Beyonce only likes black people… well, not exactly

Great meta-journalism being done by Dakota over at Netscape over the whole “Beyonce only makes records for black people” controversy.

http://news.netscape.com/story/2006/09/22/beyonce-album-sales-fall-after-black-comments

As you can see, a user submitted the story and our “Anchors” (aka metajournalists) researched the story and corrected the post. This is really the power of Netscape, and we’ve been able to double our metajournalistic efforts since the Navigators and our image editor came on board because the Anchors have more time.

We’re gonna add two more Anchors and we’re going to hire hard-core traditional journalists who know how to pick up the phone like Dakota does. That is really what this social news space needs: old school reporters to check the facts!

I love it… we’re really pushing the medium.

Side note: It is really interesting to me that folks are very active in commenting on stories (200+ comments on this one), but they don’t vote that much. This is a really interesting thing we’ve learned at Netscape… people understand the value of commenting, but it takes them 2-3 months to understand the value of voting (that it moves stories up and down the home page). We gotta but a big huge box on the page for folks who have not voted that says “You can impact which stories are on the home page by voting! Please don’t complain about the ranking of stories if you and your friends have never voted!!!”