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First off let me say I'm by no means well schooled in what I'm about to say. These are just observations I've had. It seems to me that reporting, and journalism as a whole is on a decline. Not in quanity, you have more of that then ever, but in terms of quality. You have a news channel, or a newspaper that panders to literally every viewpoint. Liberal, Conservative, ect with either no effort or a very token and transparent effort to be unbiased. I feel social networks and the internet have a large part to do with this, but I can't place exactly what. Could a journalist have broken all that somehow? I'm not really sure to continue my thoughts on all this, but I'd just love to see a real unbiased news channel or paper.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:03 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 17:31 |
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There are examples of this, Vanguard documentaries are great and something you may want to check up on. PBS has some good shows, and NPR is biased in the way that they'll entertain some points or items of news for the sake of "balance" but still do a good job overall as long as you're aware of it, and it's exactly what it claims to be; mainstream media. An "unbiased" media is a very 20th century phenomenon and Walter Kronkite wouldn't have had a job in the 18th century when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were calling each other "sniveling" and "syphilitic" in their proxy-papers. The state of journalism has always been in flux. It's just that we're moving back to that explicitly biased form. People are going to look back with rose-colored glasses at mid-20th century "unbiased" journalism all they want, but it was also just as biased then. (particularly when it came to American political radicals, Cold War, etc.)
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:07 |
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Journalism has historically been a shill for one interest or position or another.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:08 |
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quote:There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. -- John Swinton, former Chief of Staff for the New York Times, 1880
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:15 |
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Really, journalism has always been used as a mouthpiece for influencing public opinion in subversive ways by appealing to anything you can thing of: Nationalism, xenophobia, ignorance, etc. It's nothing new, but maybe you're noticing it more because the barriers to entry have been lowered with the internet. That, or the advent of the "24-Hour-News cycle" makes it much easier to notice just how brain-dead news can be.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:17 |
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If you want a unprecedented look into the state of the media, specifically the newspaper industry, you should check out Flat Earth News. It's got nothing to do with Thomas Friedman, thank god. It's by Nick Davies, a guardian reporter for decades and the man who broke the 'phone hacking' scandal everyone was embroiled in this summer. The book looks at how (and why) unpopular stories get buried, how important stories go unpublished, how 'objective' reporting is virtually always anything but, how the newspapers are free to make poo poo up because they're unlikely to face repercussions and how "the news factory" (his term for the state of modern media) . As with most things the issue is more complex than a single root cause* but the combined effect is described pretty chillingly. Perhaps somebody who has read it more recently and who remembers specific sections in more detail can explain further, but that book should be the first port of call for anybody wondering what the deal with journalism is. * Unless you count capitalism 
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 09:06 |
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There's really no good model anymore to profit from good journalism, so companies can't pay decent wages. Why does scientific journalism suck so much? Because you actually need to have a lot of scientific knowledge on what you are writing about, and anyone with those skills can make way more outside journalism. The exceptions are things like PBS frontline, which have special funding sources. But the search for unbiased reporting is something else entirely and doesn't actually exist. You can't be neutral on a moving train.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 09:11 |
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Because of the internet. It is now entirely possible to instantly look up any item/event/story, and naturally people will go right to the most interesting headline or story. Basically if the story isn’t super juicy with an attention grabbing headline it’s not going to be read so everyone over hypes everything to remain visible. Naturally, leaving out facts, blurring the details and reporting wild rumours by uninformed sources as proven expert facts to attract attention is gonna happen.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 09:49 |
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It almost seems to be trending in a direction where independent people break the actual story and do all the research and investigation then the news organizations latch on to it and put their spin onit.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 10:00 |
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A lot of respected journalists trace the recent (past few decades) decline in journalism to the following factors: -Parent companies of news organizations demanding that newspapers/TV turn a profit, which forces those companies to cut back on actual investigative/in depth pieces and overall lowers the quality of information due to money. As a result you have things like CNN trying to fill timeslots with Twitter segments or that 'iReport' garbage, because it's cheaper than hiring people to do those things. -The rise of the Internet driving people away from traditional sources for journalism, and towards newer ones -Newspapers being unable to figure out how to successfully charge for online content without pissing people off -Budgets in general for actual news organizations/newspapers declining to a point where the best talent ends up being forced to leave for either financial or career reasons -Political opinions hardening in this country to the point where investigative pieces are attacked for being 'too political', whether they actually are or not
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 12:19 |
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 12:29 |
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312 posted:There's really no good model anymore to profit from good journalism, so companies can't pay decent wages. Why does scientific journalism suck so much? Because you actually need to have a lot of scientific knowledge on what you are writing about, and anyone with those skills can make way more outside journalism. The exceptions are things like PBS frontline, which have special funding sources. This is pretty much on the money. I'm a reporter for a community-level publication in a rural area abutting a metropolitan center. On the local level, there's scarcely enough resources to specialize beyond your "beat." By "resources" I mean your time and the publication's money. There is no such thing as a totally cold-eyed, dispassionate lack of bias. Your notions about the world, and what you're willing to do as a reporter, color the product you create. Example: In the 2008 campaign, I did an article on a McCain campaign headquarters. I interview volunteers and local politicians. A man with sixteen teeth in his head comes up to me and tells me that Barack Obama is "only six percent colored," and the rest is "Muslim," and he's going to sell the country to Al-Qaeda if elected president. Do I attribute this guy in the story? He said this stuff to me knowing full well that I'm a reporter. I'm reporting in a conservative district that would, upon reading this, greedily eat up the red meat. I chose not to because I did not want to give legitimacy in print to these kind of remarks. I work with a reporter who thinks it is absolutely vile and despicable to have to write advertorials for a holiday gift guide. The idea that advertising supports the product turns his stomach. The same guy sees absolutely no conflict in going out on hunting trips with an elected representative he covers in his beat. By his reasoning, he can separate his friendship from the work he does as a reporter. Another example: you're writing about old people. What word do you use? Seniors? The elderly? Is it an old black man volunteering at a food bank, or an old white woman in her farm house, surrounded by photos of herself on horseback? Your word choice reveals how you feel about the people you talk to, even if you aren't conscious of it. If you're a reporter, do you have time to fact-check every asinine statement your elected representative says to you in election season, when you have to talk to fifteen other challengers and incumbents for a "round-up" page? It's likely that you don't, unless you're a major outlet, because you've got to cover local meetings and breaking spot news. What if something happens that is clearly a big deal, but you think is asinine - like Gun Appreciation Day or that big Chik-Fil-A thing? What if your superior demands disproportionate coverage of some otherwise-petty thing going on? A lot of times a news reporter is not in a position to take a principled stand. For newbies especially, you either humor the pet project and move on to the next assignment, or you find yourself another job.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 22:45 |
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Snollygoster posted:This is pretty much on the money. Thank you for expanding on that comment, those are very good examples. Maybe if humans were logic machines things would be different, but in reality emotion is present in everything we do and personally colors everything we see. Objectivity assumes there exists a neutral spot to observe from, and it doesn't exist.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 22:58 |
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Craig Newmark
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 23:04 |
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penus de milo posted:If you want a unprecedented look into the state of the media, specifically the newspaper industry, you should check out Flat Earth News. It's got nothing to do with Thomas Friedman, thank god. It's by Nick Davies, a guardian reporter for decades and the man who broke the 'phone hacking' scandal everyone was embroiled in this summer.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 23:08 |
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Ultimately, "market-pressures" are the most key part of it. More accurately, the decline of journalism as a profit-making venture (newspapers dying, cable tv not doing terribly well) and overall political/social/economic pressure to agree to a neo-liberal conception of world events. Journalism, especially in the United States, was never very good but certainly today is the lowest nadir since the gilded age of the late 19th-century. It is unlikely to ever improve either, at best the internet can be an alternative to getting news as the traditional media withers.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 23:12 |
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Think of it in the same way as your favorite TV channel. Back in the day, if you wanted to watch something about science, you went to the Discovery channel. If you wanted history, you went to the History Channel. if you wanted prime-time sitcoms, you went to the big 3 networks. Then something happened. Those channels got really good at what they did. Everyone was watching the History Channel for the history, but not everyone wanted to watch history. Growth stopped. Network executives needed to find a way to keep it going. Channels looked at what else people watched. The History channel saw that people were watching the Sci-fi channel instead of Building of the Great Pyramids, so they replaced the program with Aliens and Pyramids: Are the Legends True? This couldn't be done without sacrificing some of what made the History Channel the History Channel. This is also why you have very similar shows like Pawn Stars and Hard Core Pawn. They all tried to grab viewers from elsewhere since they dried up their base. Where are you going with this? The same thing happened in cable news, print media, and online news. Everyone tried to appeal to everyone and they're doing it on a low budget. Copy editors are the first to go. Just read through any online article, even once-proud establishments like the New York Times. You'll see the same paragraph twice in the article, sentences stop for no reason, and flow like an atherosclerotic coronary artery. Writers aren't doing so well either. Many places are cutting staff and they're trying to get news out faster. They aren't questioning their sources and they are building articles around a single interview. Lots of stories are coming off the AP wire and are really just repeated verbatim. Cable news is doing this too. With one exception - they literally are not able to shut up. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, HLN can not, under any circumstances, have dead air and you can only have so many commercials before people get bored and switch the channel. The problem is that actual news stories take a lot of writing and time to develop. In order to constantly be presenting earth-shattering stories, the networks would have to employ writing and research staffs in the hundreds. Instead, they decide to fill the void with low-ball stories that are easy to produce. That's why you have Bill O'Reily reading his emails and CNN showing 'Youtube clip of the day' and 'Here's a tweet we saw'. The only kind of 'uniqueness' we have now is on the polarized news programs catering to one political group or another - think MSNBC or Fox News. This is an attempt to go back to the old days of being the Best Channel at Your Thing, but with a new twist piggybacking on the new trend of opinion-as-news. This leaves us with The Daily Show as the best source for news on TV. neurobasalmedium fucked around with this message at Jan 28, 2013 around 23:19 |
| # ? Jan 28, 2013 23:16 |
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Maybe the best source of news on TV then? The daily show itself deserves (and had gotten) criticism for its own bias. It is at least openly an entertainment rather than a journalistic venue, maybe that it is why it does fairly well. That said, I don't think it is free from many of the same influences (but not as bluntly) as other sources.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:03 |
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Couldn't it be argued that, if the idea of partisan news media is particularly abhorrent in the live 24/7 era, it would be more 'responsible' to air less consequential (read: stupid) stuff in between all the really important happenings, and hope your audience could discern? Wouldn't that make CNN's email-n-tweet power hour(s) the best of the worst?
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:06 |
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Isn't there a hilariously low number of companies that own practically 100% of traditional news media (and media in general)?
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:24 |
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Ardennes posted:Maybe the best source of news on TV then? The daily show itself deserves (and had gotten) criticism for its own bias. It is at least openly an entertainment rather than a journalistic venue, maybe that it is why it does fairly well. That said, I don't think it is free from many of the same influences (but not as bluntly) as other sources. Good point. I just wanted to put it in there since as you mention, on its face it is a comedy program, but in the current environment of news programming it can be mentioned along with the big 24/7 networks and Jon Stewart is often a guest on them. It's probably some combination of the 24/7 networks loosening their journalistic guideline and The Daily Show finding and filling a gap in the market. That said, The Daily Show doesn't really function the same way. In the 21-24 minutes they have they hit at most 3-4 topics, while a news segment on CNN is closer to 10-15
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:36 |
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I don't have any real problem with partisanship in TV news media. For one, I don't think you could argue that it's worse than newspapers were in the 19th century. Second, I like the variety and I think it's probably a good thing for political divisions to be drawn more sharply. I mean, Al Sharpton has a TV show on MSNBC, right? I'm not really a big Al Sharpton fan. But why shouldn't he have a show? I'm not sure how else to put this, but there's something about the traditional American news media (read: newspapers) that makes them into total snoozefests. They all look very similar; there's very little variety; and all are generally really boring to read. It might be because of a kind of neutral objectivity, it might be because the stakes in American political discourse are higher than in other places, it might be because what happens in the U.S. is more consequential than in other countries owing to the U.S.'s status as the preeminent world power, so the tone is going to reflect the consensus a bit more, in media as well as politics. There's one theory that U.S. papers used to be more like what British newspapers are like now, and the U.K. papers used to be really dry and anodyne, and the tone for each swapped when the U.S. and U.K. swapped roles as the big daddy world empire. Americans also put a lot more emphasis on journalism being a public service, or that it should be a public service, when in some other countries there is more of a tendency to see it as a kind of sport. (I might be wrong about this. But compared to the U.K.?) The U.S. has a Protestant self-improvement culture so journalism is believed to be about improving society, when in a guilt-ridden Catholic country it might not be! (I might be wrong about that too.) Other people have pointed out in this thread that journalism really doesn't improve anyone's lives anyways, and it's sort of an illusion to think it does. It might be better to accept that we have a tabloid gutter press, and work on making it the best drat tabloid gutter press there is. We're on a website called Something Awful, so let's not smell our own farts too much. Where I have something of a problem is how the big journalistic players are increasingly becoming cults of personality around individuals. It's not for no reason the two biggest online news outlets are The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post. It's like an Oprah-fication of the news media. There's Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Beck. Christopher Hitchens had this going on too. They'll attract these mass followings of people who will read everything they write, and agree with everything they say. And this model of individual private fiefdoms doesn't really scale downwards in the way newspapers do. Omi-Polari fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2013 around 00:43 |
| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:36 |
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Real hurthling! posted:Isn't there a hilariously low number of companies that own practically 100% of traditional news media (and media in general)? Seven. Disney, NewsCorp, TimeWarner, Viacom, NBC Universal, Comcast, and CBS together control 90% of traditional media. (It was six before GE sold NBC and Comcast).
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:39 |
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Real hurthling! posted:Isn't there a hilariously low number of companies that own practically 100% of traditional news media (and media in general)? There are six major media companies that, in total together, make up some ridiculous amount like 90% of all media. The agglomeration is something you wouldn't notice unless you're paying attention.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:40 |
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Real hurthling! posted:Isn't there a hilariously low number of companies that own practically 100% of traditional news media (and media in general)? Yes! Media concentration is just like other industries, in which increasingly few multinational conglomerates control increasingly large amounts of the capital and outlets. This isn't a conspiracy or anything and it's not even easy to show it has a negative effect on content production, but it is definitely noticeable and probably important. Here are some ways to visualize it:   
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:46 |
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StabbinHobo posted:Craig Newmark Pretty much this. Craigslist destroyed the local paper's ability to make money. Corporatization and concentration of media is the unintended consequence of the internet.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 00:55 |
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As someone who has a degree in journalism from a very highly regarded school for this sort of thing, I can say that we're (meaning journalists, and people who want to go into journalism) asking ourselves the same question. And the answers are, basically, due to a number of things, including (and while most of this stuff is from a broadcast perspective, other fields are experiencing similar things): --The Balkanization of media. Cable/satellite, the growth of the Internet, and the rise of blogging/social media have been great things for both reporters and those that read news on a regular basis. However, they've produced an environment where people will only really read what they agree with, and tune out the old "big tent" sources for whatever reason, whether it's disgust over them being wedded to false equivalency, a perceived bias or the old standby "there's no good news!". No longer are people going to read the local paper, complain about it being too drat liberal/conservative, yet still buy it anyway as it's the only game in town: they'll just hop online and go to one of a few dozen outlets that filters news through their preferred lens. poo poo, a number of places are capitalizing on this trend: exhibit A being The Guardian, which got a ton of US readers (myself included, but more for the football/rugby league coverage) during the Bush years because it was seen as the last bastion of speaking truth to power. Now they're playing on that by doing a separate home page for the US, having a ton of US sport/TV coverage (which I hate, because if I wanted to read about the NFL I'd go to an American site, plus the main US TV show they're covering is Girls and well...that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish), and bringing in Glenn Greenwald, who pretty much owes his entire career to the entire concept of people exclusively hearing what they want to hear. --Less people are being paid less to do more. This is one of the reasons (plus the fact that I got so pissed off with "fairness" and "balance" and not being able to call a spade a spade) that I got of doing straight news and over to my chosen field, sports, at the first possible opportunity. It used to be (and in some of the bigger markets, still is) that you'd have one reporter and one photographer/editor at most TV stations per dayside (the roughly 8-6 shift)/nightside (2-10, all times Central) reporting shift. The reporter would do the research, interview, do a standup, and voice a story, while the photog would get good shots, make sure everything was in frame (this is getting much more crucial now that more places are going to HD, and thus everything still needs to be 4:3 safe), and putting together the finished product. Now, to cut costs more places are moving to what are known as "one-man-bands". What this means is: So you were trained to just tell the story? Great! You'll also be shooting and editing your story, plus being responsible for driving/hauling your equipment (which angered a number of people I know, as a lot of TV cameras are both heavy AND fragile, not to mention expensive)! And did we mention, now that we're trying to integrate the viewer via social media and the second-screen experience, that you'll be live-tweeting during the day (be sure to respond to all those at-replies!), providing at least 3 Facebook updates with video, taking a number of photos and adding them to our Pinterest page, and will be doing a live Google Plus hangout while editing your story to answer questions from our audience? Great! And this leads directly to... --Honestly, we're getting a bit lazy. Having to do all those things, while being paid crumbs compared to that idiot that majored in PR and just posted the picture of him drinking at the office just two days after him and his frat brothers went to Vegas, leads us to kinda lose our dreams. Are there great investigative stories out there that still get done, and we still want to do? Yes, by all means, but sadly those take time and money, and in this day and age unless those massive stories plop right into our laps (like the Sandusky case, which has pretty much shot Sara Ganim right into the stratosphere of journalism at age 26) those are the two things we don't have. So in order to hopefully work our way up to getting the proverbial Big Break, a lot of us do end up doing what basically amount to press releases writ large. It sucks, I know, but a lot of kids point to the above and say "what can we do?" Also, Real hurthling!: At the local level (affiliate stations, like how here in St Louis KSDK is an NBC station but technically owned by Gannett, KTVI Fox but run by local people, etc.) there's a lot more depth in ownership, but yeah, Comcast/TimeWarner/NewsCorp own at least 75 percent of the major outlets. CBS/Viacom and ABC/Disney only really own their own network news divisions (in fact, ABC actually downsized what was once a pretty big newspaper division when Disney bought them out), but they make up for it with golden geese elsewhere (ESPN most notably). e: those two up ahead of me beat me to the latter point and used better statistics, but it remains. Troy Queef fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2013 around 01:07 |
| # ? Jan 29, 2013 01:02 |
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Nothus posted:Pretty much this. Craigslist destroyed the local paper's ability to make money. Corporatization and concentration of media is the unintended consequence of the internet.  Incidentally, I wrote my thesis on the death of a Belgian paper back in 1978. It started way before that (in the US even earlier), but basically, capitalism changed in the post-war era and made the business model of newspapers unsustainable. Back then, you had relatively large newsrooms and nearly every paper had its own printing company - which was even more labour intensive. Unfortunately, western societies moved away from labour intensive industries, which you can see in the outsourcing of much of the manufacturing base in most countries throughout the seventies and eighties. The seventies were particularly volatile for the newspaper industry (and all industries) due to the recession, the oil crisis, etc along with some more specific tricks of capitalism, like how the price of newsprint skyrocketed due to price fixing by the few countries that produced it and the exploding demand from recently independent colonies. The technological advances of the time also required huge investments in printing machines to keep up with the competition. This all first hit the printing companies and hit them hard. That's where the first casualties fell. Some papers fell with it, especially left wing papers like the one I wrote my thesis about, seeing as they couldn't go all liberal-Hitler on them and throw everybody on the street. Nor could they rely on the same kind of support from independent investors like right wing papers did. In America, this evolution caused a lot more casualties across the board, especially with local newspapers, but in Europe, it was fairly limited. Aside from the occasional socialist paper, most worked something out and stayed afloat. But working something out was often nearly as bad as going under. The process of press concentration had already begun much earlier, but really went into gear during this time. The independent newspaper was being replaced by press conglomerates. These conglomerates bailed out and reformed existing papers and were a significant break from the earlier mentality in the media. Before, the media was fairly sheltered from the horrors of the market. Because of the global shift in capitalism, this quickly became unsustainable and left them vulnerable. The conglomerates and the remaining independent newspapers started looking towards the media as a business. Making a loss? Cut costs. Not enough profits? Cut costs. And so on. As an example of this process, look at how Rupert Murdoch got his start. Before you had newspapermen, now you had businessmen. (note: not that things were prefect before) This all had its effects on the quality of the media, but if you want to know more about that: read Flat Earth News. It's all there and it's an easy read. Small note on the Craigslist/internet thing: the fact that newspapers have to rely on advertising to be able to exist is one of the greatest weak points the newspaper industry has. The publicity market is very vulnerable to conjunctural changes. Recessions and depressions will basically kill the publicity market and take some newspapers with it. Generally, when the economic troubles don't last very long, it only affects local and small newspapers. Ads taken out by small businesses will dry up during short-term economic problems. Normally, display-publicity put out by large companies won't dip yet. Declining sales will actually drive companies to take out more ads. If the economic problems don't disappear, this type of advertising will get hit as well and mid-level newspapers will start to feel the pinch too. Eventually, this will spread to all newspapers, regardless of size. Back during the seventies, the publicity market also became more and more concentrated as a result of this and with equally bad outcomes, but that's not really important at the moment. What is important is that the publicity market isn't only vulnerable to conjunctural changes, it's also vulnerable to competition from things other than newspapers. Now it's the internet and Craigslist, but back during the seventies, it was television and advertising magazines. But as it was then, it'll be now: bad, but not the final nail in the coffin of newspapers. Though things will have to change eventually. But if you're looking for solutions, you're poo poo out of luck. Everything that happened here is caused by fundamental problems of capitalism - a conclusion many in the media landscape like to ignore by coming up with terms like press concentration, while that's just the press variant of capitalism's inevitable drive towards monopolization.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 01:37 |
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Troy Queef posted:--Less people are being paid less to do more. This is one of the reasons (plus the fact that I got so pissed off with "fairness" and "balance" and not being able to call a spade a spade) that I got of doing straight news and over to my chosen field, sports, at the first possible opportunity. It used to be (and in some of the bigger markets, still is) that you'd have one reporter and one photographer/editor at most TV stations per dayside (the roughly 8-6 shift)/nightside (2-10, all times Central) reporting shift. The reporter would do the research, interview, do a standup, and voice a story, while the photog would get good shots, make sure everything was in frame (this is getting much more crucial now that more places are going to HD, and thus everything still needs to be 4:3 safe), and putting together the finished product. Now, to cut costs more places are moving to what are known as "one-man-bands". What this means is: So you were trained to just tell the story? Great! You'll also be shooting and editing your story, plus being responsible for driving/hauling your equipment (which angered a number of people I know, as a lot of TV cameras are both heavy AND fragile, not to mention expensive)! And did we mention, now that we're trying to integrate the viewer via social media and the second-screen experience, that you'll be live-tweeting during the day (be sure to respond to all those at-replies!), providing at least 3 Facebook updates with video, taking a number of photos and adding them to our Pinterest page, and will be doing a live Google Plus hangout while editing your story to answer questions from our audience? Great! And this leads directly to... How bad is the situation with unpaid internships in TV news? It seems basically every major news site online has unpaid interns doing the bulk of the work nowadays which just creates a race to the bottom.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 01:52 |
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nachos posted:How bad is the situation with unpaid internships in TV news? It seems basically every major news site online has unpaid interns doing the bulk of the work nowadays which just creates a race to the bottom. It's getting to the point where an internship (though a lot of them are unpaid, there's a good few--ESPN in particular was REALLY good with treating their interns--that compensate) is pretty much required to get a job anywhere in TV news, as it shows you can make connections and "know the ropes" of a station even if all you did was fetch coffee and post web stories. I worked during the summer to pay for housing/gas/all that sort of thing during the school year, so I couldn't really apply for internships, though.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 01:59 |
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Arrgytehpirate posted:It seems to me that reporting, and journalism as a whole is on a decline. Not in quanity, you have more of that then ever, but in terms of quality. An alternative explanation is journalism has always sucked, particular when the topic requires subject matter expertise. We are just more aware of it now because we can hear directly from the subject matter experts, rather than having everything go through a 'reporter' filter.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 02:19 |
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gaj70 posted:An alternative explanation is journalism has always sucked, particular when the topic requires subject matter expertise. We are just more aware of it now because we can hear directly from the subject matter experts, rather than having everything go through a 'reporter' filter. But what about investigative journalism where the people who really are the experts want to keep whatever information they have a secret? Like, for instance, if a county installs speed cameras but tweaks them so that they start issuing erroneous tickets for extra cash? Who would find out if nobody is looking?
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 03:49 |
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FlamingLiberal posted:A lot of respected journalists trace the recent (past few decades) decline in journalism to the following factors: To your excellent list, I would add that the rise of 'infotainment' (the most prominent, but not only, example being cable news) has blurred what defines "journalism," although you sort of covered that in another way. nachos posted:How bad is the situation with unpaid internships in TV news? It seems basically every major news site online has unpaid interns doing the bulk of the work nowadays which just creates a race to the bottom. I was paid $15 a day (might as well have been unpaid) to intern in a Chicago TV newsroom and while there were a lot of interns, there were a lot more full-time people. I think the notion that the quality of journalism is on the decline is just nostalgia; there has always been a lot of terrible journalism, some good journalism, and the rare excellent journalism. It's the same today. Journalism, newspapers especially, have been pretty beaten up the last decade or so but at least in major markets, there is some turnaround. Minor markets are hosed, though. Enjoy your local community's Patch site burning out a college grad after 2 years for piss-poor pay while churning out press release article after press release article catering to the whims of advertisement.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 04:25 |
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nunchi posted:But what about investigative journalism where the people who really are the experts want to keep whatever information they have a secret? I'm not discounting the value of good investigative journalism. However, the operative question is whether we actually had more or better IJ in the past. In my humble opinion, most IJ boils down to simply publishing leaks from insiders. This function been largely replaced by anonymous internet posts. As for the rest, ad-hoc communities of gaj70 fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2013 around 04:54 |
| # ? Jan 29, 2013 04:52 |
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gaj70 posted:I'm not discounting the value of good investigative journalism. However, the operative question is whether we actually had more or better IJ in the past. I disagree. A lot of investigative journalism is all about sending out FOIA requests and putting different bits of information together that might not already be in one place. I also want to point out that the Internet isn't really replacing journalism because newspapers and cable news really aren't in the business of reporting. They're in the business of advertising. The journalism was just a happy side effect. Now we have youtube instead, which is good in its own right but it's also completely different and whether or not this is a net positive still seems pretty indeterminate.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 05:26 |
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Misandrist Duck posted:
I get what you are saying, but journalism absolutely is in a worse state now than decades ago. Honestly compare fox/msnbc/cnn to that time and this is quite clear. There's still quality journalism today, but the quality of journalism the normal average joe consumes has considerably declined recently. Investigative journalism has been replaced with twitter reports. But for anyone that cares there are certainly incredibly good sources of excellent journalism. I just suspect it was easier for the average person to stumble across them in the past.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 06:21 |
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312 posted:I get what you are saying, but journalism absolutely is in a worse state now than decades ago. Honestly compare fox/msnbc/cnn to that time and this is quite clear. There's still quality journalism today, but the quality of journalism the normal average joe consumes has considerably declined recently. Investigative journalism has been replaced with twitter reports. I think there's a bit of nostalgia or cognitive dissonance going on here. Of course it was easier for the average "Joe" to stumble across "incredibly good sources of excellent journalism" in the past: There were fewer outlets for it, and the barriers to entry were greater. The internet and 24-hour-news cycle have blown up the scene with an overwhelming selection of news sites that cater to biases on every point of the political spectrum. Naturally, a lot of this is garbage, but like you noted: There's still quality journalism today. You may have to look harder than in 1975 because, surprise, surprise, there's a lot more ground to cover than there was in 1975, when there were 6 channels on your TV. What the average "Joe" consumes is not an indicator of the overall quality of journalism, however. Rather, it's more of an indictment against the average "Joe" and his pitiful selection in news. Cream-of-Plenty fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2013 around 07:05 |
| # ? Jan 29, 2013 07:02 |
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gaj70 posted:An alternative explanation is journalism has always sucked, particular when the topic requires subject matter expertise. We are just more aware of it now because we can hear directly from the subject matter experts, rather than having everything go through a 'reporter' filter. That's not wholly true - there are plenty of journos that specialize in particular areas. But they're mostly operating in new media, and they don't have anywhere near the cosy relationship that traditional media's political correspondents have with politicians. There was a good example of this in the last Australian federal election. You can read the full account here, but the basic gist of the story is that during the election the opposition party launched two policies on the same day, and in different cities: the first being their immigration policy (with the opposition leader attending), the second their ICT policy. The journos on the political beat were dispatched to the immigration launch, which meant that the ICT launch was attended predominantly by ICT reporters (mostly for tech blogs and industry websites). The immigration launch went off without a hitch: the politics reporters mostly asked questions that they'd formulated earlier that day from reading the executive summary of the policy, or instead used the opportunity to quiz the opposition leader on whatever mini-scandal had caught the attention of the news cycle that day. Soundbites were duly given. But something strange was happening at the ICT launch. The tech guys had read the policy quite closely, and actually understood what it said. They took notes throughout the policy launch speech, and then asked a whole bunch of relevant, detailed questions that exposed both the Shadow Minister's lack of knowledge in his own portfolio, and some fundamental flaws in the policy itself. The blogger I linked to above described it as the biggest policy debacle in in Australia for over twenty years. But here's the thing. If not for the schedule conflict, the political correspondents would have been sent to cover the ICT launch. The tech blog journos would have been sitting in the back, vainly trying to ask questions as the Shadow Minister took softballs or unrelated questions from the journos that he sees every day in the parliament press gallery. I understand there's a similar problem in the States in terms of the relationship between White House correspondents and the press secretary / department secretaries. The correspondents have a feel for politics but not necessarily policy. It means that policy issues aren't given the scrutiny they deserve.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 10:23 |
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I think the repeal of the The Fairness Doctrine is as good a reason as any for the poo poo news reporting in the USA. Taken from the wiki: quote:The 1949 FCC Commission Report served as the foundation for the Fairness Doctrine. It established two forms of regulation on broadcasters: to provide adequate coverage of public issues, and to ensure that coverage fairly represented opposing views.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 10:41 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 17:31 |
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Misandrist Duck posted:I think the notion that the quality of journalism is on the decline is just nostalgia; there has always been a lot of terrible journalism, some good journalism, and the rare excellent journalism. It's the same today. gaj70 posted:In my humble opinion, most IJ boils down to simply publishing leaks from insiders.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 13:43 |
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