For example, despite reliable reports with photographic documentation, for a couple days, people wanted to believe that the old woman trampled by cops' horses during the protest in Ottawa had died. Also, it's been known for some time that Justin Trudeau's biological father was Fidel Castro, but a lot of people just now learning of it believe it because they want to believe such a thing, without having looked at the evidence. There's also Joe Rogan. He's had years to deliver info on "The Great Reset," but only now that it's "safe" for him to do so does he have a guest doing so on his show, so that Rogan can make a display of seeming "shocked" by it. (Rogan's the guy who'd said that he'd "lie to [his] grandmother" about Aliens, and who'd poo-pooed the idea of the existence of Bigfoot on the grounds that Bigfoot researchers are most "unfuckable.")
Truly-independent journalism is quite important, but people post viral videos that they've shot without providing date, time and place for context. Those videos get re-posted as "breaking" over the next week's time, or presented as new information a couple of years after the fact. Videos of someone scrolling through and reading aloud online articles present no URLs to the articles so that people won't have to sit through the videos, can do their own research, or might download the articles for their own archives. Hardly any citations of sources are provided with most "shared content." Haphazard presentation of information is enough to render it more questionable or prone to misinterpretation.
There are some audio and video podcasters who present their shows in the style and format of "legacy"-media news broadcasts or talk-shows, with the intro music and graphics, the preambulatory blabla, the two or three minutes of small-talk, self-promotion, or ads for crap like flashlights or dietary supplements. The hosts sit there at desks, behind microphones, and in front of green-screened backgrounds. Their speech cadences are sensationalistic and awkwardly showbizzy; not far from "legacy" broadcasters' manner of speaking. No more than 10 minutes' worth of vital information gets stretched out across a 50-minute video. Podcasters, YouTubers, and the like, fail to realize that there are a lot of other videos out there, and that since maybe 2005, no one has time to sit through an hour-long program of chit-chatty infotainment. A lot of what's presented is copy/pasted ideas, conventional wisdom, and sloppily-borrowed research. When the guests on the shows are researchers or experiencers of the topics, the hosts either cut them off or constrain them, or drag their discourses out by digressions and irrelevant interjections. "Get to the point, and stay there," and "Get in, then get out" should be guiding principles of "alternative" journalism. Podcasters and YouTubers should treat viewers' time as being more valuable than that of their own monetized videos.
What people also have to realize is that producing online "content" warrants some awareness of procedures for cataloging, archiving and presenting digital media. "I lost the phone that it was on" is a prime way displaying to the world that you're a dumbass. Having the media located only on one hard drive is a close second. Not knowing how to use cloud-sharing services, and instead trying/failing to send a 20MB file as an e-mail attachment, is right up there, as well. If one has a lot of videos or podcasts, one should number them ordinally and provide dates of original uploading, if not of their recording. Furthermore, audio can make or break a video, even if the picture quality ain't so good – so spend an afternoon reading about it and get a decent mic and learn how to use it. A pop filter will run you only about $25, by the way – some people wear headphones, or use speakers with a subwoofer and have downstairs neighbors.
More advice that I would give to independent netcasters is, "Stay in your lane." You may be the leading expert on people going missing under mysterious circumstances, but you're not a trained political analyst, nor a degreed psychotherapist – representing the two feet that you put in your mouth and just keep chewing on. People seek out and watch your videos to learn about missing people, not to hear a Joe Conservative's opinions of what's going on in global politics, nor to sit through your self-absorbed ruminations on your son's suicide a year ago. Imagine how someone might feel if they were to go to the channel of an expert on narcissistic abuse, to find that he or she is preoccupied with varieties of tapioca pudding. And get this: in the real world, no one wants to hear how sad a man feels. It's a great way to make friends disappear – so stop whining that people are unsubscribing over it.
Related to this is that people don't necessarily want to hang-out with you, they just want to hear about, oh, Bigfoot. Some people might be into hero-worshiping a chest-beating alpha-male type (with, conveniently, no other males in his realm with whom to compete, it would appear), but most people don't want to hear about all the chores you had to do around the homestead, and then your standard rants about how The Powers That Be are lying to us and screwing us around, just to wait for you get around to reading a couple of Bigfoot stories, and then your declaring that you're all out of time for that because you've got so many things to do before sundown – because thousands of people are sending their stories in for you to read, despite that it seems a secondary priority, given that 15 of the 50 minutes of a video is devoted to them; the rest to your obliging your audience to listen to you spew an internal monologue like a person who spends far too much time alone. It's like having to spend time at the crazy drug dealer's house, listening to that crummy Velvet Underwear album all the way through, before he gets around to weighing you a quarter.
The more that people are abandoning lamestream news sources, it becomes more imperative that the indie sources not resemble them in form or content; that standards of clarity, accuracy and objectivity be maintained; that information be presented as concisely, and with as much citation, as possible. The public's desire to be informed shouldn't have to tolerate being routinely misinformed nor being held hostage because one needs attention or ratings.