Sponsored posts are a form of advertisements - but not easily blocked by ad blockers. I keep the two separate in my mental compartment and take issue with one (indiscriminate, mass advertising) and the other (usually discriminate, relevant, on-topic and paid-for advertising).

>If it is trending on Twitter, to read the report you must click a link which goes to a web site that needs to pay its writers.

This doesn't even deserve a response for how blatantly wrong this statement is, but I'll humor you.

I can guarantee that during any major event I can find 1,000's of tweets covering the topic in extraordinary detail (ie: photos and videos taken by the people involved) without ever having to go to a news article and without any of those tweets mentioning an article. Hell, most news nowadays is centered entirely around finding these type of tweets and writing an article about the information in these tweets.

Browse tags related to Ferguson for all of 10 seconds to see how wrong you are.

>From a source that needs to pay its writers. && >Who heard about it from a source that needs to pay its writers, right?

My mom told me there was a fire by my house a few weeks back. The source was she saw smoke in the hills in my general direction and used a bit of guessing as to the location of the fire, which was indeed a few blocks from my residence. No writers had to be paid for my mother to take this news and relay it to me. It was entirely free! Once-upon-a-time this was how almost all news was relayed! Who'd have thought this methodology still works and is still reliable thousands of years later!

>CNN is, well, a source that needs to pay its writers. And they do so through advertising. Because we demand the web to be free.

But nothing is stopping me from finding another news source (ie: the hypothetical Russian blogger I mentioned) and following whatever they say instead of CNN, other than I don't already know they exist. Which with crowd-sourced news (more or less what Twitter is) is amazingly easy to find. If I cared enough about the Ukraine conflict I can find 20+ sources that I could cross-compare and get an accurate idea of what is occurring without a single writer needing to be paid. Just people wanting to be heard.

Believe it or not - but news is not something that needs to be paid for. The only reason that news pays is that there are people who want to share a story, people willing to listen, and advertisements that can be shoe-horned inbetween broadcasting segments. "The news" often gets its "sources" from unpaid people willing to share their story. They are a middle-man who can be cut out of the deal.

Journalism is a form of news that is supposed to be "curated" to give an unbiased, full perspective of an issue and allow the reader to come to their own conclusions. I treat it as an art-form to tell a story in a captive and informative way. It's a dying art form.

I don't apologize for my tone because your response came off as extremely narrow-visioned with an extremely annoying and self-affirming (but wrong) argument of "the source came from writers, didn't it!"

I have a blog where I write about topics important to me because I want people to be aware of them. I am a news source, I don't expect (or need) to get paid for my time spent writing on the issues. I'm not the only person like this, there are thousands of people like me. Thousands? I meant millions.