The problem of ‘Fake News’ isn’t a new one. The news media has been less than honest for quite some time. Bibliogrify hopes to improve the quality of news by making it easier for content creators to provide documentation for their work.

Providing original, unedited source material is something that news providers simply don’t do. Likewise, these days they rarely seem to provide the source of some of the statistics that get used to prop up narratives. The end result is that news consumers end having to fact-check everything for themselves. The anointed fact-checking services/bureaus are just as compromised as the news itself, so relying on them is pointless. This situation is further compounded when “opinion” and “reporting” are often conflated.

The problem for news content creators is two-fold. One is the work of putting together a bibliography. Especially if you’re someone who puts out multiple videos in a day. Bibliogrify is a pretty straightforward workflow which also provides a way to log archive links in case a source gets de-platformed “for some reason”.

The other issue is that content creators nowadays need to publish their stuff on multiple services. If the author wanted to add reference links, then that job would need to be replicated on every service. That’s a lot of work. With Bibliogrify you get a sharable public URL you can just paste into the description of your content. Easy.

The “high order bit” here is to allow independent content creators to provide the kind of legitimacy that the “real news” won’t. More and more people get their news from independents. And if the independents provide source material to back up their reporting, and the “real news” does not, the pendulum will continue to shift, one way or another. Either more folks will follow independents, or the main stream media will get a clue and realize that people want fact-based reporting.

The technology in Bibliogrify is actually derived from a larger project I was playing around with. That being a decentralized collaborative news publishing system. But I was too busy with client work to pull off such an ambitious project. I figured putting out the citation and confirmation part of the larger system would at least be useful to content creators, and also help partially validate the concept.