't seem relevant to Raw Story's reporting coverage as a whole. The source story about the article is pretty thin, as well.
• "In 2014, Jennifer Mascia published a column ..." I agree. This is sort of just what someone did on a particular day. It is already referenced in the awards section with the Columbia Journalism Review mention.
• "The same year, the outlet..." I agree. I note that Adam Muema doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, and so I'm not sure he's notable enough to have reporting about him included.

Other thoughts:

• Regarding the "On February 15, 2021" entry, this was one for which Raw Story won an award and was cited by AP in breaking the story, so that seemed more notable.
• Regarding the "in 2023, Raw Story was the first to report" entry, these stories were part of a group of other stories Raw Story did about theft of money from politicians and political action committees. I believe there are additional references to this work, so let me look at that as homework.

False claim thought:

• Something I recently noticed about one of the claims is that the false claim "In December 2017..." is that it is factually accurate but confusing for the reader, because it implies CNN's mistake was Raw Story's. It's factually accurate that "In December 2017, Raw Story published an article based on a CNN report which mistakenly stated that on September 4, 2016..." But Raw Story never reported the incorrect date of the email. This is the story: https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/don-jr-and-other-trump-campaign-officials-were-offered-secret-link-to-wikileaks-hacks-report/ I went back in archive.org to be safe, and found this as the earliest version, in October 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20171209041612/https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/don-jr-and-other-trump-campaign-officials-were-offered-secret-link-to-wikileaks-hacks-report/ Raw Story had nothing to correct because its story was correct. The authors seem to have made an assumption about the date of the email being included. I suppose it can't be corrected because Raw Story is not a Wikipedia trusted source? But it's written in a way almost to be deliberately misleading to a Wikipedia reader, who would assume Raw Story erred on the date. Here's the top-level archive.org search where you can see what was published in 2017, prior to the date of the Oxford article: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/don-jr-and-other-trump-campaign-officials-were-offered-secret-link-to-wikileaks-hacks-report/

Anyway, I'll leave it there for now. Hope you are well. JByrne404 (talk) 20:47, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Rollback explanation

Editor 98.46.111.30, who remarks he/she is a "disinterested but professional academic editor/writer (retired prof); only concern here is rigor/verifiability", left the article a mess of half-done research and research notes (which don't belong in the article itself).

There was some original research added, especially phrases or sentences to which the user tagged as 'citation needed' -- so why add those at all?

Wikipedia does not need to record a blow-by-blow account of every action related to company acquisitions. That would be WP:UNDUE. Just state that something was bought, maybe a reason given why, record a date, and be done with it.

Edit summary complaint about no citation for people in infobox -- turns out it was in the body under section "Staff", but another editor had removed all the other people except for two. Current staff are found in the masthead which is cited in the body.

Edit summary complaint about naming a reference "HIV1"; I refer user to the domain name of the URL of the citation. There was probably an HIV2 which subsequently was deleted. Keep in mind the company owner advocates for HIV prevention so 'shivers up thy spine'... I refer editor to Wikipedia is not censored.

I will look at some of the complaints and fix a few, but if editor feels the need to add huge chunks of content, then I suggest approaching it with smaller bites. For example, fix citation formats in one edit (they'll probably be just fine), and add content in a separate edit. I hate to remove a series of a new editor's good faith edits, but I cannot fix this mess. Rollback it is. Grorp (talk) 08:43, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

New awards

• Specific text to be added or removed: In 2024, Raw Story won a SABEW Best in Business reporting award for its “Lawmakers, Law Breakers” series, which exposed Democratic and Republican lawmakers who violated U.S. conflict of interest and insider trading laws. It received honorable mentions in two other categories. The series also won the first place inaugural ION Award in 2023, which called the nonpartisan investigation “fair, bold, specific, and thoroughly documented.”
• Reason for the change: It's important for readers to understand that Raw Story has increasing authority in its Congressional coverage to better judge Raw Story as a journalistic outlet. These awards are valuable for readers' understanding because the series was notably nonpartisan; it reported on both Democrats and Republicans who violated the STOCK Act. The Best in Business awards are very competitive and the New York Times, Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal were also among the winners. Raw Story also won the Illinois Women's Press Association Award for the Lawmakers, Lawbreakers series, but it seemed superfluous to add to Wikipedia. A link to that, though, is included in the references section.
• References supporting change: https://sabew.org/contestsawards/best-in-business/ https://www.rawstory.com/congress-stock-act-violations/ https://sharylattkisson.com/2023/10/announcing-winners-of-the-inaugural-ion-awards/ https://www.iwpa.org/iwpa-announces-2024-mate-e-palmer-professional-communications-contest-winners/

JByrne404 (talk) 22:30, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

 Done.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 06:10, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! One quick additional request, since it falls in the same section. Raw Story also won an EPPY Award for best/news political blog in 2023 -- link here: https://www.eppyawards.com/ . Perhaps a note might also be included in the section to indicate the EPPY Award is an Editor & Publisher award, so "EPPY (Editor & Publisher) Award," when it's first mentioned? Thanks for any help you can provide. JByrne404 (talk) 20:16, 25 March 2024 (UTC)