Inside the login, potential participants in the Renews venture will receive a confidential preview of ReNews’ dramatically new Citizen experience and economic model for news in American democracy. ReNews participants join a community of qualified Citizens, journalists, academics and organizations preparing to launch this visionary social impact venture in early 2023. Read More
Strategy for News Media Renewal
Introducing ReNews and Context Journalism
By Bennet Harvey
ReNews will transform the Citizen experience of the news. We are doing this by shining greater transparency into patterns of inequity in American society, and patterns of vested interest influence embedded in news and political ads.
The ReNews News Navigator apps sit on top of our News Context Engine Hypergraph data environment which identifies the news and data relevant to each individual Citizen’s deep and anonymized Private Profile.
The News Navigator apps present this highly personalized, yet anonymous, contextual information in a newsreader where each article is surrounded by a massive amount of information above and beyond what is embedded in individual articles.
This additional information is designed to multiply the information Citizen get from their news consumption at least 10-fold.
Two Dimensions of Context Journalism
ReNews contextual information is broken into two domains:
- Presentation of deep profiles of the data, influencers, industries, companies and government agencies mentioned, surrounding every article viewed in the ReNews News Navigator apps.
- Citizen-members will also be able to explore extensive original ReNews analytics revealing previously hidden patterns of inequity across public policy and news coverage.
- ReNews identifies patterns of inequity by applying correlation and regression analytics to societal and economic data to reveal which forces move American society toward greater equity, and which are leading us to a more inequitable and divided country.
- ReNews identifies vested interest influence campaigns through machine learning analysis of the content of news reporting and political ads.
- Using a patent-pending Context Engine Hypergraph ReNews maps influence campaigns to the forces funding the campaigns and benefitting from the positions they promote.
By revealing this information about every article and ad a Citizen views, ReNews exposes a massive amount of information about economic influence on public policy which Citizens have always suspected but could never measure, until now.
In fact, the ReNews hypergraph offers the first opportunity to measure and report on the full dark money media ecosystem unleashed on American Citizens by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
In order to make this new information useful to Citizens, ReNews is evolving a new medium of news coverage which we call Context Journalism. You may see examples of our experiments in developing the craft of Context Journalism on this page.
On that page our Context Navigators are exploring different approaches in each of five different regions of ReNews context:
- Analytics: Social Justice Correlation Heat Map
- Topic: Industry & Economy
- Topic: Employment & Income
- Topic: Education
- Industry: News Media
In each case we are seeking the best ways to communicate complex information to average Citizens about the policies and forces influencing their family’s ability to succeed in America.
We welcome journalists, academics and policy experts to review these approaches and give us feedback as to how we can be more successful without introducing bias into our coverage.
Beyond Algorithms: Complete Citizen Access and Control of Their Identity and News Feed
By Bennet Harvey
The ReNews News Navigator apps for iOS, Android and web will empower Citizens as never before. Within the ReNews ecosystem:
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- Citizens own, control, and will eventually be empowered to monetize their own identity, behavior and belief profiles instead of allowing search engines, social media sites and credit bureaus to profit by selling Citizen identities for their own profit.
- Citizens will have full navigation control across at least seven years of virtually all the news published in the US, with no algorithm prioritizing what Citizens see based on ad motives.
- Citizens will receive a wealth of highly personalized signals throughout their news feed regarding the people, corporations, government agencies, and dark money Political Action Committees attempting to influence Citizens through news and political ads. These signals will also reveal when issues or policies are in each Citizen’s best interest, or not.
ReNews' Role in the Reconstitution Ecosystem
By Bennet Harvey
ReNews was conceived and created by Reconstitution, Inc. a benefit corporation and incubator of solutions to critical societal dysfunctions.
Reconstitution is a concept in chemistry in which a complex compound is broken down into its component elements and, through the application of a catalyst, is intentionally re-assembled or re-constituted into a new structure to better serve the chemist’s needs.
Social Benefit IP
Reconstitution is incubating a portfolio of disruptive intellectual property created through a convergence of advanced analytical innovation methods including:
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- human-centered design,
- business process optimization,
- change agency,
- cradle-to-grave and multi-generational planning
Working over long product development cycles at a low burn rate allows Reconstitution to integrate its solutions, adapt to environmental trends, and avoid burning out as the early entrant who can’t go the distance.
These methods have already generated intellectual property assets across a wide range of high priority social dysfunctions.
Reconstitution generates patent applications simultaneously with technical development of each solution.
These patents and resulting solutions do not exist to generate personal wealth through financial markets. They are designed and implemented to become societal utilities of their user communities, and often generating community income through B-corp / non-profit partnerships.
Social Benefit Focus
The following are the focus areas of intellectual property in development and in the process of protection by Reconstitution.
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- Trust
- Relevance
- Privacy
- Influence
- Disaster response
- Trauma and social alienation
- Homelessness
- Aging
- Freshwater and carbon sequester
- Urban-wildland interface
Reconstitution
Reconstitution’s investment model is designed to counteract the business cycle. We build to avoid boom and bust revenues, excess hiring, and regretful layoffs. We target a flat dividend rate designed to be attractive, and to balance measurable and rewarding societal benefits.
- Reconstitution doesn’t seek outside intellectual property, we develop it ourselves.
- Our solutions are designed to demonstrate virtuous ecosystems as alternatives to the inertia of long-standing convention.
- We are neither a private equity form nor a venture capital firm as we do not compete solely on the basis of economic returns to investors.
- Reconstitution is a benefit corporation with a social impact focus on incubating disruptions at the high-risk, high-return end of society’s innovation portfolio.
- Reconstitution structures its solutions to provide two layers of returns:
- consistent moderate financial returns to investors, and
- measurable, high impact, high visibility outcomes to society.
- Many of the ventures spun off by the Reconstitution incubator are designed never to be sold, and therefore could not exist in the venture capital or private equity ecosystems.
- We work with leaders in large scale enterprise crowd-funding to build these societal utilities to be owned by their stakeholders, rather than third party investors.
- We value inspiration and creativity exactly the same as financial investment. As a result, we have
Transparency Invokes Responsibility
By Bennet Harvey
The things that distinguish us as individuals from the rest of society have always been carefully hidden behind our eyes. We keep our true selves out of sight of others because we inhabit a competitive world and we can’t allow anyone to detect what we believe to be our weaknesses. None of us can ever been sure where the other stands, be they spouse, family, colleagues, or fellow Citizens.
Uncertainty about others’ motives has made Citizens ripe for manipulation by those of selfish or nefarious intent who are able to give us confidence they are on our side. When we don’t know whom to trust it becomes easy to push false messaging at us through the media in order to bend our positions toward vested interests, and away from our own best interests.
ReNews is designed to dramatically reduce Citizen uncertainty and vulnerability to manipulation. ReNews is a demonstration of a way of civic function based solely on unflinching transparency and accountability. We do not recognize nor discuss political parties or philosophies directly in the ReNews UX. Those organizations have no more or less relevance than any other vested interest profiled by the ReNews Context Engine.
These entities know they only have power which Citizens give them. Unfortunately, most Citizens don’t believe they have any ability to control the system. ReNews is designed to give Citizens full understanding and control of their powers. What remains to be seen
A New News Ecosystem
Hypotheses for News Media Renewal
By Bennet Harvey
In order to effectively fulfill its role in American democracy as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, news media must wean itself from its failing economic model while at the same time maintaining its core journalistic principles and news gathering operations.
This is a very different path forward than today’s model of adapting to the broken revenue model by adopting ‘engagement reporting’. It is also very different than the two main alternative models proposed to date:
- funding by the wealthy through voluntary philanthropy, and
- funding by government through taxation.
Both these models are structurally neither independently sustainable, nor do they free journalism from influence from these sources of funding – government or the wealthy.
Renews is re-architecting the news media experience and economic ecosystem for long-term viability and independence. We propose this architecture be adopted by the news industry as a shared utility.
Reconstitution is committed to granting exclusive perpetual rights to the craft of journalism for application
of Reconstitution technology in the US. We propose to do this by partnering with journalist-centric membership organizations like the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and / or the Online News Association (ONA).
Examples of ReNews Hypotheses
The following are a few examples of how ReNews hypotheses align with dimensions of the problem.
Problem 1: By limiting the number of publications a Citizen can afford, the subscription model is a significant contributor to the ‘echo chamber’ effect proving so divisive today. The cost of subscriptions also place subscription news publications out of reach of the low-income communities most in need of visibility into our government’s policy process.
Consumers spend $118 per year on news content. If the first subscription is $100, there is low likelihood that the average family will be able to afford a second subscription and will therefore be exposed to limited points of view.
ReNews Hypothesis 1: In order to give all Citizens fair access to a diversity of news coverage, it will be necessary to address other inequities and imbalances in society’s distribution of resource
ReNews Ecosystem:
Dimensions and Disruptions
1
Ad Revenue Model
Citizen Identity Ownership
ReNews will replace the ad revenue model with the separate ReCommerce app which enables Citizens to monetize their own data. No more ads interrupting or influencing your understanding of the news.
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Subscription Revenue Model
Equity in Access
The subscription revenue model prevents low income and wealth Citizens from receiving quality news coverage, and from participating equitably in American democracy.
3
News Cycle
Slow News
The news cycle exists to produce more content for selling adjacent ads. Quality articles expire before they reach their full potential audience. On ReNews articles remain available as long as they are contextually relevant to any segment of the audience.
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Broadcast
1:1 News
The idea that one package of news will support all Citizen readers of a publication equally well s false. ReNews will empower Citizens to find and consumer the best mix of news and information for their specific needs, regardless of income or wealth.
5
Episodic
Comprehensive
No single article is able to capture the complexity of any modern issue or policy. Renews assembles all of the contextually-relevant information about a specific policy decision, and presents it to the Citizen in order according to the Citizen’s individual priorities and best interests..
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Linear
Non-linear
Human beings do not all think alike. No single linear storytelling approach will support every Citizen’s learning process. ReNews’ non-linear experience of the news means each Citizen can navigate to clarity along their own path at their own pace to their own policy position destination.
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Influence
Transparency
The majority of content in news and political ads is meant to influence Citizens, not to inform them. ReNews uses mathematics to reveal these hidden patterns of influence, and link them to the vested interests and media budgets pushing these influence campaign at Citizens.
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Bundled
Contextual
News publications emerged to bundle content in order to sell ads and charge for subscriptions. No single publication can present complete truth, and no Citizen can afford or consume all news publications. Therefore, Renews allows each Citizen to assemble their own personally-relevant news bundle across publications.
9
Lifestyle
Hard News
ReNews presents policy-driven coverage of 20 hard news topics. We don’t distract from this mission with ads, or with coverage of lifestyles or sports. We leave that to other services.
10
Privacy Exploitation
Anonymous Intimacy
A sustainable news ecosystem must be trustworthy. Therefore it cannot be motivated to violate the privacy of its core audience of Citizens. Therefore, ReNews presents an intimately personalized experience of the news in a completely anonymized experience. No personally-identifiable information about you will EVER exist on ReNews systems.
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Social Engagement
Civic Engagement
Social media engagement is not the same as responsible civic engagement. ReNews does not support comments or posts from Citizens. We only publish news from sources proven to be reputable by our transparent tools. We empower Citizens to bring full engagement to civic responsibilities like voting and productive discussion of policies with other Citizens.
12
Entertainment
Journalism
ReNews removes the entertainment motive from news. This doesn’t mean ReNews isn’t fun and addictive. However, ReNews is compelling because it reveals the difference between conspiracy truth and theory.
13
Opinion
Data
Today’s news media blurs the line between truth and opinion, as well as the line between news and influence campaigns. ReNews re-establishes that boundary by distinguishing statements of opinion from references to trustworthy data in all articles.
14
Manipulation
Measurement
No Citizen can fully understand the fog of messages trying to influence them, without help from a trusted advisor. Renews believes the craft of journalism must be re-established in that role, freed from the negative influences of ads and subscriptions.
Leveling the News Access Playing Field(s)
By Bennet Harvey
New conversations must begin in new forums with a new quorum based on the composition of society today and into the future, not society as it was when a very few gained very great advantage.
Throughout American history Citizens have had a restricted view of the information and influences that have gone into development of policy, legislation and regulation.
ReNews was chartered to level the playing field so all Citizens would have roughly equal access to the same contextual information about societal performance, policy development, and the influence of public policy on each Citizen’s best interest.
We do this by providing Citizens with free and universal access to analysis of three domains of civic information relevant to each Citizen:
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- Publicly available contextual data and original ReNews Context Journalism about the data defining the issues and policy proposals of the day,
- Analytics of the content of third party publisher news articles to reveal balance of coverage, patterns of bias and influence, targeting of Citizen cognitive biases, quality of data references, and participation in influence campaigns across news content and political ads.
- A cognitively neutral experience of news navigation and discovery allowing Citizens with different cognitive types and learning styles to engage with news and contextual data on their own terms, rather than according to traditional linear episodic journalism.
The Transparency Playing Field
We have heard the arguments, distortions of fact, inflammatory language, and character assassination, in our daily feed of news and political ads. But we have rarely understood in real-time why specific influencers are participating in these campaigns of persuasion. What are influencers’ personal, career, financial, legal and other motives for saying what they are saying?
Some of the information nearly invisible to Citizens has included:
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- industry lobbying efforts to influence policy,
- policymakers’ alignment with vested interests through financial relationships and political donations,
- campaigns of misinformation and distortion across mediums
ReNews levels Citizen access to this new dimension of information and much more through what we call Context Journalism. We make a large amount of relevant, trustworthy contextual information always available to all Citizens through our news navigator apps.
Renews attempts to establish this new level playing field of trustworthy information by giving every Citizen full access to the same civic contextual data, regardless of demographics, geography or finances. We are able to provide free access to our context engine filled with this data, and to our own original Context Journalism articles.
In the ReNews multi-publisher news discovery apps we calculate contextual relevance as the intersection of three separate domains of data defining a Citizen’s context at any moment of news consumption and civic engagement.
These three data domains are:
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- Extracted data about the people, parties, companies, industries, claims, arguments, facts and lies contained in the news content they are reading,
- Societal data defining the societal topics, issues, policy proposals, legislation and outcomes discussed in news coverage, and
- The Citizen’s profile data including demographics, personal and family life journey, and personal finances which make news and data relevant to each specific Citizen.
By making these calculations in an environment of complete privacy and transparent calculations ReNews is designed to give Citizens unprecedented confidence that they:
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- understand the issues and policy proposals in far greater detail than ever before,
- know how proposed policies will specifically affect them and their loved ones, and
- can make good decisions aligned with their beliefs in the voting booth and in the marketplace.
We are able to provide Context Engine access with no
How Citizens Lost Control of their Identity
By Bennet Harvey
At the turn of the century the US Congress developed legislation to regulate the ungoverned internet for the purpose of commerce.
I participated in a major financial services industry lobbying group during that effort, the Electronic Financial Services Council. I was first the representative of Cendant mortgage, the 4th largest US mortgage originator, and then of Esurance, which became the most disruptive digital property and casualty insurer. In the EFSC forum I was often a dissenting, but unsuccessful contrarian Citizen voice against a tidal wave of industry infuence.
There were two possible outcomes of that Capital Hill debate:
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- Citizens could have full ownership and rights. to control the use of their personal data, or
- Organizations to which Citizen have trusted their data could be allowed to sell Citizen personally identifiable information, and the deep behavioral profiles connected those identities, to anyone at the best price competition would allow.
The lobbying was intense from both sides. The Electronic Frontier Foundation eff.org had been formed a bit earlier to attempt to counterbalance the government and commercial forces attempting to take control of this new medium like a pirate ship boarding a gold-laden merchant galleon.
Unfortunately, for each of us Citizens, the outcome was pre-determined by the wide open lobbying back door which commercial interests have always had to the democratic process.
Congress passed several pieces of legislation between 1986 and 2003 which defined the commercial playing field on the internet and in email. While the language of the laws appear virtuous and rigorous at first glance, there was a huge gap in Citizen rights hiding in plain sight. Unfortunately for Citizens, it’s a lot harder to see a gap where something should be, than it is to see something right in front of you. That’s the secret underlying every good magician’s act.
The gap which Congress architected into CAN-SPAM and our other privacy laws was simple. Instead of saying Citizens owned their data fully and outright, the laws said Citizens had a limited set of specific rights to manage their engagement with this data. This is a common legislative trick which creates:
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- a heavy requirement for government regulation of these detailed individual rights and therefore unnecessary expansion of government, and
- wide latitude for corporations to operate in the invisible space not directly refrenced by the complex legislation.
Citizens are left with an ecosystem in which, instead of corporations bearing the full burden and cost of engagement with Citizen-owned data, Citizens must expend considerable energy to manage gaps in their privacy by:
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- opting out,
- unsubscribing,
- labeling spam,
- paying for virus and spam protection,
- falling victim to hackers, identity theft, and ransomware, and
- wasting huge amounts of Citizen energy on anxiety, financial loss, and wasted productivity.
Are we having fun yet?
Identity inside the Anonymized ReNews Ecosystem
By Bennet Harvey
Citizens and their politics do not exist balancing on a razor’s edge one-dimensional line with sharp points of extremism at both ends. Nor do the majority of us cluster in the middle of such a line, cowering in fear like a mass of fearful average sheep.
Instead, with careful study and an effort at empathy, it is easy to see that every Citizen occupies a unique position in a cloud of multitudinous dimensions. We Citizens are surrounded by family, neighbors, communities and ideas which are near and dear to us. We also know there are concepts, people and communities with which we seem to share very little.
In the ReNews demonstration of a virtuous news ecosystem, many people, industries, companies, politicians and executives will be made uncomfortable by Renews Editorial Policy and the ReNews Constitution, found inside the login of this site.
A key clause of this policy is that any person or entity mentioned in the news is deemed to be a Public Citizen and therefore we create a Public “Newsmaker” Profile in the ReNews context engine for them. This profile becomes part of other Citizens’ context and is referenceable from:
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- the articles in which the Public Citizen is mentioned, or
- the phrases and arguments the Public Citizen uses, or
- related to the profile of the Public Citizen’s company, or
- connected to the Public Citizen’s political campaign contributions.
AT NO TIME WILL A CITIZEN’S PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PROFILES BE CONNECTED IN ANY WAY ON RENEWS OR RECONSTITUTION’S SYSTEMS.
This means that Public Citizens will have two profiles:
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- a Private Profile which they maintain and which is anonymized in every way, and
- a Public Profile which has no connection with their private identity, and which the Public Citizen cannot modify in any way.
To make all this possible, the ReNews ecosystem is supported by three main pillars:
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- Complete Private Citizen privacy, within which anonymized Citizens may communicate what is most important, without fear of reprisal.
- Expansion of Citizen visibility into the operations of society, including tools to allow Citizens to continuously and consciously document their innermost beliefs about public policy, without fear of reprisal.
- Analytics of anonymized Citizen beliefs, demographics, life journey, and financial profiles to allow each Citizen to understand where their position fits relative to their community, measurable by hundreds of dimensions.
Beyond Ads and Subscriptions – A New News Economic Model
By Bennet Harvey
Citizens and their politics do not exist balancing on a razor’s edge one-dimensional line with sharp points of extremism at both ends. Nor do the majority of us cluster in the middle of such a line, cowering in fear like a mass of fearful average sheep.
Instead, with careful study and an effort at empathy, it is easy to see that every Citizen occupies a unique position in a cloud of multitudinous dimensions. We Citizens are surrounded by family, neighbors, communities and ideas which are near and dear to us. We also know there are concepts, people and communities with which we seem to share very little.
In the ReNews demonstration of a virtuous news ecosystem, many people, industries, companies, politicians and executives will be made uncomfortable by Renews Editorial Policy and the ReNews Constitution, found inside the login of this site.
A key clause of this policy is that any person or entity mentioned in the news is deemed to be a Public Citizen and therefore we create a Public “Newsmaker” Profile in the ReNews context engine for them. This profile becomes part of other Citizens’ context and is referenceable from:
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- the articles in which the Public Citizen is mentioned, or
- the phrases and arguments the Public Citizen uses, or
- related to the profile of the Public Citizen’s company, or
- connected to the Public Citizen’s political campaign contributions.
AT NO TIME WILL A CITIZEN’S PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PROFILES BE CONNECTED IN ANY WAY ON RENEWS OR RECONSTITUTION’S SYSTEMS.
This means that Public Citizens will have two profiles:
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- a Private Profile which they maintain and which is anonymized in every way, and
- a Public Profile which has no connection with their private identity, and which the Public Citizen cannot modify in any way.
To make all this possible, the ReNews ecosystem is supported by three main pillars:
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- Complete Private Citizen privacy, within which
The ReNews Hypergraph Reveals Patterns of Influence in the News
By Bennet Harvey
As Reconstitution and ReNews’ founder, I have submitted patent applications and built the first massive curated news content and data farm, a context hypergraph. This investment has created an opportunity to shed a brilliant new level of transparency into the function of American society.
Supporting Citizens over Industry
There are many business applications of this technology, such as transformation of commerce privacy, brand monitoring, intelligence gathering, competitive analysis, product-market fit, and much more. Reconstitution may eventually apply this technology to enter these B2B markets. However, Reconstitution exists for the benefit of society and individual Citizens. We are not purely focused on the profit motive.
Therefore Reconstitution determined that the best way to strategically deploy this technology is on behalf of Citizens and Society. Specifically, we believe the best initial application will be to grant full rights to this technology to the news media industry, in support of a transformed Citizen experience of news.
By granting the news media industry exclusive rights to deploy this technology on behalf of Citizens, and ensuring it is deployed without compromising its core values, ReNews will help establish a new role for journalists in identifying and protecting the best interests of individual Citizens, not as a mass audience, but one-by-one.
We have defined new reporting workflows designed to help to restore trust in news by allowing Citizens and journalists to measure and manage the sources of influence embedded in the news and political ads they consume. The ReNews apps allow Citizens to separate this influence messaging from the meaningful Citizen-relevant data underlying each issue and policy discussed in hard news coverage.
Building the Hypergraph
The ReNews Context Engine hypergraph data environment was built by:
- beginning with all quality US journalism for 7 years.
Political and Economic Independence
By Bennet Harvey
The economic independence and politically non-partisan ideal of journalism has never existed in practice.
The pressures of the advertising revenue model have forced publishers to focus their products at one end of the political spectrum or the other. This pressure has intensified as social media and search marketing algorithms have eliminated the possibility of hard news coverage from reaching Citizens who favor lifestyle and entertainment content.
The only way news media has been able to earn its meager ad revenue under these circumstances is by:
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- Positioning the content, tone and voice of their coverage to be acceptable to Citizens on one side or the other of our artificial one-dimensional political spectrum
- Using deceptive headlines and ledes to sensationalize stories that don’t deserve attention.
- Limiting coverage to content having little to do with Citizen civic responsibilities
- Neutering reporting critical of advertisers and political allies
Why Independence Is Important
The articles outside the login on this site report on the decline of trust in news media, and document the consequences of the erosion of the firewall between journalism and its business model.
In order to remain economically viable, news media has been forced to adopt the methods of search and social media, thereby taking on the negative trust profile of those mediums.
Trust does not necessarily reflect the trustworthiness of the institution being considered. In fact, in a society with a depleted and disrespected news media, it is nearly impossible for Citizens to understand what is, or is not, trustworthy. This is the case in the US today.
With decimated local reporting, we can’t be sure what is going on in our city councils, planning commissions, or school boards. With a handful of national newspapers remaining, and all of them holding partisan editorial positions, A subscriber to a single news organization may only get one side of national stories, or we may not be able to figure out which “side” of a story to believe.
Is this because the remaining news media is untrustworthy? Not necessarily. What little local reporting we do get may be responsibly gathered, edited and published. The partisan national papers may be reporting the partisan positions on issues accurately.
The problem is that, with most Citizens only being able to afford one subscription at best, Citizens choosing to subscribe to be in different audiences receive different positioning on the key issues. This does not support a Citizen’s full transparency into the news.
ReNews is founded on the belief that all Citizens should have full and free access to all news coverage across publications. We further believe that it is the responsibility of public policy to ensure all Citizens receive sufficient education to be able to understand the news.
Thomas Jefferson stated this belief most compellingly in 1789, at the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution.