User talk:Fconaway

 Hi Fconaway, and Welcome to Wikinews!  Welcome to Wikinews! I hope you enjoy this free news source and want to stay. As a first step, you may wish to read the Introduction.

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Good luck, and have fun. – Legoktm - (talk) 23:22, 8 May 2008 (UTC)}} Legoktm - (talk) 23:22, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Endangered 'Asian unicorn' sighted
Published. Congrats! I did need to do some work on it during review, such as on the attribution. See . --Pi zero (talk) 23:35, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks for your good work in getting this up to speed! The Serbian edition has the story, also.  I especially like the picture they published.  If it quacks like a unicorn ... Fconaway (talk) 07:30, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Sofosbuvir
I'm hoping you'll choose to pick the more-positive suggestions out of the edits/templates I've put on this. You knocked the 'Asian Unicorn' article into shape with a little prompting, and this is obviously something you believe is important to put before the public. It's not intended as a criticism of you that the mainstream have simply said "this drug is wonderful" and, "this drug will cripple you financially"; that 'Doctors without Borders' have "complained" about the price means 'refreshing' the story involves going and asking them about it. Equally, what do the FDA and CDC say about Hep-C?

The news that the FDA have approved a treatment has receded over the 'news event horizon'; it's, now, simply a fact. That makes it, as it stands, unsuitable for Wikinews. However, the experts who can actually provide some insight are no longer being bombarded with dumb questions from mainstream journalists who've skimmed a Wikipedia article. I'm left wondering what the answers to a few questions are, and where that would lead article-wise. For example, "Who has the patent on a treatment that's going to cost up to $186,000?" "Why does this treatment cost up to $186,000?". The missing background in there is "How come Hep-C is a 'silent plague'? Are there no obvious, common, symptoms should prompt screening?"

Decent reporting on medical issues is really thin on the ground. That's where sourcing from stressed journalists who'll buy that a presser says 'this is a scary disease' &mdash; but, don't worry &mdash; 'we have a very expensive cure', falls down.

Journalism is storytelling, and rescuing this as a news piece will need answers to some of the questions the basic details prompt. "kills more people than AIDS" is almost a 'throwaway' remark in closing, but there is(?) some precedent in the compulsory licensing of hepatitis and HIV drugs. I assume most people are like me, and only vaguely aware of these sometime-legal battles. I'd love to know how the patent-holder breaks down their costs, and justifies their pricing. Without giving hypochondriacs a checklist to take to their doctor: Why is Hep-C so widely undiagnosed? One I always wonder about with many high-price, patented, developments is the "You didn't build that" issue; perhaps best-put as: What basic, publicly funded, research is this built on?

I pulled BRS' 'Fascinating' and 'provocative' piece as an example of where Wikinews' access to Original Reporting (OR) can take a story. That's eleven days after the last mainstream source, but it could just-as-well have been a month later because of what the OR brings to it.

Anyway, merry festiv(whatever), if you want to 'have a go' at rescuing this via OR, let me know. You might-well know a lot of the answers to the questions above; applying NPOV on Wikinews in such situations is going and asking the relevant experts to back you up in their own words. The storytelling is in narrating what you find out, the challenge is in the narrator being 'unimpeachable'. The 'punishment' is defending your approach as being "impartial", having accepted that NPOV is an idealistic, but realistically-unattainable, goal within news-production cycle. A series of compromises, and if you're not upsetting someone it just ain't news. ;)--Brian McNeil / talk 14:39, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Brian, thanks for your kind and encouraging words. Usually, I am a consumer of news reports.  This story, however, seems to have an unfolding character: that is, there's a story within the story.  The specific pharmaceutical news points to a backstory with implications for advances in medical science.  It looks like we may have news before long, so I will continue to investigate the specific areas where news will occur without writing more, for now.  Fortunately, I have no personal interest in the outcome.Fconaway (talk) 21:41, 25 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Good luck with it. I meant "personally interested", as-opposed to a "personal interest" (such as knowing people with Hep-C, for example).
 * We all started out as consumers of news, and writing synthesis pieces starts to give you an insight into where the gaps or holes in a story might be. For this one, I can see a lot of useful background and context that's missing. That's really news, because a large chunk of it is covered by the Orwell quote: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations". If you know enough about the subject to ask intelligent questions, I'm suggesting not waiting on mainstream journalists getting around to it.
 * If you need a hand pinpointing who to put questions to &mdash; for example, asking the WHO or CDC press office to point us at experts &mdash; I'd be glad to help out there.
 * Basically, I agree that there should be further news; you suggest there's more backstory, whereas I'm saying there's a 'politically charged' backdrop. Those are essential ingredients for a news story that will provoke debate and discussion. I just don't want to see it done in the "OMG! Amurikah is evul" sensationalist form that Russia Today might opt for, nor with the "It's a Big Pharma conspiracy!" spin that your average Huffington Post blogger might select. That's going back to being a critical consumer of news; what we've got so-far is the "This development is Good News®™©" spin. Telling the whole story, and giving respect to neutrality, is avoiding the editorialising that it's easy to see in the example sorts of reports.
 * I still question how you can have NPOV in news, but the tradition of "balance" in news isn't working. We end up with crackpots demanding equal airtime, and equal prominence in the news. It is to the benefit of many mainstream news services to perpetuate this, and the 'blogosphere' reaction is often horribly preachy. With the "guidance" of NPOV, Wikipedia made Encyclopædia Britannica obsolete; I don't expect Wikinews to do the same to the NYT, or BBC News, even if we give it a couple of decades. I do hope to see enough intelligent reporting here that those sort of mainstream sources give us some grudging respect. We can't ditch NPOV, we'd get overrun with conspiracy theorists and Truthers; but, you can still find yourself having to defend good, intelligent, reporting against accusations of breaching/ignoring NPOV. You can be left with a hole in a story &mdash; if, for example, the pharmaceutical company with the patent declines to talk to you &mdash; but, that's their problem, not yours. --Brian McNeil / talk 12:04, 28 December 2013 (UTC)