As you might or might not know, I’ve got a relationship with Edelman, the PR company. I know Richard Edelman, I’ve spoken to their clients about blogging, had meetings with them, and spoken at two of their events. I have also worked closely with Jackie Cooper PR, their sister company, providing training and consultancy.

So I’m pretty embroiled with Edelman, and that makes me even more disappointed to be using the ‘Blog Fuckwittery’ category on this post, but it can’t be helped, I’m afraid.

If you’re into the whole PR thing, then you’ll likely have noticed recently that Edelman have got themselves into a bit of a pinch by helping create a fake blog for Wal-Mart. Called ‘Wal-Marting Across America‘, it purported to be a blog by a couple who decided to go on a cheap holiday in an RV (that’s camper van to us Brits), staying in Wal-Mart car parks overnight. What the blog failed to mention was that the project was a publicity stunt and that Wal-Mart were paying for their petrol, food, and the RV. This trick is known in the trade as ‘astroturfing’ (i.e. faking grassroots). Another way of describing it is ‘lying by omission’, and we all know lying is bad.

I’m not going to go into detail here about what was wrong with this specific project because lots of other people have done that, and I don’t much feel like parroting them. (For balance, I include the frankly lame responses from Richard and Steve.) But I do want to discuss a creeping disquiet I’ve felt lately that this serves only to reinforce.

Now, I like Richard Edelman – he seems to be a nice guy, quite savvy, and genuinely interested in the blogosphere, but the problem here is not just that Richard and his team were not transparent, it’s more fundamental than that. It’s that they are still thinking in old media terms: This was a typical ‘broadcast media’ stunt, an attempt to change the way people think about Wal-Mart by playing up the warm fuzzy angles and neglecting to mention that the whole thing was set up from the start. That is such an old-school way of thinking and it reveals just how much of the bloggers’ ethos has percolated through to the heart of what Edelman do, i.e. ‘not a lot’.

The other week, Kevin and I were invited by Richard and his team to attend a briefing that they, with Technorati, were giving their clients about the European blogosphere. Kevin was on the panel and I was asked by Richard just before the event if I could stand up and say something about the difference between US and UK top ten bloggers. I didn’t really blog it, bar a quick mention on Chocolate and Vodka, because I ended up feeling a little bit uncomfortable with some of the basic premises on show, such as ‘the A-list are important’.

There were a lot of other bloggers there, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it, because it was a little too much like they were there for show. For a long time I’ve felt that Richard is indulging in the zooification of bloggers – collecting and displaying them the way that rich people used to do with exotic animals. I worry that this makes him feel that he’s got a better understanding of the phenomenon than he actually has.

Surrounding myself with Chinese speakers does not instantaneously make me a fluent Chinese speaker. Yes, having access to Chinese speakers can help me learn Chinese better and faster, but only if I actually bother to speak Chinese to them. Surrounding yourself with bloggers is a pointless tactic if you don’t talk about blogs with them, if you don’t actually put some effort into learning what all this stuff means. You can’t pick it up by osmosis.

And this Wal-Mart debacle shows that Edelman still have a long way to go before they genuinely understand blogging. There are a lot of values and ethics they have yet to instil in all their staff at an instinctive level – Wal-Marting Across America should have been simply impossible to conceive, one of the ideas that they never had because it runs so counter to blogging culture. The fact that it wasn’t shows that too many people at Edelman think the old school way, about control and being on-message and spin. This is not the blogger way.

Kevin frequently talks about how he sees big media trying to adapt blogs to their business model instead of adapting their business to blogs, and Edelman are making exactly the same mistake – trying to use blogs for PR, instead of trying to adapt PR to blogs. Having a blog isn’t a magic bullet, it doesn’t fix anything. The magic comes from transparency, openness, honesty and engagement. As Kevin says, that’s the cluetrain, this is just clue-fucked.

Now, a few days after the furore, Richard has outlined the steps Edelman are taking to remedy the situation within Edelman. I have a few thoughts about his ideas, in order:

1. ‘Best practice’ is not something you get by put down rules into a document, or creating a set of processes you make people follow. It’s achieved by ensuring your staff have a deep understanding of what blogging is and how blogging culture works.

2. A single class on ethics in social media will not solve your problem – it will barely scratch the surface. I spent six months this year with employees from JCPR, giving them as thorough an insight into blogging as possible by introducing them to all the surrounding technologies and communities, and by encouraging them to read and write blogs. We spent two hours every fortnight for six months talking about and participating in social media, and you know what? There’s still a lot more they don’t know yet (but we’re working on it!). Blogging is not something you can learn in an afternoon, or a day – it’s as complex and alien to PR people as Chinese culture is complex and alien to me. Do not underestimate the scope of the differences – what’s acceptable in PR circles is far from acceptable in blogging circles and it takes a lot of unpicking to see exactly what’s what.

3. A hotline? That indicates to me that you know your staff haven’t got the requisite clue. But tell me, where are you getting all these lovely guidelines from? I’ve been doing blog consulting for nearly three years, and frankly I’m still learning things. The field is evolving rapidly, and I have yet to come across a nice set of guidelines that encapsulate it all.

4. Who’s writing your ethics materials? Please, God, don’t say WOMMA.

Finally, Richard asks for advice, to which my response is: If you really want to understand blogging properly, stop collecting bloggers to display at your events and start actually learning about the blogosphere. Set up a proper training course for your staff, run by someone who actually knows blogs, and who is not a PR blogger. I am highly sceptical of PR, and that allows me to point out to PR people where what they do is at odds with what bloggers do. If you simply employ PR people who happen to blog, all you’ll get is the same old PR attitudes, but with comments and trackbacks. And we all know that that is not enough.

I do think Edelman are doing better than most, but you are also more vocal than most, and if you’re going to talk the bloggy talk, you damn well better be capable of walking the bloggy walk, otherwise you’re going to look more than a little foolish.

The Guardian‘s Comment is Free site has been troubled again this week after they introduced a half hour waiting period in between comments. The accusation levelled at the commenters was that the discourse was not of a high enough standard and that a wait of half an hour would force people to calm down and think a bit harder before they posted. Thus, the assumption goes, would the conversation become more erudite, more intellectual, more stimulating.

Georgina Henry said, in her post Less is More:

[T]he sheer number of comments now coming in from individuals is making it harder to keep the quality of the debate high through post-moderation alone.

Aside from the persistent breaches of our talk policy a frequent cause of complaint is the pointless chatter that litters threads. Too many comments have nothing to do with the original post, or degenerate into back-and-forth slanging matches with others which just get in the way of reasoned argument and put off people who want to engage with the original piece.

[…] For those that want to cotinue to debate the issues raised by CiF bloggers, we’re proposing to introduce a comment frequency cap which will only allow individuals to comment once every half an hour. If it works it might make for more thoughtful contributions from those who tend to write before they think. If it doesn’t work – ie, if it simply dries up or drives away the best while leaving us with the worst – we’ll think again.

The majority of commenters were outraged at this arbitrary limitation of their freedom to post, and unsurprisingly so. They feel that it’s their site now, and that The Guardian has acted undemocratically and heavy-handedly. Commenter Sealion said:

Wow, what an atrocious idea. So what’s the problem? Cif has become increasingly popular and thats a problem for you? So you suggest that people don’t use your site, they go find another, or use a talkboard. Cif is a talkboard….did you really think it was a blog?

By your own admission, discussions have become better when the originator has come online to debate with the commentators. 1 post every 30 minutes? That’s altrui knackered then. And Sunny. In fact anyone who wants to get involved in a discussion is going to have to wait 30 minutes for a reponse from somebody they may have raised a point to, which is going to kill any debate stone dead, or persuade people to create multiple screen names to get around it and add chaos to confusion.

People will also write longer pieces because they have only one chance, and then they’ll probably go off and do something else because this isn’t much of a spectator sport.
Yes, it will probably get rid of a lot of abuse and pointless comments, the same as it will get rid of just about everything else. This will kill discussion, people will just post an essay length summary of their opinion and then leave.

Of course, it didn’t take commenters long – about 1 hour and 4 minutes – to figure out that The Guardian were using cookies to achieve their aim and that, by deleting the cookie one could post as much as one wanted.

But the reason people feel miffed is not just to do with their ability to post comments. Henry had posted previously that CiF had around 10,000 commenters, but only 100 people have posted over 207 comments each, with two having posted over 1,500 and one person approaching 2,500. This is a power-law distribution. Now, quantity is not the same as quality, but I would wager that if you plotted the quality of the comments, that too would follow a power law: the majority of users write perfectly acceptible comments and the name calling, ad hominem attacks and unpleasentness is committed by a small minority of users. Yet by imposing a half hour wait on every single user The Guardian are reacting disproportionately, as if the problem is widespread ‘bell-curve’ problem. It’s not, and the commenters know it. They feel as if they have been treated unjustly and that The Guardian has meted out an indiscriminate punishment to all without bothering to try and solve the problem posed by a minority.

After an evening of protest, Georgina Henry ceded some ground, and the system has changed so that the half hour wait is per article, not across the whole site. However, she doesn’t acknowledge that the commenters’ protests are in any way valid, and in my view fails to take in their points at all. She says:

Thank to the odd commenter who understands and supports what we’re trying to do. Just to reiterate, for the critics, there are other audiences that we’re trying to reach which this might help – they include the vast majority of people who read CiF but never comment; those who comment occasionally when they have something worthwhile to say; those who used to read us but are put off by the mindless irrelevant chatter that infects many of the threads and those who would like to engage with the original argument but have to scroll through too much rubbish before they do so.

How is this supposed to help? It’s natural that there should be a power-law of comment frequency amongst readers. I would expect nothing less – it’s how almost all these sorts of websites work. Lots of people read, some post once, and a tiny minority post frequently. This distribution is extremely common and well understood. Apart from, it seems, by Ms Henry.

There is no need to try to encourage those who don’t post to post by shutting up those who do post. Maybe the people who don’t post don’t post because they are happy just reading? Is there actually any evidence of droves of people put off by ‘mindless irrelevant chatter’? If that’s the reasoning behind limiting posting times, then I fear that there’ll be disappointment when the number of people posting doesn’t suddenly increase in leaps and bounds.

But there are a couple of themes here that CiF needs to understand. Firstly, ‘messy’ comments is not only inevitable, it can also be good. Euan Semple said:

We can tolerate a lot of apparent messiness and our ability and desire to make patterns allows us to get real value from it.

Dave Snowden was right when he said if you have a complex environment you need to have simple rules. Complex rules just result in a mess.

One mans rubbish is another man’s gold dust.

We can work together on complex activities with minimal directions.

The question is, what are the rules? Putting a wait time on posting is not a rule that is going to encourage less chaotic commenting, it’s just going to string it out over a longer period of time, and maybe destroy some valuable conversation that might have otherwise happened.

Perhaps, more important, is whether or not the original author actually takes part in the comments thread. Blogging, done well, is about a conversation, and on CiF, it seems that that conversation is rather one-sided: columnist opines; commenters comment. It that really any way to encourage an intelligent discourse?

What to do? The Guardian is – understandably – worried about not just quality of conversation, but also libel, defamation and other things that they might get sued for. This is serious shit – they cannot and should not allow libellous material on their site. They have to strike a balance between chilling out about the mess and ensuring that really nasty stuff gets dealt with.

But half hour waits will not appreciably help, especially if all it takes to sidestep the delay is to delete a cookie. Keeping the existing system will annoy people more than it will help. The Guardian will have to be more innovative than that.

Here’s a thought. How about learning from sites that face a similar problem. Slashdot is well known for having a rather low common denominator amongst the comments. Yet it’s still readable… So long as you know that you can filter out the rubbish by using the built in ratings system. Digg also uses a ratings system and comments with a low enough score are hidden from the casual reader: whilst they remain on the site, you have to unhide them to read them. Could the Guardian not improve on these systems?

It’s essential to remember that the problem is not really a technological one, but a social one. Comment ratings systems are only a tool to allow the community to look after itself, but the tool has to be well crafted in order for it to work.

Let’s consider a simple thumbs up/thumbs down system which the community can use to police itself. It can have a sliding scale of punishment, to allow for the varying severity of misdemeanours: -10 points, say, and your comment is hidden; -20 and you have to wait half an hour before your next comment is published; -50 and your comment is deleted. Extreme behaviour gets a ban.
The problem is, such systems can be gamed. Even if you have a system wherein you can only vote once for each comment, malicious behaviour from a minority can break the system. How could you combat this? Perhaps by using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – send all comments to MTurk and pay an uninvolved strangers to answer the question “Is this comment abusive?”. I’m assuming that a combination of RSS and MTurk’s API would make it possible to integrate this seamlessly into the site so that you have an impartial input into whether or not comments are good or bad.

It’s possible to completely outsource comment moderation, but my personal feeling would be that it’s preferable to let the community have a stab at self-moderation first. The more people feel divorced from the way that a community is run, the less they care about it. I think this is why people react less well on threads where the author of the blog post doesn’t engage in the discussion, particularly when they don’t answer (reasonable) questions that are directly put to them. Taking the comment moderation and giving it to some third party, whether a room of moderators at The Guardian or an external moderation house, feels a bit like saying to the community ‘Right, you can’t be trusted’.

So I think there are a few things to pull out of all this:

• The Guardian needs to chill out about comments. They’re not all going to be Nobel Prize winning essays, and some of them may go off topic. No big deal.
• CiF bloggers need to interact more with the commenters and stop thinking of commenters as annoying, underemployed and overopinionated. Digs like “My guess from looking at the email addresses is that the list is overwhelmingly male” by Georgina Henry do not show much respect for the people who make CiF as vibrant as it is.
• The Guardian needs to think about ways in which the community can self-moderate and use technology to facilitate that process, not try to use (shoddy) technological fixes to try and arbitrarily shut people up.

CiF could be a great site, but it needs some significant work and a change in attitude from the bloggers there in order to evolve from the ‘soap-box with hecklers’ model to a being a real blog.

And finally, thanks to tomper for this blog post’s title.

We’re off on holiday now for two weeks. I look forward to seeing if we’ve any comments when we get back…

I don’t have a TV. I also don’t have a radio. I get my news the same way any self-respecting geek does, via the intarwebthingy. It used to be that I would pop along to news websites and see what was going on, but then Dave Winer invented RSS and that saved me all the fuss and bother of having to figure out whether a site had been updated or not by conveniently feeding new articles into my aggregator. Wonderful.

Blogs, you see, have been using RSS for almost as long as it and they have been around, because blog software is written by geeks, and geeks do like to save themselves some effort whenever they can. RSS was invented in 1997 when Winer created an XML syndication format for use on his blog. Now no self-respecting blog is without a feed. Yay us.

News outlets, on the other hand, suffer from Chronic 90s Web Buzzword Syndrome, which means that they are still thinking about ‘stickiness’ and ‘eyeballs’. I don’t know about you, but the thought of sticky eyeballs quite makes my stomach churn. However, they have – slowly, painfully, and with no small amount of looking over their shoulder to see if the Big Nasty Sticky Eyeball Eating Monster was creeping up behind them – adopted RSS. Despite the fact that bloggers saw RSS as a no-brainer, the media had to think long and hard before they committed to using a technology which made it easier for people to find out what they had published on their websites and which could, therefore, drive lots of traffic their way.

But they’ve got there. Sort of.

I’m glad that The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC et al are using RSS. I am, at heart, a lazy wossit, and I much prefer my news to come to me, rather than for me to have to go out and find it. However, I am afeared that the media has not quite paid enough attention to RSS, making the consumption of news via my aggregator a painful and unpleasant experience.

Firstly, no one seems to have figured out that when you change a story, the changes show up in some aggregators. I use NetNewsWire, and it’s set to show me the differences between old and new versions of an RSS feed. It’s true to say that sometimes NNW misinterprets what constitutes a change, but it also exposes all the real changes made to news stories.

The BBC seems to have the biggest problem with constantly changing RSS feeds. I brought this up once with a meeting of senior BBC news execs, and they failed to understand why this is a problem. It’s not just that it’s irritating – changing a story even a little bit causes it to be republished which then flags it up as ‘unread’ in my aggregator, even though I have actually read it. It’s also that changing stories after they have been published is unprofessional and damages the news source’s credibility. When I link to a news story, I want it to say the same thing next week as it said when I linked to it.

When I explained this to the BBC’s news execs, they cried in exasperation that they couldn’t possibly be expected to be right all the time, and where do you draw the line between a major update, which gives the story a new URL, and a minor update? Well, that is a good question. Another good question is, why do you even do minor updates? Perhaps better sub-editing, along with not rushing too fast to publish, would help get rid of the need for minor updates, and any major changes to the story are dealt with by a new article? Or perhaps there is an even better way to deal with additional facts coming in, such as saying ‘Update’ in the article, or some other methodology that I haven’t thought of that doesn’t screw with the integrity of the original.

To be fair, not all of the BBC’s RSS output is affected. Out of nearly 40 items from the BBC in my aggregator at the moment, five have changes. That’s only ~13%, which you might thing is negligible, but I think that figure should be zero.

You’ll also find, when you click through to the site, that the first paragraph is different from the excerpt that’s published in the RSS feed. Considering how concise some of these first paragraphs on the site are, it makes you wonder why the BBC are writing separate excerpts at all, and particularly makes me question why those excerpts get edited. Seems like make-work to me.

Here are a few examples from today, picked in sequence from headlines published around the 15:30 mark and including the copy from the website as well. I have replicated the additions (in italics) and the deletions (strikethrough) exactly as they show up in NetNewsWire, so you have to take into account its inherent over-enthusiasm for marking things as changed.

Virus-hit cruise firm apologises

Five hundred UK holidaymakers are sent home after their Hundreds of passengers whose cruise ship was detained because of holidays were ruined by a severe virus.virus outbreak are to be offered refunds.

Virus-hit cruise firm apologises

A travel company has apologised and offered a refund to hundreds of passengers whose cruise holidays were ruined by a virus outbreak.

US crash sparks Afghanistan riot

At least seven people are killed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Violent disturbances rock Kabul after a deadly traffic accident involving a US convoy crashes, triggering a riot.military convoy.

US crash sparks Afghanistan riot

At least seven people have been killed in the Afghan capital Kabul after a traffic accident involving a US military convoy sparked mass rioting.

Race against time in Java quake

The United Nations warns that the task of bringing taking aid to the survivors of the earthquake in Indonesia is “enormous”.“enormous”, the United Nations warns.

Race against time in Java quake

The task of helping survivors of Saturday’s earthquake on the Indonesian island of Java is “a race against the clock”, the United Nations has warned.

Worse than the BBC is Google News. By it’s very nature, Google News is all about change, but by god that screws with your RSS feeds. Out of about 80 items, 68 had changes. Now, Google News aims to track news stories from multiple sources, so it is inevitable that their items should change frequently, but it makes it completely useless in an RSS aggregator, because every time I refresh, the items that I had read become marked as unread again because Google News have either done something as minor as changed the timestamp from “5 hours ago” to “6 hours ago”, which is not hugely useful, or added a new source, or substantively changed the copy.

This breaks Google News’ RSS feed in terms of usability. There’s just no way I can continue to have Google News in my RSS reader.

Now, what the BBC does get very right is its timestamps. Items published today have the time published as their timestamps, and items published yesterday and before have the date.

Would that The Times could learn that timestamps are important. Instead, RSS items from The Times are timestamped with the time that I refresh my aggregator, not the time that they are published. I have my news feeds grouped in one folder and I read them en masse. News is highly time-sensitive, and I want to read stuff as it comes in, so having an accurate timestamp is essential. The Times, however, hasn’t figured this out yet. Instead, I get a cluster of items grouped around a single timestamp, and when I refresh, I not only get new items, I get repeats of old items with the new ‘timestamp’. This is not helpful.

For example, I learnt that ‘3,000 UK troops are Awol since war began’ both at 11:09 and at 13:58; and that ‘Abbas threatens Hamas with referendum over blueprint’ both on 25th and 26th of May. These items are in the same feed, and appear to be identical, yet they are showing up twice.

The Guardian is pretty good, compared to The Times, Google News, and the BBC, in the way they treat RSS, as I would expect considering they have people like Neil McIntosh and Ben Hammersley to advise. They get timestamping right – the clusters of articles all being published at once is more to do with their editorial time-table than bugs in their RSS feed.

But there is still room for improvement. Whilst they do edit their RSS excerpts, sometimes just as pointlessly as the BBC, they do it a lot less often, so my main criticism would be that they are inconsistent in their excerpt writing habits. Some articles get a sentence, others get two bullet points; and sometimes the excerpt (and headline) is the same as on the site, and sometimes it isn’t. I have to say, I’d prefer a single sentence excerpt and headline which was the same as the site.

A few examples of what I mean.

Ghost ship washes up in Barbados

· 11 petrified corpses found in cabin· Letter left by dying man gives clue

After four months at sea, ghost ship with 11 petrified corpses washes up in Barbados

· Letter left by dying man gives clue to investigators

· Dozens of others thought to have perished en route

Climber left for dead rescued from Everest

A climber who was left for dead on Mount Everest has been found alive.

Climber left for dead rescued from Everest

· Team forced to leave Australian at 8,800 metres

· ‘I imagine you’re surprised to see me,’ he tells rescuer

Cage swaps Malibu for own desert island

Nicolas Cage has bought a 40-acre undeveloped island in the Bahamas for $3m (£1.6m)

Cage swaps Malibu for own desert island

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

Monday May 29, 2006

The Guardian

Wherever you go, people stare at you. Paparazzi take pictures, fans ask for autographs, absolute strangers wonder aloud if they once met you at a party. For the hard-pressed celebrity there’s only one way to get away from it all: hide on your own desert island.

The surprise in all this is that the one newspaper who gets it spot on is The Independent. I really can’t fault their RSS feed at all. Timestamps are reliable, and again reveal their editorial timetable with many articles being published in the small hours and few being published during the day. Their excerpts vary in length, but some of the longer ones are more useful than those of other news outlets. Personally, I like longer excerpts because I would rather skim a two sentences that give me a better feel for whether I want to read the article than have just one short sentence that doesn’t tell me much.

Some examples, again with the copy from the RSS and the copy from the site:

British journalists killed in Iraq

Two British television journalists were killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb today.

British journalists killed in Iraq

PA

Published: 29 May 2006

Two British television journalists were killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb today.

Bush ‘planted fake news stories on American TV’

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Bush ‘planted fake news stories on American TV’

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Published: 29 May 2006

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Indonesia Earthquake: As a people, they already had little – now they are left with nothing

In the morning, Salim retrieved the lifeless body of his three-year-old son, Sihman, from the ruins of their brick and bamboo hut. In the afternoon, he buried him, digging the grave himself. As night fell, he searched through the rubble of his former home for scraps of food. “I have lost everything,” he said.

Indonesia Earthquake: As a people, they already had little – now they are left with nothing

By Kathy Marks in Bantul, Indonesia

Published: 29 May 2006

In the morning, Salim retrieved the lifeless body of his three-year-old son, Sihman, from the ruins of their brick and bamboo hut. In the afternoon, he buried him, digging the grave himself. As night fell, he searched through the rubble of his former home for scraps of food. “I “I have lost everything,” he said.

I like the fact that the RSS feed and the website copy are identical. To me, that’s ideal – what I see in RSS is what I get on the site. I also can’t see any evidence of changes, although I will say that this RSS feed is new in my aggregator so maybe this point will clarify itself over time.

Now, all this criticism may seem like pointless nit-picking. Perhaps some it is down to my inner editor screaming for consistency and my inner blogger begging for honesty, but certainly some of this has a direct impact on the usability of RSS feeds for the reading of news.

I want news. I have no problem with the idea of clicking on a link in my aggregator and reading the full article on the news outlet’s website – this is not a plea for full posts (although hell, that’d be great and if Corante can put advertising in their RSS feed, so can anyone, but that’s not the point I want to make).

It’s a plea for journalists and media IT staff to think a little harder about how news is being read these days. RSS is not a fad, and it’s not going to go away. It is going to flourish, with more and more people using it to get their news from many disparate sources. It is in your best interests to ensure that your RSS feeds work, that your editorial policies take into account the effect of new technology on the transparency of your medium, and that you strive at all times for honesty even if that means owning up to your updates (note, ‘update’ does not necessarily mean ‘mistake’).

Google News is revealing your reliance on syndicated content, and RSS is revealing your edits. If you want to remain credible, you must adapt. In an increasingly competitive world, where people choose which news sources to read not just based on content but also on usability and accessibility, can you really afford not to?