Snopes On The Ropes -- NY Times -- July 26, 2017

Long-term readers know my thoughts about Snopes.com. So this NY Times headline caught my attention: Snopes, in heated legal battle, asks readers for money to survive.

Snopes, the fact-checking website that once focused on debunking flimsy internet rumors but has expanded into a 16-person operation that calls out political leaders for dishonesty, is locked in a legal battle that it says has drained the money it needs to survive.

The site, which gets all of its revenue from advertising, created a crowdfunding page on Monday, seeking $500,000 from readers to remain operational indefinitely. It says that Proper Media, the vendor that runs its advertising services, has withheld the site’s revenue and has refused to relinquish control of the site. That leaves Bardav — the company that owns and operates Snopes — with no way of moving the site to a new host or installing its own ads, said David Mikkelson, a founder of the site.

“We have had no income whatsoever for the last several months,” Mr. Mikkelson said in an interview on Monday.

When asked how long the site could last without a successful fund-raising drive or legal victory, Mr. Mikkelson responded: “Not a whole lot longer.”

The other side of the story is completely different, according to the linked story. It looks like we need Snopes to fact check the story of its imminent demise. LOL.

With regard to the Bakken, Snopes has never updated it's March 10, 2011, post on the Bakken.

According to news accounts, although new drilling techniques have greatly increased oil production in Bakken formation in recent years, as of February 2011 that region was still yielding less than half a million barrels per day. 

Snopes was consistently negative on the Bakken throughout that fact-checking post and never updated the evolution of the Bakken.

Snopes completely missed the Bakken revolution. 

If I recall correctly, Snopes started out as a website run by one person (or possibly a husband-wife team) with no research department (in other words, simply another blog) with its own agenda. [Update: a reader sent me this link -- yes, it was a husband-wife team.]

Of course, one wonders if the whole story is fake, particularly coming from The New York Times. LOL.