More than pedantic and insulting than “13 Things You Didn’t Know About…”

More than “…And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”

More than “How One Tweet Perfectly Explains (complex topic)”

More than any of those, the most insidious headline tactic plaguing the online publishing world is the dreaded question mark. You know you’ve seen it. And now that I’ve pointed it out you’ll see it even more often, I’m guessing. “Did X Company Just Hire Y Person?” “Did X Company Just Release All Your Data To the Russian Government?” That punctuation is everywhere.

It’s known as Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, something I now know courtesy of Rex Hammock. That law states that any headline with a ? at the end can be answered by a simple “No” since the writer and everyone involved know they can’t back up the claim of the headline, though the rest of the article will lay out why they’re publishing it in the first place.

And it’s used by writers and editors as a sort of Get Out of Jail Free Card, one that seemingly absolves them of being accountable for what they’re writing. By appending it to the end of their headline they can write whatever conjecture, hearsay or unsubstantiated rumor they want, all while hiding under the cover provided by the crook of the question mark. If confronted about it they can always say they weren’t sure about it so were asking the question instead of making a declaration.

It’s a small distinction but one that serves an important purpose. If they were to pass along the same rumor that was coming to them third-hand but report it in a more declarative statement they could be opening themselves up to legal action by the subject of the rumor.

To avoid that the options would be either to A) Not report on it at all or B) Do actual reporting to see if there’s any truth to what’s being said.

The first option isn’t taken because if Site M reports it and Site N doesn’t then the latter potentially loses out on revenue, whether those pageviews are coming from social networks or from search. Not only that but they look out of touch by being so far outside the current buzz.

The second option isn’t taken because, well, who has the time or resources to do actual reporting? While we’re seeing more publication launch than ever before, very few of them are being staffed with writers who have any journalistic skills or contact networks that can be used to substantiate claims made by others.

In many ways this is more destructive than when a publication publishes something but then has to issue a correction/retraction or even take the piece down from their site. Not only does this show that the publication in question at least has the courage of its convictions (not to mention more faith in their editorial staff as a whole) but it doesn’t do as much to destroy the the foundation of tomorrow’s knowledge that we’re building today.

Think about what search results are going to look like two, three, five years from now. Every article will end with a question mark and therefore lack any sense of authority or truth and therefore be unreliable. Subsequent opinions and information will then be built upon the shakiest of sands.

We need to demand more of the publications we turn to for information. And those publications need to demand more of their staff. Most of all, the whole industry needs to be accountable to something more than the race to the bottom where, seemingly, all of the advertising revenue lies.

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic paints a somewhat grim picture for professional local – or what we used to call “hyper-local” media. The story is pretty much what you would expect given the last few years in the media world: Layoffs of staff at local outlets, big companies unwilling to invest in resources and entrepreneurs having trouble getting funding for their passion projects. It’s enough to make you pretty discouraged that the local online media market has any hope in a world where Buzzfeed and its ilk are dominating the social publishing space. And big time failures like Patch and others aren’t helping.

But here’s a radical thought: Maybe the reality is that no, there’s no money in local media. And maybe that’s alright.

Travel back with me now to 15 some years ago when blogging was just starting to reach the mainstream. One of the first areas of promise identified by media watchers at the time was hyper-local. While news organizations of all sizes (at the time) had local reporters, self-publishing by the masses – by the people in the neighborhood – seemed like a great idea. Every problem could be solved by these independent voices who would shine a public light on them. These people knew the community and weren’t beholden to column inches and other considerations, so they could cover a topic as much as they deemed fit. And business models weren’t important because people would either do it just for their love of the community or, if they needed a few bucks they could always rely on Google AdSense income.

That utopia has only kinda sorta come to pass, though. Or at least the vision got altered in some way. It’s not necessarily that it never came to pass – I’m guessing you can find a decent personal blog for most major towns and villages in the U.S. – but it got subsumed by the larger media companies who thought they could operate these kinds of sites at scale and bring in not just the few dollars AdSense might generate but serious income through local advertising. Most of these operations are now over and done with, having failed through some combination of crappy content generated by lousy writers being paid a pittance and the inability to actually sell local advertising, a result of not having locally-based sales teams.

It’s possible, though, that local news coverage of the kind we’re talking about here will never be a viable business, either as a stand-alone enterprise or as a division of a larger company. But there’s nothing that says in order to succeed a hyper-local news blog needs to be generating massive revenue, be flush with investment cash or be part of a larger media company. They *can* be sure, but they don’t need to be.

I think the expectation that in order to be successful it needs to meet one or more of the above criteria is false and is simply a construct of the larger media-industry narrative. In a good story the money goes somewhere. So if it’s not being funneled through one of those filters then (sad trombone noise) it’s a failure. But it’s only a failure if there’s some sort of goal to make Aurora East Side News (which I should really start) into a going concern that allows me to quit my day job and become a full time journalist of some sort. If I’m doing Aurora East Side News (which I should really start) simply as a passion project because I want to raise awareness of certain things and am able to do so around the other commitments in my life, then whether I get 35 or 3,500 visitors a day it doesn’t really matter. Certainly a little check is nice and welcome, but it’s not the goal. The news is the goal.

19th Ward News, a site by Scott Smith about his neighborhood (which he says is taking a break while he migrates from Tumblr to WordPress) is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Nothing about this screams “I’m angling for a Knight Foundation Grant so I can retire.” Instead it looks like someone who just wants to talk about the good, bad and weird side of their neighborhood. It’s done for the love of community – physical community – conversation and information. That’s the kind of goal many of us started out with and it’s just as worthy an aspiration as someone who thinks their blog about movie marketing is going to land them a full time gig writing for Variety.

So it’s not that the goals need to change: Let people do what they want to do for whatever reason they want to do it. It’s that the perception of the worthiness of those goals in the eyes of industry watchers and commentators – myself included to an extent – need to be adjusted so that every venture *needs* to be about what the commentator thinks it needs to be about.