“An independent journalist” who won't remain nameless
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Reporters write stories and people read them to be entertained. Newspapers make money when more people read the stories.
No wonder that newspapers don't cite others... That's just an advertisement for their competitor.
This isn't the only way to view the news industry but it certainly explains a lot.
I think the simpler explanation is just laziness and no positive incentive or obligation, as opposed to proactive competitive practices..
Meanwhile, (some) journalists at (some) news organisations are being forced to write stories that have no integrity under an editorial policy that is designed to promote a partisan point of view.
There's no working business model for real investigative journalism, but our democratic systems need real investigative journalism in order to function properly and hold politicians to account. Nothing else does.
Independent journalists can make this happen, but how do we recognise a "real" independent journalist doing real investigative journalism from an activist blogger with an axe to grind?
[0] I'm not saying that the author is not a journalist, or inferring that they're a blogger.
The main difference from a societal point of view are obviously all the privileges and duties given to a pro in a field, be it writing or anything else actually.
Independence is ever denial or lie when it comes to social interaction. No one is an island, or if you prefer, under the sea even island are connected on solid grounds and all kinds of life forms are able to travel from one island to an other. There is nothing as an absolutely isolated zone.
Also you can be trappist, but simultaneously claiming to be the president of the universe won't hold much attention.
More cynically, almost all news these days is PR. There is very little new information entering the system from journalists - just synthesis of information provided to them. So traditional journalists are not unlike bloggers in this way either.
With platforms like substack, X, and LinkedIn it seems easier than ever for an independent journalist to cultivate an audience.
As long as they create quality content, I’m more than happy to subscribe to whatever platform they choose to use.
True quality (especially once you get into the niches) is extremely valuable/interesting and to paraphrase Van Gogh, wheat is wheat, even if townsfolk see it as grass at first.
Cultivating an audience is one thing but serious investigative journalism often takes considerable amount of time and money. Most journalists I’ve seen on Substack and similar platforms seem to mainly do commentary, summaries of topics, interviews, and the like. There is a place for that of course but it isn’t really filling the need for investigative journalism too well at the moment.
You see people become more and more extreme because that is what get them donations. This might just be what works with humans.
A least with independent journalists there is a chance they might not be compromised. Not so, corporate journalists.
And I don't think there's any legacy media outlet that's really independent now a days. They've all gone hardcore partisan one way or the other, and all frame things in strong accordance with US geopolitical policy. For instance imagine how absurdly different the coverage would look if what was happening between Israel and Gaza was instead, otherwise identically, happening between China and Xinjiang (Uyghurs).
A while back, a semi-independent journalist, Nate Silver, said that Disney (who had bought his site) "almost never interfered in our editorial policy".
Apparently oblivious to what that means: that Disney were perfectly willing to interfere with his editorial policy, but rarely had reason to.
There doesn't have to be. No reason to gatekeep it. Anyone doing investigative work, and publishing their findings in a structured way qualifies as a journalist. In fact, the more journalists there are speaking truth to power, the more we all benefit.
Let’s not forget the credentialed journalists, backed by well-funded media orgs, fully equipped with narratives—and not shy about targeting everyday people they simply don’t like.
So? Why should this be considered a special case? Its no different than programming, for example.
The idea that only authorities should be able to report as journalists is anathema to a free and open, democratic society.
Holding programming up as the apex of good practice in this area isn't the argument you think it is ;)
[0] Amateur from an engineering discipline perspective.
I think you mean to say that you're not implying they're a blogger.
Shortselling and prediction markets.
This is the sort of thing that only works if hardly anyone is doing it, and hardly anyone takes it seriously. (It's like most "free market" solutions, in that regard: the conditions for a free market are actually quite hard to obtain, and are almost never stable.)
In fact, it's just the opposite.
If "hardly anyone is doing it", you can, in fact, distort a prediction market pretty easily. If you have the money to throw at it, nobody is going to stop you.
If absolutely everybody is doing it, though, the situation changes. Somebody whose pockets are just as deep as yours will eventually discover what you're doing. It is in their best interest to trade against you and bring the market to where it should be.
This is one of the reasons penny stocks are so much worse than Aapl or SPY. Penny stocks have very low trading volumes and very low interests, so it's pretty easy for a motivated player to distort their price, "pump and dump", or do other shenanigans of the sort. There are so many people trading on aapl that you can be pretty sure the current price represents the market consensus of what aapl is currently worth.
A subplot of @patio11's podcast has been how to bootstrap the social conventions of "qualification or accreditation" in order to bring one's findings to a broader audience through journalistic enterprises.
Example: By the way if you get written about once by any paper ever, every time that you do a reach out to your favorite local assessor's officer, similar in the first paragraph you know, as you might have seen in blah, blah, blah we are the blah, blah, blah. Like, you don't have to be officially constituted or blessed initiative for anything.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/tax-the-dirt-...
100% the wrong take.
Why shouldn't reporting be traceable as far as is both practical, and safe for the people involved? "The 'I HATE BIBI' blog reported that the Israeli Prime Minister admitted he like dressing up like a kangaroo and hopping around his office" allows people more (potentially) useful information than merely reporting the PM is a furry.
There doesn't need to be a distinct line between "reporter" and "person reporting news". At least, not in general; some measure of impact (followers, audience size, etc) is practical and necessary for allowing people to attend White House press briefings, but that's another subject altogether.
You just described the perfect business model. A democratic society would be all over that. Who wouldn't pay a small sum to ensure that their employees are kept in line?
The only problem is that most people don't really want democracy. They want replaceable dictators who can do as they please during their stay as long as they step down after the allotted time. That's why said business struggles to find any customers.
Just read the CBS article linked by the author. As she mentions it always cited WaPo. And it now it properly cites her, too:
"The Rwanda arrangements were first reported by the Washington Post, which also cited work by independent journalist Marisa Kabas, who had uncovered the recent deportation from the U.S. of an Iraqi national to Rwanda."
I wouldn't say it properly cites her. It says that the Washington Post reported it first, which is nonsensical because in the very same sentence it says that Washington Post cited Kabas.
Links would be nice but it does not add enough value to be worth it, it actually costs too much and is easy to mess up. The ones who care will search for it, and the great majority can not be bothered. Source: internal statistic from a webbserver, with fact heavy articles.
There were some types of articles that needed source material. But these kinds not so much. I say this because I was involved in a project that worked on QA and maintaining links. We wasted money on that project.
and yes, it does take time.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't cite her work, it cites her.
In that system it was the standard to reference the paper that first reported the story.
People understandably have a hard time conceptualizing a highly dynamic and diverse news media landscape these days, but back when it was working like it was supposed to —- before Clinton-era reforms destroyed the laws protecting against consolidation -— it was not as simple to suppress a story because you had actual competition who would profit if you didn’t.
In other words, news wasn’t always so distinctly “entertainment” and the rules which govern news items in a landscape of less than a handful of media conglomerates are nothing like what used to govern in a less starkly dystopian version of the same.
EDIT: The “world wide web” also played a major role in kneecapping the funding sources of journalism. But failing outlets could not simply be swallowed by conglomerates without the aforementioned liberalization of media ownership.
You are free to link something about consolidation and how that is bad and only because of Clinton. I think this is a case where your local situation makes it hard to understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
Only by twisting the meaning of plagiarism to be defined as word-for-word.
Universities intensively train students to accept plagiarism so long as the copy is sufficiently reworded (and hopefully referenced). That sick and pointless system is ironically being exposed by student usage of LLMs.
If it's cited, it's usually by definition not plagiarism. Omitting the reference is passing the work off as your own, but providing that information is giving credit to where it is due.
Other institutions do hold more of a view that plagiarism is not possible with credit, but they will then consider the first mentioned paper as some other form of academic violation.
Even the narrow definition institutions don't view plagiarism purely as misrepresenting sources of ideas as yourself, or self-plagiarism would not be a thing. It ends up as something more like: passing off original ideas from another work as having originated in this current work.
This means that every single thing they write throughout their studies is some regurgitation of stuff they find elsewhere.
To avoid having a reference after every single sentence, we need to allow them to pretend that some of the stuff they read is common knowledge, and can thus be passed on as such, without reference.
But if someone else actually wrote the sentence, that would be plagiarism, hence writing it in your own words.
That of course doesn't mean that every instance of plagiarism is actually detected but the principles are there.
Auckland University https://learningessentials.auckland.ac.nz/writing-effectivel... says:
Direct quotes from other sources should only be used when absolutely necessary. It is best to paraphrase the quote or summarise the ideas when you use other people’s writing.
in your assignment, you need to ensure that there is enough difference in form between the original [words] and your own summarised version. This may be achieved by simplifying the ideas, as well as using a different sentence structure or sentence order to present those ideas.
Students are forced to do it here in NZ. I find it dishonest and pointless. Although generally I'm rather cynical about the value of university education here.
Searching for "paraphrase" comes up with other suggestions which demonstrate that students are searching for tools to do it for them. That isn't a recent development with LLMs.
So from what I see OP's claim is bunk: they want you to paraphrase, but doing that and citing your source isn't close to plagiarism.
Granted, teaching soft skills is hard but English teachers seem to have universally given up trying at all.
What’s the point of learning APA or MLA citation in high school and college but journalists don’t even bother with it? Insane to me.
Would address the complaints of the author _and_ help readers "trust but verify" the claims. Of course, some sources can’t be cited properly (ie, "source close to inner circle of the family") but at least we can discern whether "journalist" did their DD or copied the source from another journalist (or just pulled it out of their ass)
Every journalist will experience politicians and other powerful people wanting to tell them things "off the record". If they enter into those kind of agreements they are also betraying their profession and their audience.
Citation needed.
/ Former journalist
An anonymous source has the power to decide what information she lets the journalist have, and thus she controls the exchange. If the journalist does something to displease the source, then the journalist is cut off from the information.
A non-anonymous source can also practice intentionally-controlled, agenda-servicing, and pleasure-contingent disclosure.
I would estimate that most do.
And it will be a lot different for a named source to defend why she is making public some things and hiding other things.
Obviously they have an agenda, and want to advance it, so you need to figure out what that agenda is.
The next challenge is confirming that what they are telling you is true, to an appropriate level of confidence at least. Your professional ethics and your editor (and your legal team at larger publications) won't let you publish if you can't do that.
There are many ways you can do that - ask them to show you supporting evidence (usually documents) for example - but the most common is to try and find a different source who can confirm what they are telling you is true.
If you can get two sources - anonymous or not - to confirm the same detail and you're reasonably confident that those sources don't know about each other that's often good enough to get to something you can publish.
* As much as needed for the public to be able to verify.
That’s really not the point of journalism.
Not every story makes it to HN’s front page let alone every document. That kind of filtering for interesting info has real value as I don’t want to read every court document, press release, etc for relevant information.
My point was nobody comes back if it’s not generally interesting, that’s the baseline for the industry.
Still someone needed to find the underlying interesting bit of information before everyone else could add their own spin to it.
It's maddening when you then have to look for the paper using the article's few hints, but usually turns out that the paper's claims are far more careful/'smaller scale' than the news article's claims.
The next time you roll your eyes at the nonsense a White House press secretary says at a podium, remember that overseas it might just get reported as “The United States today announced…”
Because journalism doesn't use the same type of citation as an academic paper. It's an entirely different type of writing, for a different purpose, and a different audience.
If you want to know why journalists use anonymous sources, you could just Google it: https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous...
But I suppose complaining on the internet and making up false equivalencies is better for feeding one's righteous indignation.
It's when they do science reporting and say "a new study says blah" without linking to the study. Or they paraphrase a law proposal submitted by some lawmaker without linking to the original text. Or they repeat something they got from another news source without pointing it out. And even if they do, as the previous poster mention, it is subject to link rot. Frankly I think they do that because of the attention economy. Less eyeballs leaving their site.
If a journalist protects her sources then she can rely on a steady stream of information from them. If she divulges or betrays those sources, they could be reluctant to feed her further information. A source may be at political or legal risk for leaking to the press. The journalist therefore acknowledges those risks by protecting the identities of the sources.
It is the editorial board of the news outlet who is responsible for vetting sources and fact-checking. Another very important function of journalism is analysis. The editorial board and the reporters are collating various sources of information and providing their expertise by analyzing these facts, distilling them and presenting them to the public with a unified front.
It is true that an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia has different standards, and generally citations on an encyclopedia must be transparent and open. Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, not journalism, and they rely on that analysis and presentation by journalistic sources in order to present comprehensive information on a topic.
Now with all that being said, TFA seems to be about an independent journalist who is the victim of widespread plagiarism. That isn't nearly the same thing. If this journalist is getting ripped off by major news outlets, that is certainly a problem. Every journalist deserves a byline and credit for writing those stories. This journalist is not a source, in herself, but rather producing print-ready material that should not be ripped off, willy-nilly, by any outlet that thinks they can get away with it. If these allegations are true, then that is quite unjust.
Journalists are generally very good at attributing information to journalistic sources. That is, when they relay a claim someone has made, they state who made that claim - ideally by naming them, but if the person making the claim wishes to remain anonymous and the journalist chooses to respect that anonymity, by attributing the information to e.g. ‘sources familiar with the matter’; in such a case the journalist is asserting ‘I know this person is in a position to know this information, but I can’t tell you who that is’.
That’s all fine. And has nothing to do with APA or MLA citation standards though.
When it comes to citing reporting from other media, there’s definitely some sloppiness. In general the instinct is to use the same ‘journalistic sourcing’ standard as above, but caveat it with a sort of hearsay warning: ‘according to reporting in the Washington Post, sources familiar with the meeting said “…”’. And that’s where Marisa Kabas’s complaints lie: she wants to get that level of attribution which print journalists typically accord one another, and not be relegated to ‘an independent journalist’.
But when it comes to citations, the thing you’re most right about where journalists often do not cite their sources is in the form of linking to primary material they used in preparation of the report. Academic papers, government reports, court judgements, official transcripts of speeches… there’s a lot of primary documents it would be great to be able to get hold of if you want to dig further into a story.
To give teachers an objective criteria to grade with - in an otherwise subjective assignment.
She has been essential to keeping up to date with developments in the USA regarding Donald.
I subscribed to her newsletter last month.
It seems to me mainstream media doesn't really cut the mustard.
I get most of my information these days from specialist blogs, run by individuals.
But the bloggers are also great, but you need to do some more homework to decide if they are trustworthy - no editorial team, no journalistic ethical codes (if those actually exist), etc.
The other factor is that a lot of the conspiracy thinkers based their beliefs on blogs or the equivalent thereof (FB posts, youtube videos, etc), stuff you wouldn't see in the mainstream media - because it's nonsense, but the fact the mainstream media doesn't cover it actually draws the attention to the conspiracy bloggers.
But the complaint that bigger outlets didn't immediately follow her story by crediting her seems like an understandable situation from the other outlets' point of view. Who will take the heat if it's wrong? A popular outlet that runs with it will get shit on if it's wrong, even if it's citing the independent journalist as the source (in a way they won't if they were just following another popular outlet).
So these outlets need to either 1) verify it on their own, or 2) cite another popular outlet.
It'd still be courteous to name the original reporter, but until she's built enough clout and reputation to stand on her own as a credible source, it seems structural that this will keep happening.
Quote: This is very much a "the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters" moment, but you are weathering it as well as anyone I've seen. (Commenter L.O.)
It's different than a journalist doing work where their identity could be problematic.