Is journalism dying?

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.