The biggest challenge to branded corporate 'masthead credibility' information sources/'news' aggregators is their reliance on firms like Outbrain for advertising revenue. Outbrain packages up salacious and questionable material as click bait and runs it on sites like SFGate, supposedly as additional 'news' from a partner of SFGate. The result is deterioration of trust and respect for SFGate.

The fuzzy term 'fake news' is fraught with problems. We've been lied to so many times in the western world via 'official' sources many people simply don't trust the mainstream media any more. Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time.

The joy of the internet is our ability to consume information from a wide variety of sources, triangulate across many ideas, reporting and opinions to make up our own minds. The old model of having a small number of 'news outlets', such as the four commercial TV channels and one main 'news' broadcast a night that worked so well during the Vietnam war era is long gone.

There seems to be a hankering for regulated, rubber stamped 'news' and credibility checks, which I think is profoundly undemocratic and against the principles of free speech.