Is journalism dying?

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

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.