Jump to content

More Active Crime Journalism


A_Acko

Recommended Posts

On 1/8/2021 at 2:43 PM, .Pluto. said:

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

 

New leadership was only just assigned in December so we're trying to bring a sustainable infrastructure to the table will last long term rather than for a month or so. We feel we've put forward an infrastructure that will be sustainable long term and help incentivize and offer purpose to join LSNN as opposed to people just setting up their own 'fake news' outlets and blogs and would encourage people to do so to encourage people to do so as it supports the development of roleplay in the sever across the board and targets a wider auidence.

 

21 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. 

 

Not to sure why you're taking a dig at us? Firstly we've only just took over the faction so as for the 'months' statement it's more like 1 week and six days to be exact and you weren't even in the faction when we took it over as a leadership figure and it was lacking a leadership figure hence the reason we came in to try and turn the faction around. So I don't feel the faction has to be dissolved as a lack of us publishing an article when we're working on the most in-depth news agency structure I've seen on a virtual roleplay server. There's no value to publishing things quickly if you don't have an infrastructure that's sustainable to direct the faction with, it'll just take the path it has on several other occasions.  We've got a team on board and it's always going to be a hard faction to work with considering a great deal of other legal factions have financial wealth to bring in players or offer around the clock entertainment such as the PD/SD/FD etc.  But we're implementing new ways to broadcast and publish news upon which you were informed of yesterday when you asked me why I wanted to the Captain on a sinking ship. 

 

I'm not sure what your goal is with your statements but we have never 'removed' you. I sent you a message asking if you and every other member of the faction wished to partake in the reform and at this point you weren't a leadership figure in the faction and you've still not been removed? I asked you on a PM if you wished to remain and you never responded and it was made clear to everyone in LSNN that if you wish to remain reach out and we can reinstate people. All I'm reading is defamation, as no one has ousted you and not one thing you've said in that statement is true when referencing a friendly bunch of guys that are trying to pull a faction together and help turn it around. We simply informed you that there was no mentioning that you were a 'Owner' and then you never responded further.

 

14 hours ago, Greyfeather said:

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.

 

🙂

Spot on ethical journalism isn't just as simple as going out and doing anything you can to obtain a headline and not only would this have legal implications for the Journalist themselves but as you pointed out it'd have various legal consequences for the network which would be costly and damage the networks public image. I'm all for investigative journalism and I'm going to be pushing it within the reform of the faction but we're also going to look at various other avenues for print publications that will push creative journalism within the community. Things that we're looking at are things like political columns, life style that'll cover things like the best restaurants in the community and as a result will generate interactive roleplay across the board for both the people involved in the faction and the people we interact with. My biggest qualm is that a great deal of the people covering things like fake stories and independent journalism aren't fully roleplaying it into their characters background and it's these same people who ask of activity from LSNN yet don't wish to partake within reforming media roleplay within LSNN.

 

We're really focusing right now on the organizations infrastructure from head to toe to ensure that it's a sustainable faction long term, so we're pretty much starting a fresh and are working on every section of the faction and are implementing many new and creative ideas that I've not seen implemented previously. I hope moving forward we can revamp the faction and help bring creative, interactive and active roleplay to the community. Hopefully with these reforms and the financial incentives we will be able to offer that we'll be able to attract people to join the team.

 

5 hours ago, knppel said:

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.

The difference with LS-RP was that SAN News on that server had sustained financial revenue from various script based supports, LSNN has nothing of the sort, no financial assets and no revenue sources that aren't self sourced. That's why we're trying to fix that with the current revamp of the faction to ensure that it's not a problem moving forward. Whilst money isn't everything on a roleplay community it's hard to lead a news faction when you've got two news vans and no ability to incentivize workers.

 

We've already put forward an idea to FM that would easily rectify this issue and it'd be IC'ly driven internally and so I'm hoping that it's accepted as it's a sad reality that many people don't want to work for nothing even in a virtual video game. That's what I found previous leaderships struggled with was finding that source and judging by the logs I have access to relied on FM's financial support to stay afloat and even then that support wouldn't have even remotely attracted the people that it could as people were being rewarded less than 20K a week when they were active. I would say that on all RP communities I've seen 50% of people in news factions want to be competitively financially rewarded as a result of their work and even then the people that actively make their news character their primary is less than 25% I'd say. That's why we're looking at making the faction more engaging and creative and hopefully as a result it'll make it more attractive to roleplay within and with.

 

I agree with your point about the OOC faction though, I find that a big issue when people don't actually roleplay this in-depth. As an example the recent arrest of the Mayor it was published two days before the Media Relations Unit within the LSPD reached out to us. We wouldn't usually wait for them to come to us but we're not actively present in-game at the moment due to working on the backend of the faction first. 

 

 

Link to comment
15 minutes ago, Wang said:

We're really focusing right now on the organizations infrastructure from head to toe to ensure that it's a sustainable faction long term, so we're pretty much starting a fresh and are working on every section of the faction and are implementing many new and creative ideas that I've not seen implemented previously. I hope moving forward we can revamp the faction and help bring creative, interactive and active roleplay to the community. Hopefully with these reforms and the financial incentives we will be able to offer that we'll be able to attract people to join the team.

Aaaand now I'm tempted! 🙂

 

Good luck, it sounds like you're really thinking about making it sustainable. 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
3 minutes ago, Greyfeather said:

Aaaand now I'm tempted! 🙂

 

Good luck, it sounds like you're really thinking about making it sustainable. 

Thank you, appreciate it! You're welcome to reinstate whenever as we could do with creative journalists and likeminded people! 🙂 

Link to comment
4 hours ago, Wang said:

The difference with LS-RP was that SAN News on that server had sustained financial revenue from various script based supports, LSNN has nothing of the sort, no financial assets and no revenue sources that aren't self sourced

This is a myth actually. SAN's paychecks on lsrp were broken, and when Carry had her short period there SAN would have been defunct if not for her privately funding that.

Elvira&Clem-Clem telling Carry to not rp not being paid as she and other staff "realistically would be paid" is not actual revenue, and articles that "SAN was sold to Chinese for 300m" whenever a new (old) crew emerged to run it were neither.

 

4 hours ago, Greyfeather said:

Good luck, it sounds like you're really thinking about making it sustainable. 

 

4 hours ago, Wang said:

Whilst money isn't everything on a roleplay community it's hard to lead a news faction when you've got two news vans and no ability to incentivize workers.

 

I can't stress this point enough (not only for news):

That Carry had a business plan was one of the prime reasons lsrp's FAUX was longer lived than any of the SAN-Teams I witnesses there, or LSNN here for what I found out.

The original character motivation had been that she wanted to be on TV and didn't make it as actress. Actual investigative reports, opposed to the ranom and often one sided "news" people write up just like that, were a niche she found, not the original plot.

In the early days, a single van someone generously gifted her and a printer to spit out free samples of the newspaper to rp handing out was all it needed.

Everything else, the big parts in the tower, the offices and big print below, buildt up over time then from profits, added by demand, opposed to throw people into a structure to fill out (including my own character).

 

4 hours ago, Wang said:

That's what I found previous leaderships struggled with was finding that source and judging by the logs I have access to relied on FM's financial support to stay afloat and even then that support wouldn't have even remotely attracted the people that it could as people were being rewarded less than 20K a week when they were active.

Indeed a major issue.

An often asked question to Young Carry: How can one be a stripper and a news reporter.

Young Carry's reply: How can one be a news reporter without a sidejob to at least pay the coke.

 

Now let's go from other server's history to a hypotethical thought mentioned above: Ideally, one could also play a news reporter full time and make a halfway decent living off it.

 

As correctly spotted, this does not only need paychecks, but also a general budget for faction members to work with to spend on operations not covered by what the faction infrastructure provides (in other words: Everything that's not a van or a paycheck for a fellow full time faction member).

 

Crucial is also that the majority of these budgets stems from ic sources the news are not accountable to. Government funding or payments from industry or Crime Factions are an option, but carry the obvious risk that the players of the reporters again are prevented from following news stories because they'd touch this or that's major financier's interests he doesn't want the public to talk about.

 

The solution Carry found back then and that can be applied: Advertisements, wide spread. The more sides contribute to a news networks' finances, the less leeway the single financier gets (i.e. Senator X, Club Owner Y or Mob Boss Z might cease their funding over unfavourable reports, but if all three of them have advertisements, the other running contracts allow the news faction to investigate regardless without much conflict of interest. D'oh, it's just an ad, nothing personal!)

 

This is also a reason why I bashed so hard against the spammed fake "news" posted in the news section- being able to charge for ads is a matter of exposure. Business owners want to reach their target audience. The one or other guy will order ads for the RP, as long as the news do it cheap, but that's no solid business model.

Factual, researched articles being buried in obscure faction subforums, or under a flood of forum topics containing of articles with zero investigative rp, but only some effort in forging e-documents and a tiny bit of creativity to invent a story rather than to research one, of course reduce chances for this business model significantly.

 

Summa summarum, any successfull news faction that actually lives and funds itself off their news operations, has to find an advertisement platform people will spend their money on, as it reaches the relevant target audience groups.

Once FM cuts the amount you may take for your ads like they just did for designers, you're doing it right, from the business management side (and this still allows to employ run-down reporters with shaggy coats and hats and crappy cars, btw).

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by knppel
Link to comment

Reporters rarely want to report on crime on here, and i've noticed that when they try, alot of the time they approach the wrong people, end up being pushed away, threatened or have something done to them IC and that pretty much kills any desire for them to report on crime. Either that or they simply don't look.

 

I remember LSNN wrote two articles about MS-13, I was a big fan of the first one, but not the second one. Not because of anything the LSNN writer did, but because in my opinion they interviewed the wrong person IC 😅😅😅 Unfortunately the person they ended up interviewing gave them some half arsed message on the forums as their 'interview' instead of hopping ingame and roleplaying it. I wanted to fully RP the interview, but the other player didn't want to it seemed.

 

If LSNN was to get active again or another news faction or independent journalist popped up IC, I'd be more than happy to use one of my gang member characters to roleplay an interview with them.

Link to comment

Ultimately when I ran Saints News many moons ago my faction made money from page hits. To be quite honest, nobody cares about a murder outside the gas station in Davis - happens all the time and the only thing you're doing is putting your reporters in harm's way. You know what people cared about? Drama - cheap, populist drama, my most read article from the Saints News days was about a guy who managed nightclubs driving around speeding and serving underaged alcohol. When I tried to write about gangs I got very view page hits and my sources were always limited.

 

The one thing I'm thankful for and the only reason that Saints News got actual news at all was because of the cooperation of @Big_Smokes, the Chief of Police at the time, I couldn't have ran the faction without him and his outright perseverance to providing fantastic sources. If news companies aren't getting crime stories, don't seek the criminals, seek out the police.

Edited by HaveADream
  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
1 hour ago, HaveADream said:

Ultimately when I ran Saints News many moons ago my faction made money from page hits. To be quite honest, nobody cares about a murder outside the gas station in Davis - happens all the time and the only thing you're doing is putting your reporters in harm's way. You know what people cared about? Drama - cheap, populist drama, my most read article from the Saints News days was about a guy who managed nightclubs driving around speeding and serving underaged alcohol. When I tried to write about gangs I got very view page hits and my sources were always limited.

 

The one thing I'm thankful for and the only reason that Saints News got actual news at all was because of the cooperation of @Big_Smokes, the Chief of Police at the time, I couldn't have ran the faction without him and his outright perseverance to providing fantastic sources. If news companies aren't getting crime stories, don't seek the criminals, seek out the police.

ALSO THIS

 

Drama, politics, significant characters' news. 

My Rabi Habeeb dead man thread got the most views as well as Halford

Link to comment
  • Wuhtah locked this topic
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...