Is journalism dying?

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