“Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the mar­ket were noth­ing but self-​​published autonomous authors either writ­ing with­out edi­to­r­ial or pay­ing out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good prod­uct mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five sec­onds before some­one came along and said: hey, what if I started a com­pany where we took on all the risk, hired an edi­to­r­ial staff and a mar­ket­ing staff to make the prod­uct bet­ter and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a per­cent­age of the prof­its in exchange for tak­ing on the risk and the ini­tial cost? So writ­ers could, you know, just write?

And writ­ers would line up at their door.”

“But how do you present that dis­clo­sure? A link in each web arti­cle that jumps to a spread­sheet of donors and dol­lar signs, and let the reader judge? Con­versely, many peo­ple trust NPR and PBS as a news source, but are sat­is­fied by the sim­ple roll call of spon­sors and slogans.

So how do we present this infor­ma­tion and con­text hon­estly and tact­fully? It reminds me of a dis­cus­sion at ScienceOnline2010 pro­mot­ing fact-​​checking pol­icy dis­clo­sures. What if you could only afford to fact-​​check 10% of your reporters’ arti­cles? Does that dis­clo­sure give your read­ers more or less con­fi­dence in your service?”