Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales sets up ad-free Wikitribune site to tackle fake news

https://www.wikitribune.com/

Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has launched a website aimed at countering the spread of fake news by bringing together professional journalists and a community of volunteers and supporters to produce news articles.

The online proliferation of fake news, some of it generated for profit and some for political ends, became a major topic of angst and debate in many developed countries during last year's U.S. presidential election.

Wales argued in his video that because people expected to get news for free on the Internet, news sites were reliant on advertising money, which created strong incentives to generate so-called "clickbait", catchy headlines to attract viewers.

"This is a problem because ads are cheap, competition for clicks is fierce and low-quality news sources are everywhere," said Wales.

He also argued that social media networks, where an ever-increasing number of people get their news, were designed to show users what they wanted to see, confirm their biases and keep them clicking at all costs.

In a survey by the Pew Research Center last year, just 18% of respondents indicated that they had a lot of trust in the information they got from national news organizations.
http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/trust-and-accuracy/

Wikitribune has a plan to fix fake news:

Interesting to note that fake news is not new, it existed as long as there were newspapers: