Is journalism dying?

this has never happened :(

Carl Hiaasen writes interestingly about j'lists. I think in the post-Watergate Era, journalist got really full of themselves, thought they were the mob ("hey look, we took down the president, nobody fucks with us") and wanked themselves into Geraldo.

Journalism is dying but diaryism is on the rise.

That doesn't necessarily mean a movie will be made. When Janet Cooke was busted for inventing a story and had to give back her Pulitzer, there was talk of a movie, but it was never filmed.

There was a time when journalists didn't pretend to be pure, because (frankly) the thought hadn't yet occurred to them. With the rise of the modern public relations agent in the 1920s and fascism in the 1930s journalists eventually learned modern propaganda techniques. It was only a matter of time before they applied the same techniques to improve their own image from that of sleazy purveyors of scandal to guardians of the public's sacred "right to know".

It worked, didn't it?

all i'm saying is we need a connie chung biopic real fucking soon. for the kids.

i've got an idea for a connie chung title but it would rightly get me booted from ilm.

That's what my friend Lukas does. He hates it.

Okay Tracer, I am going to drive into Baltimore this weekend and beat up heroin dealers with my shining teeth, blazing feet, and lightning wit. You have to come up with a crazy name for me, though.

I'm betting 4-1 that I have actually been impervious to bullets all along. Who's in?

-- Aaron W (aaro...), May 29th, 2003.

the corruption and cronyism rampant at 95% of alt-weeklies is depressing

-- James Blount (littlejohnnyjewe...), May 29th, 2003.

not nearly as depressing as the awful writing though

-- James Blount (littlejohnnyjewe...), May 29th, 2003.

Couldn't agree more, James.

-- Aaron W (aaro...), May 29th, 2003.

ooh, ooh, count me in on all of this too. and let's not forget how fucking long it takes them to mail cheques. the assholes.

But bitching about them feels counter-productive. People who are frustrated should get together and do their own newspaper.

Meanwhile The WaPo pulled back at the last minute from allowing its publishers and newsroom to mingle with lobbysits.

our wonderful local rag, aka that nasty bunch of hypocrites: http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Town-website-publisher-s-porn-business/article-1883453-detail/article.html

http://i.imgur.com/B5ez7.jpg

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/216382_1923770406620_1012896840_32277949_7741349_n.jpg

So the Cape Cod newspaper has its very own Stephen Glass:

There is an implied contract between a newspaper and its readers. The paper prints the truth. Readers believe that it's true.

It's not always so simple, of course. There are nuances in how a story is presented, what words are used to describe the action. Papers have personalities, and no two are exactly alike, but at the end of the day, facts are facts. And a good newspaper holds nothing more sacred than its role to tell the truth. Always. As fully and as fairly as possible.

This is our guiding principle, so it is with heavy heart that we tell you the Cape Cod Times has broken that trust. An internal review has found that one of our reporters wrote dozens of stories that included one or more sources who do not exist.

The reporter was Karen Jeffrey, 59, a writer for the Cape Cod Times since 1981. In an audit of her work, Times editors have been unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically.

On Tuesday, Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names. She no longer works for the Cape Cod Times.

We were able to verify sourcing in many stories written by Jeffrey, mostly police and court news, political stories, and recently a series on returning war veterans. The stories with suspect sourcing were typically lighter fare – a story on young voters, a story on getting ready for a hurricane, a story on the Red Sox home opener – where some or all of the people quoted cannot be located.

In 2011, for example, a story on the Fourth of July parade in Cotuit featured Johnson Coggins, 88, “the patriarch of the family” and a longtime Cotuit summer resident. No one by that name can be found using public-records searches and there is no Coggins in the town of Barnstable's assessor's database. We were unable to locate five other people featured in that story.

In a 2006 story on the Falmouth Road Race, we were unable to find five individuals, including Daniel Fortes of San Diego, a marathon runner who, Jeffrey wrote, has run the Boston Marathon and the Falmouth race but was sidelined with an injury that year. Fortes could not be found using public records and no one with that name had competed in the Falmouth race or the Boston Marathon for the five years leading up to the story, according to the races' websites.

Times editors reviewed Jeffrey's stories using a variety of search techniques, including a public-records database tool called Accurint, searches of voter rolls and town assessor's records, a review of Facebook profiles and attempted phone calls in an effort to find the sources.

1 Herald Plaza is gone.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/nyt_hasnt_been_hit_that_hard.php

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/27/journalism-and-astroturfing/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-note-on-sponsors

"You probably think of us as big innovators on the editorial side."

Ha.

former alt-weekly editor, now in the academic world, makes hipster plea to rich folks to buy alt-weeklies

Because if the John Henrys and the Jeff Bezoses can pick up papers for a song, it's a song popular when they had more hair and it was on the "radio." Alt-weeklies, however, can be yours for the cost of a download by a band you've never heard of, but one you will totes YouTube after reading that review by an alt's music writer who wears a knit cap, always, even in summer. Because she knows what she's talking about, and she's talking about it in a medium that continues to be relevant — and even sometimes makes money.

What I'm saying is that alt-weeklies are still a darn good value in today's media market. And here's why:

No. 1: They're cheap! So cheap, even broke-ish dailies are plunking down for them! Baltimore City Paper just got eaten by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. The price? Undisclosed, but it couldn’t be much. The underpaid City Paper staff had concocted a scheme before the sale to pool money and buy the thing outright. And let's visit Chicago, shall we? The Sun-Times bought the Chicago Reader in 2012 for about $3 million, according to sources "close to the deal." Consider that's half a million less than a group of eight people paid on eBay that year to have lunch at a steakhouse with Warren Buffet. So instead of a side of creamed spinach (and a few stilted selfies) you could own an institution that's been kicking tail since 1972

http://www.altweeklies.com/aan/an-open-letter-to-the-guy-who-owns-snapchat-and-other-hip-wealthy-people/Article?oid=7596431

INCREDIBLE STORY

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Squirrel_goes_nuts_as_Maine_teen_takes__selfie_.html

http://m.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/delauter-to-the-news-post-don-t-use-my-name/article_e965025f-6c48-5a02-b162-600dfd2b5495.html?mode=jqm

http://jimromenesko.com/2015/01/06/start-suing-mr-councilman/

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/kirby-delauter-kirby-delauter-kirby-delauter/article_da85d6f4-fa3c-524f-bbf6-8e5ddc0d1c0a.html

Just saw this. Was wondering if he was connected to the sovereign citizen movement. And if not, could he be pushed if someone were to send him a few youtubes?

Sovereign Citizen types claim the right not to have their names spoken/published? Damn, those people are crazier than I thought.

Well, they have weird and tricky ownership procedures around them anyway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

good vice diss

i've noticed that i have a new anxiety, just before i am about to post something somewhere that links to a news story or anything dated/dateable, i think to double check to make sure it really is 'now' and not like, four days old

i saw that the guardian has started putting, in addition to the dateline, notices at the tops of stories: 'this article is 2 years old' etc

lol The New Day closes before we even bother to take the piss

Upbeat, optimistic approach

Don't remember even noticing this on sale. Business model seems to have been, a free paper, but costing money?

amazed that their innovative pitch of 'A brand new UK National Paper for women and men' somehow failed to grab the attention of readers

it didn't have a political stance

or readers

rip the new day heaven needed a... whatever you were

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeo1V-47BBw

these guys did the pied piper table ad, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdkz9y8LRDI

when she says "that's the fun part" a little part of her dies

that tronc recruitment video would make me run away screaming, rather than be put through a funnel and optimized.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/google-funds-press-association-robot-reporter-project-which-will-provide-30000-local-media-stories-a-month/

"The Press Assocation has been awarded €706,000 by Google to develop a robot reporting project which will see computers write 30,000 stories a month for local media."

"The only other recent movie I can think of that deals with journalism is Spiderman, which certainly doesn't portray it positively." -- original post

Journalism is dying but diaryism is on the rise.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, May 29, 2003 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

* spooky music *

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand)

i answer all phones ever with an exasperated "STUdio"

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, May 29, 2003

Maybe the problem is that journalists don't have anyone cool like Spiderman to cover. We need more superheroes!

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, May 29, 2003

Are you accusing me of killing journalism with my glib one-liners? I don't think I deserve that but they are symptomatic of the disease, tbh

man google still can't tell me whether local businesses have changed holiday hours, how will they handle this

a robot reporting project which will see computers write 30,000 stories a month for local media

the news has been more and more about reposting tweets and crap it finds on the internet. seems like an area where bots will really excel.

Tracer, really I was celebrating the unexpected spirit and quality of ilx c.2003, exemplified by you. :D

clickbait necessary to survive in today's media failed environment

Ha! Thank you pf :)

It seems like Facebook is causing many people who didn't read news before to be forced now to read the shittest news sources ever - and they vote

https://fashionista.com/.amp/2017/08/magazine-interview-format-trend

On Thursday, Harper's Bazaar released the cover story for its September issue, featuring an interview with cover star The Weeknd that was conducted entirely via email. It was a move Rihanna also pulled in The Fader for their May/June issue, with the added stipulation that only five questions could be sent to her. And earlier this year, Paris Jackson was the cover star for not one, but two publications (Teen Vogue and Vogue Australia) where the accompanying interview happened over text. Like, on a phone.

So what exactly is going on here? Is this about magazines being too short-staffed and tight-budgeted to send a writer to the mansions or yachts on which their cover stars are dallying? Is it about celebrities attempting to keep more of their private lives private without missing out on press opportunities? Are publicists and managers wanting to keep a tighter control on what their star clients say to the media and how it's construed?

There's evidence supporting all of the above. It hardly takes sleuthing at this point to uncover the fact that print media is bleeding money. And The Weeknd's interview gave clues about the reasoning behind his email-only mandate: He cited annoying questions about his hair, his desire to maintain a sense of mystery and the claim that "the only thing the world demands of me is music."

on the flip side, this would lead to an end of a) the writer describing what the celebrity ordered for lunch at the upscale hotel where they're conducting the interview (RIP truffle fry-gate) and b) male writers describing how hot their female interviewees are (RIP Neil Strauss-on-Jewel).

Or just make the latter worse.

"I had regularly felt a stirring during my obsessive review of her selfies, and I admit when I was typing out the email questions, I only used one hand."

At our student newspaper we don't allow email interviews with administrators unless the editor in chief okays it, for obvious reasons, I think. I sympathize with The Weeknd's attitude if he means it. But he and the reporter can discuss the scope of the interview before it happens and come to an understanding (i.e. no questions about truffle fries, hair, etc).

you interview in person partly to catch their lies. but usually, who cares if celebrities lie?

i think you answered your own question, maura - seems like this is the natural endpoint of publicists' powers to demand concessions increasing as print media's influence wanes

i'd imagine too that celebs are now so used to communicating with their audiences directly through social media that a significant proportion of them view interviews as anachronistic - in that case why not stick to communicating with journalists using text or email if that's what you're comfortable doing, and your publicist can swing it?

oh that was cut and pasted from the link, sorry. but yeah, i think that's a big part of it

"access" is a trap

risk vs reward of an interview with harper's bazaar vs self managed instagram account not looking so hot these days

Would rather read an essay about The Weeknd (especially if it was called "Why The Weeknd Sucks") than an interview with his boring ass anyway. I mean, that's the other thing - the three people cited in the above blog entry (Ironclad Journalism Rule: Three Is A Trend) have always seemed like paralyzingly boring human beings whose opinions should mean basically nothing to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

I thought we'd already decided all the interviews should be of Noel Gallagher.

imagine writing this story. how you'd feel about yourself.

http://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/839264/bbc-weather-bbc-breakfast-weather-report-Carol-Kirkwood-rain-shocks

a recap of a weather report followed by some cut-and-pasted twitter comments

what the actual fuck

I look forward to spending my twilight years clicking through contentless links in a hypnagogic state

by that measure i'm already in my twilight years tbh

I can't stand Carol Kirkwood, I hate how she says Englind, Scotlind. There's a news story for you.

This was on the sidebar and same sorta things except there is no cut and paste of Rachel doing letters or numbers.

http://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/833313/Rachel-Riley-Countdown-wardrobe-malfunction-dress-fruit-pastille-lolly-Twitter-fans-Channe

they literally publish one of those Carol Kirkwood stories every few days, see also "Carol Kirkwood wraps sensational curves in gorgeous green jacket for forecast" from 8th August, "Carol Kirkwood showcases ample bust in figure-hugging purple frock" from 7th August, "Carol Kirkwood thrills as she teases cleavage in low-cut navy frock" from 24th July, "Carol Kirkwood distracts viewers as she squeezes into plunging red dress" from 21st July, "Carol Kirkwood flashes PLENTY of cleavage in plunging jumpsuit as she takes to the skies" from 17th July, etc

it seems like the task of writing them is divided between several journalists rather than having one dedicated Carol-Kirkwood-perving correspondent, probably better for morale: imagine writing this story. how you'd feel about yourself.

https://digiday.com/media/facebooks-ad-breaks-are-not-bringing-in-a-lot-of-money-for-publishers/

Five publishers participating in Facebook’s mid-roll ads test, which began in March, said the product isn’t generating much money. One publisher said its Facebook-monetized videos had an average CPM of 15 cents. A second publisher, which calculated ad rates based on video views that lasted long enough to reach the ad break, said the average CPM for its mid-rolls is 75 cents. (Facebook’s mid-roll ads don’t show up inside videos in the first 20 seconds, which means many three-second video views aren’t “monetized views.”)

A third publisher made roughly $500 from more than 20 million total video views on that page in September.* (This publisher had not calculated its CPM, as its total video view count includes videos that were not monetized by Facebook mid-rolls.) A fourth publisher confirmed revenue was low without giving specifics. (A fifth publisher, when asked about its Facebook mid-roll CPMs, responded by texting lyrics to Flo Rida’s “Low.”)

am i the only person who's loath to click on any links anymore because the prospect of having my music drowned out by some annoying ad is too high

the secondmost obvious question is "what does facebook have to do with journalism?"

everything tbh

then we have a definitive answer to the question in the thread's title: no, it isn't dying. it would have to be alive to be dying.

aimless are you asking that question sincerely or being snide? because facebook and google (and to a lesser extent twitter and other platforms) have completely transformed the way news is disseminated and by extension the priorities of publishers

Like 3/4 of the world's population, I am not on fb and therefore never look at fb. Personally, I have no interest in ever changing this state of affairs. Consequently, fb has not transformed how news reaches me, unless it is solely responsible for the slow strangulation of the channels I still rely upon.

ftr, unlike fb, the Reagan administration's deregulation of broadcast media did completely transform the way news was disseminated to me; I stopped watching television news broadcasts. fb is slightly different, in that I never started looking at it to begin with.

Is journalism dying (for ILX poster Aimless, specifically)

is twitter dying?

okay well even though you're above fb, the rise of platforms has changed things for you on the supply sid

side

Like 3/4 of the world's population, I am not on fb

we call these ppl the 'movers + shakers'

I have no idea if I am above fb, but I am certainly outside it.

xp the way priorities have shifted in newsrooms is undeniable and it reverberates throughout publications. i don't think it's a good thing at all - it's extremely short sighted in the way it's practiced now especially - but it's happening.

anyway,

In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”

Google and Facebook blamed algorithm errors for these.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/business/las-vegas-shooting-fake-news.html

okay well even though you're above fb, the rise of platforms has changed things for you on the supply side

― maura, Tuesday, October 3, 2017 1:49 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

we call these ppl the 'movers + shakers'

hate to break it to you, but being on fb does not give you superpowers, or enhanced powers, or any kind of power at all that a body could notice, except the power to update your timeline or whatever it is fb people do.

Old Man Condescends At Cloud Computing

It really worries me that no-one at Facebook has had a moment of realization that "hey, maybe we should hire people to sift through these headlines/links for accuracy again."

lol Aimless are u really this thick bro?

Like, are they really and truly saving that much money in the long run?

before i can answer your carefully crafted question, you need to clarify how thick is "this thick"?

Raymond they got spooked by the right-wing media machine and its propensity for calling facts that aren't in line with their nihilistic death-cult ideologies "biased."

Paging Jethro Tull to thread

Erm, hate to wade in here but:

1. Not being on FB yourself doesn't mean that it doesn't affect what type and quality of information you take in. Ditto for TV news.

For comparison, NYT and WaPo have shaped what information people get even if they've never sauntered out to find either of those particular publications on their doorstep.

I hear there are even people who don't spend very much time on the internet. And yet what information they get is still, strangely, shaped by online culture in some ways. Mind. Blown.

2. If old-skool media outlets can barely fact-check anymore (and they pretty much can't), how on earth can we expect social-media sites to do a better job (working with exponentially more throughput, and vastly fewer staff)?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was responding to the assertion that facebook had "everything" to do with how news is disseminated. The assertion under consideration was not that fb was a influence, but that its influence was "everything".

um:

the secondmost obvious question is "what does facebook have to do with journalism?"

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, October 3, 2017 5:01 PM (one hour ago)

right. Maura's answer was: "everything tbh"

So your question was responding to the answer?

No, my question was a question. It was not obvious to me why this thread was chosen to post an excerpt from an article about "Facebook's mid-roll ads" and the poster's annoyance at having music interrupted by them. I can see now that my question was too inspecific, but it was based in genuine ignorance of facebook's interface and how users tend to use it, especially in that the article seemed to have little or nothing to do with journalism or its death.

The answer to my question was unenlightening, even though I am sure it seemed a beacon of truth to the person who offered it. Chalk it up to mutual incomprehension, based on living in somewhat different online cultures, but being called "thick" seems a bit much.

that was tracer's answer

lol

am i dying

I apologize for misattributing that answer to you, maura. When there's something of a pile-on in progress, one gets in a hurry to respond before there's a backlog of new replies.

I just wanted to make a Simpsons reference before the moment passed

Aimless otm

here have some links that outline how facebook and other platforms have refocused publishers' priorities as they move away from print and/or see print as a supplemental focus to the work they do online. i don't feel like i have to apologize for posting the above graf (which should have been funny for its use of flo rida anyway) or for explaining things in a way that you view as "unenlightening," but i'm kind of testy today. note that some of these links are two years old and some of them use google's amp (accelerated mobile pages) program, which is also influencing how stories get disseminated.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/digiday.com/media/facebooks-growing-influence-news-consumption-5-charts/amp/

http://fortune.com/2016/05/12/facebook-and-the-news/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.recode.net/platform/amp/2016/5/11/11656312/facebook-video-news-feed

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/facebooks-role-in-trumps-win-is-clear-no-matter-what-mark-zuckerberg-says/2017/09/07/b5006c1c-93c7-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html?utm_term=.ea4d3b7fcd6d

https://www.theawl.com/2015/07/platform-creep/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/business/sponsored-content-takes-larger-role-in-media-companies.html

About 95% of the links to stories I used to see on my FB feed dried up awhile back. Either an algorithm change or Ned taking a social media break.

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances, and (most importantly) advertisers of wildly varying repute, and imagine the splatter pattern of those stories being determined by an opaque algorithm created by a shadowy entity that has to constantly please wall street. on top of that imagine the statistics that show which stories do and don't get read being transmogrified into assignment editors for publications across the board. that's pretty much the situation we have here

hang on i think i figured out how to adapt the video game PAPERBOY for the big screen in that post

Imagine if Bethesda remade Paperboy

xpost... dammit

I was too slow

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hycrI1JV-_Q/hqdefault.jpg

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances, and (most importantly) advertisers of wildly varying repute, and imagine the splatter pattern of those stories being determined by an opaque algorithm created by a shadowy entity that has to constantly please wall street. on top of that imagine the statistics that show which stories do and don't get read being transmogrified into assignment editors for publications across the board. that's pretty much the situation we have here

― maura, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:42 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hang on i think i figured out how to adapt the video game PAPERBOY for the big screen in that post

― maura, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:43 (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Two booming posts, ty

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances

Well, rn the key is that stories are being thrown at me by MY friends, cousins, vague acquaintances etc. Which is fine; it's not a terrible replacement for having H.L. Mencken or Harold Ross or Ben Bradlee or whoever decide what stories are going to get thrown at me.

A different batch of stories is being thrown at and by the friends, cousins, vague acquaintances of othertribers - Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Steve Bannon. That's the downside of socialized gamified crowdsourced information-peddling.

and groups. don't forget groups! which were key to the russian disinfo campaigns. they even co-opted a 'pictures of cute dogs' group :(

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/technology/facebook-russia-ads-.html

There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads. ...

The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure. But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.

that tactic isn't all that dissimilar from the ones used by those twitter accounts that boost their follow counts by "parodying" people like frank ocean and kanye west then turn into ads for sneakers or whatever

Yo I heard paperboy died
Did he?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgRlY6r331g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja8uu2h113k

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances, and (most importantly) advertisers of wildly varying repute, and imagine the splatter pattern of those stories being determined by an opaque algorithm created by a shadowy entity that has to constantly please wall street. on top of that imagine the statistics that show which stories do and don't get read being transmogrified into assignment editors for publications across the board. that's pretty much the situation we have here

― maura, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:42 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hang on i think i figured out how to adapt the video game PAPERBOY for the big screen in that post

― maura, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:43 (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Two booming posts, ty

― passé aggresif (darraghmac), Tuesday, October 3, 2017 7:56 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/08/media/cnn-correction-email-story/index.html

is it standard practice to report the contents of an email that the reporter him/herself has not seen? particularly when the sourcing is anonymous?

it is standard practice among the gullible, the negligent, and the unscrupulous.

So it took 15 years from the start of this thread, but...

"America's local news has reached its death spiral phase."

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/new-york-daily-news.php

Tronc's dumpster fire management style is not emblematic

Seattle’s local papers are a single daily owned and editorialized by a rich Republican fuckstick I refuse to give any money to, an alt biweekly that has laid off all but one actual news reporter but has room for Dan Savage, and a non-alternative weekly that has refocused its coverage on…the suburbs or something. Fuck all of them, I’m supporting my neighborhood blogger on Patreon.

Anyway nobody seems to believe in the importance of journalists more than journalists. But The News has never stopped being one of the many machines that turns anger and anxiety into money.

Like how much honestly happens on a given day that I have to know about the next day, there’s nothing to be done about any of it.

Not all journalism is daily journalism. Reportage and think-pieces in monthly or quarterly magazines is journalism, too. For democracy to work, people have to have some kind of trusted source for what is happening beyond their front door.

So to follow up on my last thread revive, a friend and I have both quit our jobs to start this thing -- compassknox.com -- to cover gubmint, politics and business in our fine city. We have low overhead and we're doing subscription only, so we figure we only need a couple of thousand subscribers to be sustainable. (In a metro area of well over half a million people.) Reaction from our first week of offering subscriptions has been good -- especially because we aren't even publishing til September, so right now people are just signing up because they know us or like the idea. Here's hoping.

Oh, here's a clickable link: https://compassknox.com/

Best wishes~ hope you can pay the bills ASAP

You’re probably the one who looks like an ilx user right

yeah that other guy looks like one of those guys with money or one of those guys who knows people with money, smart move getting hooked up with him

that's great tipsy, best of luck

I enjoyed the "son of" bio openers

omfg the dichotomy of your accents in the video

I fully support this but I no longer live in Knoxville

Thanks all! Yeah, I love the mix of accents too. We gotta have at least one real East Tennessean.

best of luck tipsy! :)

Great initiative tipsy, hope you rack up the subscribers soon!

go tipsy go!! local news has been absolutely decimated by decades of bad corporate policy (fuck gannett forever) and recent trends toward focusing only on the phony metric known as "trending"

i was fucking astonished at how bad local tv news is now in Knoxville. WBIR literally just runs packages from random Gannett affiliates. if it's vaguely near Knoxville that's a bonus but it totally doesn't have to be. craft beer festival in, i dunno, california? WBIR has you covered! the only actual local news they do on the reg is sports and weather. the last 10 minutes of the show. it's kind of unbelievable!

Yeah, the local media landscape is pretty dismal. It's not like it was ever great, but there are so many fewer actual reporters in town than there were 10 or 20 years ago (even though there are tens of thousands more people living here).

local news has been absolutely decimated by decades of bad corporate policy (fuck gannett forever) and recent trends toward focusing only on the phony metric known as "trending"

I've talked to some people at the local (Gannett) daily, and they don't even pretend otherwise. It is literally all about generating clicks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/business/media/mic-staff-layoff.html

I wrote a piece for them once, and it was a good experience overall. Hopefully Kyle and everyone else lands okay.

36,000sf of 1WTC for this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/at-npr-an-army-of-temps-resents-a-workplace-full-of-anxiety-and-insecurity/2018/12/07/32e49632-f35b-11e8-80d0-f7e1948d55f4_story.html

Botero quickly realized what she was up against. As a “temp,” she floated among unfamiliar co-workers and faced an ever-changing set of responsibilities, some of which she’d never been trained for. Her work contracts were sometimes as brief as two weeks, at the end of which she’d have to persuade a manager to extend her.

Worse was the sense of constant competition among her fellow temps, many of whom were angling to be hired for a limited number of permanent positions. “The only person I felt I could trust,” she said, “was the person I was dating, who was in the same position I was.” After a year of such uncertainty, she left, taking a job as a reporter for a group of public radio stations in New York state.

What’s surprising about Botero’s experience is how unsurprising it is at NPR.

For decades, the public broadcaster has relied on a cadre of temporary journalists to produce its hourly newscasts and popular news programs. Without temporary workers — who are subject to termination without cause — NPR would probably be unable to be NPR. Temps do almost every important job in NPR’s newsroom: they pitch ideas, assign stories, edit them, report and produce them. Temps not only book the guests heard in interviews, they often write the questions the hosts ask the guests.

The only thing worse than Gannett being the largest newspaper company in America would be MNG being the largest newspaper company in America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/business/dealbook/gannett-takeover-offer-mng.html

i know there's a long line of american industries that should have all their executives prosecuted but hedge funds have to be, like, top 5

my tweet portal is whack
i hv been trying to say i am sorry i offended
and i so appreciate my colleague

— Tom Brokaw (@tombrokaw) January 28, 2019

nothing says you mean it like abbrevin’ words like “have”

“abbreviNATION: what social media leaves out” could be a book

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html

props to a genuine act of journalism for once

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/whats-at-stake-in-the-takeover-of-cahiers-du-cinema

Haven't looked at it in 40 years, since university, but it's just one of those things you always assume will be there. (And it still is.)

Anybody signed up for this?

https://thecorrespondent.com/

I was a member for some years of the Dutch version, from which the English version originated. I ultimately bowed out because of the pedant tone a lot of the articles had, that rubbed me up the wrong way (the "this is right/wrong, and here's why", which is way more de rigeur in the USA imo). Having said that, I do think they are doing some things right and occasionally publish stories that 'matter'. With Jay Rosen on board I think they have a decent shot at getting a foot in the door in the US, and I'm interested in seeing how they'll fare.

signed up for the us version and it's been pretty eh

Final update on the thread of news dystopia: Microsoft’s artificial intelligence news app is now swamped with stories selected by the news robot about the news robot backfiring. pic.twitter.com/X0LwfVxw8e

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) June 9, 2020

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article243391186.html

hasan generally on point
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA

Once the hedge funds have snarfed up your local paper, it becomes much more difficult to follow his advice to support it, because you're getting fleeced, just like all the other 'assets' the paper owns. Figuring out how to convert them to employee-owned and run co-ops seems like a pipedream, but maybe that's the best avenue for keeping them viable.

something something cryptocurrency something something

Aimless otm. I worked in newspapering from approximately 1985 to 1999. My grandfather was the owner/editor/publisher of a small-town paper. My grandmother, mother, and my two sisters were all print-era creatures. I have ink in my veins. If I'm not a stan for print journalism, no one is. And yet...

The project of shlurping local papers into a homogenous corporate blob was already well underway in 1982 (having essentially started with the establishment of USA Today/Gannet/Tegna).

Nowadays, the remaining "local" papers are as local as those Clear Channel-style radio stations that have identical programming, except for the weather and traffic and one or two "this one goes out to Janie in Incestville" requests that help them "localize" what is otherwise centralized. In most cities it is not doing anything different from the local Fox affiliate.

On a personal note: You can not imagine how hard it was for me to cancel print delivery of the Washington Post, after 42 years of having the day begin with its arrival on the doorstep. I don't know what to do about this, but it is a minor heartbreak.

i just started getting the ny times international edition delivered! it's magic, i love it. i got a very good introductory price and it saves me having to wait in a queue for the print edition on the weekends just so i can do the crossword.

I suspect your subscription also entitles you to access the online crossword?

Mine does.

i'd rather not do it at all if i couldn't use a pen. faintly ghosting in a guess with a ballpoint is one of my key techniques.

it also takes my eyes away from a screen for a few goddamn minutes.

http://i.imgur.com/pqrQItG.png

Might throw some dollars at this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1478924964/the-brick-house-cooperative

More info here: https://www.cjr.org/first_person/introducing-the-brick-house-the-wolf-proof-media-cooperative.php

so it’s civil without the crypto and with a few new faces

Is it? I didn’t pay much attention to civil

other people vouch for maria b and certainly i admire the effort but establishing a post-click *and* post-blockchain economy seems like a lot

ah shit paywalled. it's the story of how Wirecard tried to discredit the FT, going to mad lengths to set up fake news operations with some (shitty) former intelligence people bribing market manipulators and ... hell, it's all insane Bourne-Ultimatum stuff

lol rong thred

This fucking guy... (the replies are as choice as should be expected).

A, perhaps odd, piece of advice to fellow journalists. Reach out to your hate mailers.

I just had a great, instructive, and professionally helpful phone call with a man who called me "a selfish partisan hack” in an email this morning.

— Sam Stein (@samstein) September 11, 2020

Deleted

I've noticed the NY Times going ahead and using quite charged language when talking about Trump in their hard news items. It feels unusual to me, and maybe even unprecedented in my time reading it. For instance, the blurb for today's article about Georgia re-certifying Biden's win says:

The announcement is the latest blow to President Trump’s attempts to subvert the election results in the state.

"Subvert"! Pretty sure heretofore that verb would have been "challenge". When talking about trumpoid fever-dreams of election rigging, they'll routinely refer to Trump's "baseless" claims.

I just don't think I've ever seen them do this before. It's like a kid with a new toy who can't stop playing with it. Look ma! I'm using my professional judgment! When I first moved to London in 2003, newspapers were so incredible to read because the news pages would routinely pass judgment on what they people they were quoting had to say, and it was so refreshing. It was like the paper recognised that it was a participant in events, rather than a supposedly passive bystander. That it could impart its own view on someone's trustworthiness, or truthfulness, or history. The New York Times appears to be at least very occasionally realising the same thing. It's like watching an ape become sentient. Unfortunately, like that child on Christmas day, I fear that once Trump passes from the stage of national politics the New York Times will get bored of its new toy and just go back to its old ways.

I don't think there's any question that the NY Times has become a lot more overtly partisan in its reporting during the Trump years. It's been going on for at least a few years now. Maybe it's gotten worse. I don't find it refreshing. I guess they felt like they needed to go there to compete with the likes of Huffington Post, who would otherwise repackage their expensive reporting with a more partisan slant and capture their audience. I don't really need daily headlines like "Trump Once Again Demonstrates Lack of Scruples" when that kind of thing is all over my social media feed.

If a sitting president working to cripple the US (because a crippled country is easier to loot) isn't newsworthy, nothing is. I'm all in favor of calling Trump a crook and a liar in news stories as well as op-ed and analysis pieces.

I think it’s within the fundamental responsibility of journalists to call a claim “baseless” if, in their judgment, it is. They’re the people in a position to know (as opposed to, like, us). They’ve just interviewed the relevant experts on both sides of the story. And if an actual judge says that the President’s proxies are trying to undermine faith in an election, using a word like “subvert” is justified. On the other hand, NOT using those words would be granting Trump (or whoever) a legitimacy he hasn’t earned.

I don't really need daily headlines like "Trump Once Again Demonstrates Lack of Scruples" when that kind of thing is all over my social media feed.

fetch my fainting couch!

I don't know, maybe Trump really is as relentlessly bad as the Times portrays him to be, but it's very hard to read that paper day after day and have any sense of why, you know, 72 million people might vote for him, other than they are all crazy, misinformed, racist or what have you. I guess there is a popular sideline in Times analysts trying to explain this great mystery, though no one seems to ever ask if maybe he's not as one-dimensionally evil as they portray him to be, and whether that might explain part of it. I feel like some other news sources have no trouble calling Trump on his bullshit yet somehow seem to present more of an appearance of evenhandedness or objectivity.

Weird genre of post you’re inventing here

can you point to some articles in other press about various scruples that he has demonstrated?

I'm not saying other press sources are constantly writing about his strong moral fiber, just that they tend to treat him more like all of the other politicians they cover (not all of whom regularly cover themselves in glory where demonstration of scruples is concerned) and less like a uniquely corrupt and maleficent force. Anyway, there's no joy to be had these days trying to advocate for old-fashioned journalistic values of neutrality, separation of editorial pages from "hard news" pages etc. Perhaps those values were always a thin veneer of respectability that deserved to be worn away.

Bob McChesney and John Nichols:

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/the-local-journalism-initiative.php

https://www.esquireme.com/news/48076-how-the-uae-is-celebrating-todays-international-day-of-peace

...

Wow and yikes. I went to the homepage and it's all like that, just puff pieces sucking up to assorted Middle Eastern moguls and hotshots. Gross.

can't believe how far the most trusted name in news, Esquire Middle East, has fallen

I just looked it up, Esquire has a bunch of international editions. Not all of them owned by Hearst, some it looks like they just sold the rights to the name to an in-country publisher. But Esquire ME is an actual Hearst mag. So is Esquire Bulgaria, which I bet is a treat.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021024&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5be9da642ddf9c72dc27c25d&cndid=29476922&hasha=f0ef51a738774f8c6d037c5c6beb7573&hashb=7cfed5b1cbcbc6a71fea3c2fc2bc754ee2661f52&hashc=fdd5c8d249d863be98861f55628588b242a4ca01384346986428715bbfdd44db&esrc=CDS_OP

Is the media prepared for utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021024&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5be9da642ddf9c72dc27c25d&cndid=29476922&hasha=f0ef51a738774f8c6d037c5c6beb7573&hashb=7cfed5b1cbcbc6a71fea3c2fc2bc754ee2661f52&hashc=fdd5c8d249d863be98861f55628588b242a4ca01384346986428715bbfdd44db&esrc=CDS_OP

Never

I read that article (clean link) and my reaction was that it makes me wonder if journalists fundamentally misunderstand how the average person sees news. Why pay to learn something that will likely bum you out, and about which you can do nothing? Isn't life hard enough already? More and more, I feel like a medieval peasant. The rulers are gonna do what they're gonna do, and the people in charge of telling us about that are mostly cheering them on (in a "can't argue with success!" sort of way), so fuck "the news." I'd rather spend my money on music, books and movies, and if I'm "uninformed," so be it. I don't feel like I'm missing much.

yeah

Urgh, my wife and I are j-school types. We don't really have a lot of backup plans and it's a bit late to generate a backup plan now.

Recently she looked into going to law school at age 46. That seems pretty far-fetched, but it's not like I have a better idea.

We are unlikely to manage mortgage/college/retirement/debt etc. whilst working at e.g. McDonald's. (No disrespect to those who do, just saying it would be a tough bunch of changes.)

if you're considering career moves, as a high school teacher i mean this 100% sincerely, please consider teaching! media literacy is absolutely kicking our collective asses and we don't have enough people who understand it to teach kids about it.

The essay's right about the forces at work, but what's amazing to me — and The Messenger is obviously the most ridiculous example of this — is how many people with lots of money at big media companies have just totally failed to understand the realities. Advertising is gone as a primary revenue stream for news/media companies. But these guys still think they're gonna get rich selling ads.

Subscription and/or nonprofit models are the obvious ways to go. They both have their challenges, but there are a lot of people doing good work with both of them right now. Will just have to see how well they can sustain themselves. I'm less pessimistic about journalism than I was five years ago, because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But for sure it's unstable, and I'm happy not to be working for legacy media companies still trying to retrofit their old models.

More and more, I feel like a medieval peasant. The rulers are gonna do what they're gonna do, and the people in charge of telling us about that are mostly cheering them on (in a "can't argue with success!" sort of way), so fuck "the news." I'd rather spend my money on music, books and movies, and if I'm "uninformed," so be it. I don't feel like I'm missing much.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Saturday, 10 February 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Most people in the medieval era couldn't read or write. Which is what I get from your posts

The essay's right about the forces at work, but what's amazing to me — and The Messenger is obviously the most ridiculous example of this — is how many people with lots of money at big media companies have just totally failed to understand the realities. Advertising is gone as a primary revenue stream for news/media companies.

And when a much-ballyhooed site like The Messenger collapses the crash sounds louder -- it becomes another warning sign, another "there, you see? Media IS collapsing!"

xp I suspect that primary and secondary school teaching is going to mostly be a volunteer force in 20 years and work on an equivalent of the original Sunday School system in 30.

please consider teaching! media literacy is absolutely kicking our collective asses and we don't have enough people who understand it to teach kids about it

Teaching media literacy would have to be a stealth operation, because with the enshrinement of standard tests driving the entire curriculum these days there's not much space for anything else in a school day.

I disagree. It’s pretty easy to align lessons on media literacy with the common core. You are assessing their ability to make inferences and comprehend nonfiction texts.

treesh, I know you're a smart and experienced enough teacher to control your own lessons in depth and make your teaching materials work for you rather than the other way around, but that is a high level and a difficult attainment. For a less experienced or committed teacher, the fact that most contemporary media are not consumed as nonfiction texts places a large constraint on their effectively teaching media literacy. Even more so, if the classroom materials are imposed rather than discretionary.

Anyway, I acknowledge your greater expertise on this, so if you think my perspective is insufficiently grounded, I'll accept your conclusions.