What if Quality Journalism Isn't?
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baekdal.com
We, the people formerly known as the audience recognize this. We can tell when we are being lied to. We can tell when the truth is being shaded to benefit the beneficiaries of the status quo.
If you hand us shit and call it ice cream we still aren't going to like it, on facebook or anywhere else. We know that our vaunted 'free press' is a bought and paid for lie. We know that much of what passes for journalism is a ham-handed attempt to manufacture social proof for the acceptance of the current order of things.
Burn it down. All the way down. We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better...
Well, it's certainly that, too. But journalism can also be about uncovering truths that hardly anyone knows about, or telling stories that help us understand the world.
> We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better...
You're probably being sarcastic, but even if word of mouth never passed straight out lies and total myths, journalism isn't just about reporting facts, but putting them in perspective. Perspective is necessary because there are simply too many facts for you to digest. A professional journalist hopefully keeps track of all pertinent facts of her beat, and reports the most important stories in context.
Word of mouth can, at most, be a data collection mechanism. In fact, word of mouth is one of the inputs a journalist works with; it certainly can't substitute the final product.
This is a version of a quotation, ""Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." It is usually attributed to George Orwell, but it may be older: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Orwell#Attribution....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/edward-snowden-nyti...
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/glenn-greenwald-michae...
Funny how their lawyers jumped on Nadine Dories when she suggested that they published the expenses scandal to derail the cross party alliance on shutting down the tax havens in the channel islands.
P.S. No, wait, I can't really tell, if you are being sarcastic or not, so sorry if you are.
Ok, so maybe someone would care to explain, how the belief, that encrypted, anonymous and unaccountable news sources would be any better, than journalistic outlets whose profits depend on their reputation; how that belief is not infantile?
Why is it not possible, that groups opposed to transparency, like for example certain governmental organizations, would be able to join in the fun and flood the "encrypted, word of mouth, anonymous" space with their own opinions and propaganda?
And I'm not 19 and haven't been for quite some time.
I basically treat HN the way Jenn Schiffer treats Medium, as a venue for satirical performance art.
Also it would ignore the news cycle.
It seems that people don't want a factual news source. Especially not for celebrity coverage. It's the same reason that people flock to talk radio or fringe conspiracy sites: the truth is boring and/or depressing. It's the humor sites that come closest to the bone (the Onion, the Daily Mash etc).
Ding ding ding! What we call news is mostly consumed for entertainment and identity-reenforcement/social currency, so that's what the news business serves up. It's made out of real-world events and facts, but the actual end product is to reality as "frozen dairy product" is to ice cream.
Obviously this is easier said than done :)
To succeed as a syndication platform in this, methinks you either need to be very good at satisfying yourself with a fickle audience looking for subpar content while making numbers work in your favor, or syndicate the rock stars in razor focused channels (The Magazine or Flipboard) that your quality audience will value enough to stay around.
Whether traditional newspapers will survive this transition any more than music publishers is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath for most of them -- quality is simply too low.
the future of actual journalism is probably something like Pierre Omidyar's new venture - Benevolent billionaires supporting actual investigative journalism because it provides some public good, and not expecting it to be profitable on a scale like big media houses such as the New York Times are expected to work.
Article such as "Can you <insert phrase> and still call yourself a feminist (immediate bingo if there reference is to sex/porn)" and "Twerking - everything you need to know" have begun to appear[1]
I am not sure if a Trust, or philanthropic entity solves the problem while we still refer to DailyMail or HuffPo as a 'news site'. 'Trash aggregator' would be more appropriate.
[1] Made up titles.
And then along came the internet, the king of all disintermediators. First local print news lost its readership and ad revenue, and many thought it was a matter of media, printed matter vs digital matter. Then over many years a lot of newspapers shut down, while others attempted to modernize and enter the digital age. And now we're at a stage where the truth is harder to hide from. The fact is that most journalism just isn't very good, and never has been. But when it was the only thing available it was better than nothing so it was consumed regardless.
Now the regurgitation of wire reports, simple duplicate coverage of a story, and uncritical passing on of news releases from 3rd parties holds no value. Those are things that rely on distribution, and in the internet age that is trivial. This puts into sharper focus the kernel of original, serious reporting that journalist do. And it turns out they have historically done very, very little, and even less of it of any serious value.
The problem isn't that print journalism uses an outdated media, the problem is that the vast majority of what used to pass for journalism is now largely redundant. And most traditional news organizations still don't realize this or understand that the news organizations which will be able to survive in the 21st century will be very, very different from those of the past, and not just old organizations with a few modernizations bolted on. That's a tough pill to swallow because it means both that most journalists have quite frankly not been doing worthwhile work, it also means that there is no place for the vast majority of traditional journalism jobs. People within the industry naturally flinch away from such hard truths, but it won't stop them from being true.
It's hard to measure engagement on a news site when someone doesn't "like" and "share" the story because they don't want to share it with their social circles. If only there was a site that kept track of personal bookmarks.
I remember reading a science article in Ars for the first time, and thinking "wow, this doesn't suck. I thought all articles about science sucked." There was even a link to the paper at the bottom! Ryan Paul wrote articles about programming and open source, and they were nuanced, coherent, and made sense. He could even program!
Still, this is all nerd shit, right? Real people don't care. Vox seems to be addressing this in other fields- you read an article about a speech (http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full-speec... chosen by fair dice roll), the same article every other two-bit news outlet hammered together in 45 minutes. Then you go down to the bottom of the page, and you've got a bunch of explanations of every related thing. What, why, more details, links to rebuttals.
Still, politics is just nerd shit for innumerate white people. Real people don't care, right? Grantland writes sports articles with heat maps, diagrams, tactical explanations, as well as the usual platitudes about desire, and perfunctory examinations of the politics of sport.
Quality is an issue, and it's certainly becoming more pressing. As to whether or not people who are not insiders are interested in the opinions of subject matter experts over professional summarizers, we'll see. Not everyone wants to know more about everything, but everyone wants to know more about something sometimes.
But this is where I think the article falls short. I think if someone is interested in the wider world they will figure out how to get what they want from the newspapers of today. Some news agencies will be bad at it, and some will be good. That's just the nature of diversity.
But, to say that a small percentage of online news is relevant to me is only true if I don't go looking for the parts that interest me. This was never true, not even for the old dead-tree news.
Whilst I think things can be done to make digital news more engaging, I think the real 'problem' is to be found elsewhere in the ever sub-dividing space of our 'free' time.
I like the article. It has weaknesses, but it makes some good points.
The bigger issue - to what extent should the media be about political empowerment - is another question.
I'd suggest current branding/advertising strategies are entirely about disempowerment, because they train consumers to think and act passively.
When you believe that politics is about voting for Product A vs Product B, which is almost like a Facebook like only it lasts a little longer, then you've already lost all your political power.
Traditional journalism was sometimes able to hold power to account. We're not going to that from clickbait intent/interest marketing. Can anyone imagine Buzzfeed breaking the next Pentagon Papers?
So who's going to hold power to account now? And how?
There were a lot of interesting points in this post, but they don't seem to add up to a coherent argument.
Neither is war propaganda. Or kowtowing to the government on the Snowden documents. The NYT is the shiniest outlet for establishment "news." At a time when the establishment is so rotten, even the NYT can't make it smell nice.
I'm guessing the future will be individual journalists/columnists marketing themselves directly via aggregators.
The entire article is about how that's not true, but the conclusion was that's true and the way to fix it is for NYT to make a Flipgboard clone. That's actually a great idea, and maybe they already do that I don't know. I use HN to aggregate my news.
Of course you can. In fact, that's the normal order of things, because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist. If this logic were correct then crack is the "best" product in the world. Everyone who tries it wants more, so much so that it's physically hard to stop.
The sad truth is that quality and popularity rarely intersect, especially when it comes to intellectual "goods" or art. In fact, producing the best quality in those fields is almost a certain assurance of failure. I would say, "you can't be the world's best and succeed at the same time".
This is also why advertising is failing for newspapers. In a digital world where intent is paramount for advertisers, it's far more valuable to target your advertisers for when people are looking for something specifically, rather than the random 'I don't know what I'm going to get' that we see from the newspapers.
Advertising is failing for newspapers because the revenue it generates is lower than the cost of production, and the revenues are low because of competition with sites that have low production costs.
On social channels, we define what we are interested in by following people and brands that match what we care about.
Yes, and unfortunately quality newspapers and magazines are directed at people with broad horizons and open minds that trust the editors' choices. At people who think, "if the NY Times thinks it's newsworthy then I'd better read it". That actually used to work once.
Following The New York Times on Twitter is just like paging through a print newspaper. Each tweet is about something completely unrelated to the tweets before it. And this is the opposite of why people usually follow people and brands online.
Yes because people are crack addicts. That's what works in the market, but that's not necessarily what's "good" for us.
Today, the newspapers' editorial focus is to create random packages of news.
Yes, well unfortunately that's what the world is. A random package of events.
They are all over the place, and as such there is nothing that we as viewers can connect with. There is no momentum, passion, or reason for watching any of these videos.
With that I actually agree. Of course, if they were to create the journalism they really wish to, they'd fail even harder, but that's another matter.
I am glad to read an article like the original post, about how the incentives of the world we live in distort the effects of the things we consume. I am distressed to read top comments like yours, which lazily declare that the world sucks because you're too smart. Even if you were right, and you're not, you wouldn't change anything.
For instance, your comment about '"intellectual goods" like art' is completely off the mark. Having dabbled in both music and writing, I have found that there's a huge difference in attitude between your stereotypical "starving artists" and people who produced art and music that the world actually liked, if only a little bit beyond their circle of friends.
Generally, the people who ranted the most about popular art were people who least understood how to craft music or writing that people wanted to read. This sort can often be found roaming university halls and earning degrees making art nobody actually wants. On the other hand, the guys who played at bars, or published stories in small magazines, almost universally had respect for the extraordinary amounts of talent in even the "lowest" books and music, even if they strongly disagreed with the value of the art. They also had very sharp analytical and critical minds when it came to the art in question.
Because I was, for four years, a regular long form writer, and later a bi-weekly columnist, in the most prestigious weekly magazine supplement in my own small country, I can actually provide some first hand perspective. The newspaper the magazine belonged to was the NYT of my country, and "enjoyed" a readership of just a little over 100,000. That isn't enough to keep the paper going (it's still around, but it's uncertain for how long).
Obviously everything is on a spectrum. While I expressed myself in black and white terms in my first comment, my point is that there is little correlation between quality and success, and I stand behind it. The fact that some quality writers and musicians achieve some level of success -- some of them enjoy quite a great deal of it -- is not enough to change the overall picture. A newspaper isn't an individual writer or artists. It's a big business with very high costs. Modest success enjoyed by a writer is total failure for a newspaper, because a newspaper needs some specific measure of financial success in order to break even. For a newspaper, the outcome is often binary: live or die. It can't generate a side income like an artist could.
As to the last paragraph of your comment: I agree, but that has little bearing on the matter at hand. I love popular art, and I enjoy popular news outlets (like Gawker) immensely. But I wasn't saying that the people creating popular art aren't smart or talented. I was merely questioning whether highbrow art or journalism is economically viable. As far as art goes, we know the answer: it isn't. Pretty much every art museum in the world and every opera troupe is state supported. This may or may not be the case for journalism as the NYT practices it.
As a matter of fact, I'm not even lamenting the state of affairs. I was simply reeling against the assumption that popularity is any sign of quality; that's all.
To add a little more information about the paper business -- to those interested -- I'll explain that a newspaper survives by cross-subsidizing reporters. You maintain a bureau in France and one in Iraq. When there's something interesting going on in Iraq, people buy the paper to read about that. When something happens in Europe, people buy it for that. But the cost of the paper stays the same, and it's not a price anyone would pay for a single article. Once you unbundle the package and allow people to read (and generate revenue) for a single article, the entire business model becomes unsustainable. You simply can't pay for the guy in France with the little money generated by the guy in Baghdad. Saying something like "you should produce more interesting content" misses the whole point of how a newspaper works. You can produce all the interesting "content" in the world, but you still won't know what's going on in Europe or Iraq. You can't have "unbundled" beat reporting (although you can have unbundled, occasional, long-form magazine assignments), because maintaining eyes and ears somewhere requires a constant cost whether or not there are good stories there at the moment.
I don't understand how a paper that seems to have fired all its researchers and fact checkers can be considered winning at journalism. They continually cannot get the senators from certain states (North & South Dakota) and print unverified opinion as fact.
It is a bit simpler than that though. The NYT is no better than Fox News or MSNBC in its partnership. People don't like to continually read a paper that insults their beliefs in the editorial pages when I can just go to Yahoo and see what's going on.
The low for me was when a ND Senator (whom the identified as coming from South Dakota) has to set them straight on how a hunt in a National Park will save a lot of elk (kill a few vs. starvation), I realized they have no idea how nature or the national parks work and were unwilling to find people who did.
Yahoo is an aggregator for normal news and does have quite a bit of original content in selected verticals. I will say they point to local papers that tend to get it right. I don't see any advantage to the "putting it in context" when it is such a prejudice and not-very-well-facted-check lens. The NYT (like CNN) is riding on an old reputation.
CNN asked if a black hole could be responsible for a missing airline flight.
1) at night is a whole different story - everyone has pundits everywhere
How do Americans follow local news?
Local newspapers still dominate the local news field.
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