User talk:Johnatmicronews

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-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 16:05, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Catan sets a date for its King's coronation

Hi. Please see my review comments.

What is "micronews"? --Pi zero (talk) 23:18, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks for the comments I will take them on board. MicroNews is a Independent Micronational News Source that aims to give the wider world a more accurate view on what is occuring in the micro world. Johnatmicronews (talk) 09:03, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

This could be interesting subject matter. We don't have all that many articles in our Category:Micronations, mostly from 2008 (I guess some Wikinewsie was interested in the topic that year). A couple of observations.

• You need to get the focus in the lede, as well as establishing newsworthiness there (WN:PILLARS#style); just at this moment, I see you've got a background paragraph about the Kingdom of Catan before the lede, which doesn't work. The trick is to get in the punches you need in the lede without spending a lot of words on them, and then you can do things like a full-blown background paragraph about Catan later in the inverted pyramid.
• I anticipate that covering micronational news via the Wikinews synthesis form will be challenging, for some of the same reasons that other synthesis has also become more challenging. It's to do with our two-source rule for synthesis, that the focal event be corroborated by two mutually independent trust-worthy sources. Part of the motive for Wikinews, from the start, has been that traditional news vehicles are deteriorating in the internet age; but as the mainstream news media's economic model falters, two things are happening that interact with our two-source rule. On one hand, news outlets are aggressive about shutting down sites that violate their copyright, making our two-source rule all the more important to enable us to keep clear of copyright concerns; and on the other hand, more and more often a smallish story only gets covered by at most one big wire service, leaving us with no second independent source (only lots of syndication of the one wire service).

--Pi zero (talk) 12:01, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Btw, it occurred to me after posting the above (it would be after, of course :-) that over half the articles in Category:Micronations also belong to Category:Original reporting. OR is more complicated; we highly value OR, but it's more challenging; our standards for OR have gone up since the era when those articles were written, so it's possible some of them wouldn't even pass now, and in any case, all things being equal we want a reporter to have cut their teeth on synthesis writing for us before they tackle OR. It's a possibility for the future, though. --Pi zero (talk) 12:23, 26 March 2015 (UTC)