More Active Crime Journalism

[Pathway]

7 hours ago, A_Acko said:

I was inactive for a while after I posted this. Have there been any updates regarding journalism or news agency factions?

 

[.Pluto.]

7 hours ago, A_Acko said:

I was inactive for a while after I posted this. Have there been any updates regarding journalism or news agency factions?

People are doing it on their own. LSNN is lacking on activity in the past few months.

[Kenshi]

The number 1 issue I heard from independent/non independent journalism is the lack of awareness. 

Granted, personally I feel you can somewhat mitigate that by being observant and picking up on clues that lead you to crime scenes.

But unless I was mistaken, feelers were put out early 2020 about how the PD (SD wasn't a thing back then) would feel about people having acces to the BASE frequency. I.E. Where the general comms go over, traffic stop locations, status changes, alerts, the whole 9 yards, but also the more serious issues, like officer needs help-type of calls where the entire department descends upon one location. 

And the general consensus was that they wouldn't mind, so long as it's the base frequency, so long as people can't broadcast. Listen-in only, and so long as the access to scanners was strictly regulated by admins only, as the illegal community itself said they feared gangbangers walking around with a scanner system in their pockets/cars. Which needless to say, is dumb.

[Stiggz]

Well this thread came out in September and now there’s a mountain of fake news outlets that make up joke stories 

[Mitch]

3 hours ago, .Pluto. said:

People are doing it on their own. LSNN is lacking on activity in the past few months.

Speaking as one of the former leaders of LSNN, it self imploded on itself with extensive burnout and unclear direction. I'm unsure who leads it now nor do I have anymore of a say in teh faction after I was removed by the 'new' leadership. I have at the moment left GTAW to find different avenues, at this stage LSNN should be archived, to be fair, as the new 'leadership' hasn't mentioned anything on the forums in months. 

 

News is difficult and people really underestimate how hard it is to run a news organisation and continue it for a long duration of time. 

Edited January 8, 2021 by Mitch

[MCB666]

5 minutes ago, Mitch said:

News is difficult and people really underestimate how hard it is to run a news organisation and continue it for a long duration of time. 

This ^. It can honestly be tiring at times and sometimes demotivating. 

[Greyfeather]

6 hours ago, Mitch said:

Speaking as one of the former leaders of LSNN, it self imploded on itself with extensive burnout and unclear direction. I'm unsure who leads it now nor do I have anymore of a say in teh faction after I was removed by the 'new' leadership. I have at the moment left GTAW to find different avenues, at this stage LSNN should be archived, to be fair, as the new 'leadership' hasn't mentioned anything on the forums in months. 

 

News is difficult and people really underestimate how hard it is to run a news organisation and continue it for a long duration of time. 

Everyone wants to see it and very few want to put in the effort to write it.

 

Investigative approach

 

While at LSNN, I published a number of investigative news articles. But think about this - the RP required to get a fully researched, corroborated article to print is huge. Not to mention the writes, re-writes, checking if the official you're speaking to has corruption permissions, verifying evidence, and re-writes again once the article has been past the editing team. And that's before you even get the lawyers involved (yes, we had to speak to IC lawyers about a few of those articles).

 

You have to RP reaching out to and interviewing your principal source, as well as corroborating ones. Each of these interviews can take multiple hours, depending on the sensitivity and complexity of the subject and the need to be thorough.

 

And even then, there's no guarantee that management will publish.

 

I spent so much of my time either RPing interviewing people, or just out of the game preparing articles.

 

Crime reporting

 

This isn't as straight forward as you think. I was fortunate to have cultivated quite a few civilian contacts as well as a couple of verified PD and SD corruption approved ones. I could never break into FD, though. This took a lot of time to do, but it did mean those nights I would spend driving around aimlessly to find flashing lights decreased a little bit.

 

But even when you get to a crime scene, it's not a case of snapping a few photos, taking some notes and writing an article. You have to again verify your facts using either the available (if available) media liaison, or the scene supervisor -- assuming he or she would want to talk. If you couldn't get verification, you had to file a written request with the relevant department and await a response. There were numerous times that I had to abandon articles because I couldn't get verification.

 

Then of course, scenes were "like a box of chocolates". It might be a crime, it might be an accident, it might be 8 cruisers gathered around something extremely minor and entirely un-newsworthy because it's a slow RP night. 

 

This is also sad to admit, yet true; most people can't be bothered reading about yet another couple of gangbangers killing each other on a street. If you doubt this, check the clicks. I had to consistently find creative ways to present that material to attract interest in it.

 

And that's if admins don't void the scene mid-way through your RP. Oh, and thanks to all the admins who took the time to PM me that scenes were voided. ❤️  

 

What does this mean?

 

It means that, if you want to IC protect the integrity of your news brand, you can't cut corners. Everyone is looking for a way to discredit news they disagree with. It's also really easy to slip into metagaming territory if you aren't diligent about doing everything IC.

 

The things I've written above seem like a rant, but they're not. I really loved my time at LSNN, one of my best RP experiences was interviewing a gang member about the intricacies of his organization. About two hours after I last spoke to him he was was CK'd by his own faction. Seeing that CK notice sent a little chill up my spine. It also meant I couldn't ethically push the article to my editors.

 

RPing ethical journalism isn't a simple case of showing up and pushing some writing out for the GTAW community to read/ignore.

 

There's a reason people are now publishing fake news and questionable blogs, because it's easier than the actual due diligence required to write a properly researched and verified piece.

 

Thanks.

 

N 🙂

[ChickenOffSky]

I was REALLY looking forward to getting into something like LSNN. I work for a news station irl as a camera man so I’m somewhat familiar with the writing styles and ethics that go into it. It’s really sad to see LSNN fade out of being relevant. On another note, what’s the deal with Weazel news? I remember someone saying something about how it’s off limits for the foreseeable future but is that true?  I’ve had some ideas for a produced news show involving anchors, reporters, and producers but the lack of interest from other players makes me think it would be a wasted effort. 

[DomThomson]

The main issue of Crime Jurnalism is the fact that IG currently there is no real way to know, what, where and why it is happening to get there in the first place. IRL this much easier since there is stuff like police scanners and other ways to catch information going through dispatch to know what is happening and mainly where it is happening. Press releases are hard to do for the factions since everyday there are countless homicides, robberies and such with detectives not investigating them half of the time because there is nothing to investigate. It's simply easier to catch a homicide IRL because you don't get them every single day and the law enforcement agencies will half of the time invite the news agencies since it's such a large scene and it makes the department or agency transparent. In currect times, I simply don't think it's viable to efficiently do something like that just because there is so much crime, so many homicides every day and such, that it's not viable.

[knppel]

1 hour ago, DomThomson said:

The main issue of Crime Jurnalism is the fact that IG currently there is no real way to know, what, where and why it is happening to get there in the first place

I beg to differ here.

What's tough close-to-impossible is the "full coverage" of events in the public press, as we'd need a few douzen people playing journalists to follow a majority of possible tracks, Releases from Department side and so on.

 

What's fully possible though (it was on lsrp, so I'll eat my new hat if it isn't here if one tries), is to create content in character that's based on ic research, to liaise with both crime networks and LEOs to gain information before it reaches the public, or to find whistleblowers that spill beans about stuff the higher-ups would prefer to keep internal (counts for both OCGs and LEOs).

In other words, roleplaying a journalist.

 

On an ooc factor, as long as people with fresh-off-batch forum accounts are allowed to post what's ic the weak forgery of an official document, in the very same position I am given to place a researched article I roleplay handing out in character as sold newspaper on the forum, I can't be arsed.

If you make the "online news" a 4chan that's what you get.

Edited January 9, 2021 by knppel