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Journalists are middle men who shittily translate other peoples information for profit??? The motherjones thing is a perfect example, that person had to become a prison guard to get that first hand information instead of being a "journalist" and just interviewing some prison guards or something. Investigative journalism is probably a necessity to keep society civil, but posting poo poo on twitter or your blog doesn't count. So no I don't think journalism is dead I just think people need to turn off the internet and go see poo poo first hand for themselves before they start writing about it.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:21
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roymorrison posted:Journalists are middle men who shittily translate other peoples information for profit??? The motherjones thing is a perfect example, that person had to become a prison guard to get that first hand information instead of being a "journalist" and just interviewing some prison guards or something. Investigative journalism is probably a necessity to keep society civil, but posting poo poo on twitter or your blog doesn't count. As someone above noted, there's an enormous distinction to be made between investigative journalism and run-of-the-mill reportage.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:24
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roymorrison posted:Journalists are middle men who shittily translate other peoples information for profit??? The motherjones thing is a perfect example, that person had to become a prison guard to get that first hand information instead of being a "journalist" and just interviewing some prison guards or something. Investigative journalism is probably a necessity to keep society civil, but posting poo poo on twitter or your blog doesn't count.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:28
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Journalism really isn't unbiased and probably shouldn't ever be. That doesn't mean Yellow Journalism All Day Erry Day, or even being in the pocket of a certain person/candidate/whatever, but if you don't take some kind of stand on interpreting the issues you just throw up two conflicting sound bytes and go  .Ideally there's enough differing views that you can get a variety of viewpoints and judge for yourself. However, this requires:
...and I'm not the least bit confident any of those can happen right now. I really do think internet sources are stepping up to provide the multiple viewpoints, but because the audiences are often so small, they become insular echo chambers. The only way to fix that is to break out of them yourself and surf around, but that's really hard to do, honestly. In short I don't know what the solution is and this post is probably a waste of space 
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Aug 22, 2016 18:38
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Chokes McGee posted:
This has never happened. I'm (just barely) old enough to remember a time before CNN, when there were three major broadcast TV networks, which spoon-fed news and viewpoints from the mainstream center in the US. I'll take today's diversity of information over that, any day of the week.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:45
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Yes I would like more and better journalism but, because of reasons you listed, I think that good "journalists" are typically not people who went to school for and are currently employed as journalists. Does that make sense? Journalism right now has such a massive filter on it that by the time the information gets to me I cant tell if it should be trusted.
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Aug 22, 2016 19:57
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roymorrison posted:Yes I would like more and better journalism but, because of reasons you listed, I think that good "journalists" are typically not people who went to school for and are currently employed as journalists. Does that make sense? Journalism right now has such a massive filter on it that by the time the information gets to me I cant tell if it should be trusted. Journalism school is utterly worthless. Who do you think would be a better analyst of immigration policy for an in-depth article: a 22-year old recent J-school grad with a head full of Frankfurt School who thinks he's the first American ever to read Manufacturing Consent, or someone without the J-school degree who's been a practicing immigration lawyer for ten years? Universities that still offer BAs in journalism should be sued for educational malpractice.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:07
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TheImmigrant posted:Journalism school is utterly worthless. Who do you think would be a better analyst of immigration policy for an in-depth article: a 22-year old recent J-school grad with a head full of Frankfurt School who thinks he's the first American ever to read Manufacturing Consent, or someone without the J-school degree who's been a practicing immigration lawyer for ten years? Universities that still offer BAs in journalism should be sued for educational malpractice. So the only people who should be allowed to write news articles and analysis are solely the experts involved in their fields? That's a great idea, but there are a few issues with that. Firstly, the people involved in fields like immigration policy are typically already busy doing the work in whatever field they work in and lack the time to write in-depth articles. Secondly, there are a lot of professionals out there that aren't too good at writing and might not have the best ability to translate complex ideas into something an average reader would be able to not only digest but also understand. Journalism school has its downsides and I would argue it needs to promote developing more secondary communication skills to give reporters an out when they inevitably crash from all of the pressure and low wages, but by the time I had earned by degree I had studied communication law including its history and application for years, learned the ins and outs of libel/slander, learned about to read complex reports, how to ask better interviewing questions, had a chance to study what not to do in reporting, hell even boring technical poo poo like the weird differences in Associate Press style guidelines, gained some pretty advance skills in layout and editing/taking photos, etc. etc. etc. What I ended up with was a far cry from "educational malpractice," but I certainly wish there was more honesty about how loving brutal being a reporter can be.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:23
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roymorrison posted:Yes I would like more and better journalism but, because of reasons you listed, I think that good "journalists" are typically not people who went to school for and are currently employed as journalists. Does that make sense? Journalism right now has such a massive filter on it that by the time the information gets to me I cant tell if it should be trusted. That's not because of "journalists", but rather because of the media organizations that employ them.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:28
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Awesome Welles posted:So the only people who should be allowed to write news articles and analysis How on earth did you get from A to B? I never went to journalism school, but wound up working as a journalist for a few years. Then I taught as an adjunct for a year, and was utterly appalled at the absolute nonsense journalistic 'theory' being taught by the academic sorts in J-school. You want to talk Gramsci instead of learning how to outwit a slippery interview subject? gently caress right off. Journalism is a vocation. If you need to be taught how to write, find another calling. The best journalists have had a solid mentor or two, and a lot of field experience.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:35
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Chokes McGee posted:Journalism really isn't unbiased and probably shouldn't ever be. That doesn't mean Yellow Journalism All Day Erry Day, or even being in the pocket of a certain person/candidate/whatever, but if you don't take some kind of stand on interpreting the issues you just throw up two conflicting sound bytes and go It feels a lot like people don't understand what "bias" is, which is large part of how we've gone from "reporting" journalism to "evangelical" journalism.
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Aug 22, 2016 20:49
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TheImmigrant posted:How on earth did you get from A to B? I thought that's what you might have been implying, so my bad if I just misread it. Journalism schools are hugely hit or miss and I support having more reporters studying more specialized fields on the side (for their own protection if anything else), but it sounds like you just taught at a lovely journalism school. I went to a university that was average at best and aside from a few classes that were horseshit (mainly due to the professors teaching them) I never felt like I was being pushed into learning some set idea of how to "outwit" people or that we avoided talking about complex figures or topics. On the contrary, communication law and history were classes I enjoyed the most as we had a ton of awesome discussions and studied tons of stories and controversies. Perhaps if what you went through is what a lot of reporters go through in college then maybe I lucked out. quote:If you need to be taught how to write, find another calling. There isn't anything wrong with going to school with the intention of studying journalism to learn advanced writing and interviewing skills, although it's clear it doesn't always work out that way for people and that's an issue. Personally, I would have liked it better if classes focused a bit more on logic/analysis and less on AP Stylebook: Do's and Don'ts (Also gently caress Commas).
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Aug 22, 2016 21:18
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My journalism school was great. Every teacher was a practicing reporter (one of my TV teachers did local packages on the weekend, and in addition she produced TV spots, hey-o) and we got taught poo poo like "how to give an interview" and "how to verify information." I don't know what that other guy's going on about with manufactured consent.
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Aug 22, 2016 21:22
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Actually, I do get what you're talking about, I just got lucky enough not to have to deal with any of that bullshit. But I've seen plenty of it in other majors - architecture especially seems to be a total cesspool, so I can imagine how frustrating it would be to have that. It's a big part of why I dropped my Poli Sci minor for English I had a very vocational sort of education, even with a traditional 4-year degree. Even most of my English classes were focused on producing publishable work (with the assumption you'd go on to an MFA, but still: workshops rather than theory).
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Aug 22, 2016 21:25
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Chokes McGee posted:Journalism really isn't unbiased and probably shouldn't ever be. That doesn't mean Yellow Journalism All Day Erry Day, or even being in the pocket of a certain person/candidate/whatever, but if you don't take some kind of stand on interpreting the issues you just throw up two conflicting sound bytes and go Thanks for this comprehensive description of everything that's wrong with the UK media (aka the entirety of the UK media).
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Aug 22, 2016 22:36
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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TheImmigrant posted:Journalism, in the journalist-as-gatekepper sense, is increasingly obsolete. There has never been greater access to information than what we enjoy today, and the hand-wringing I'm seeing on this thread seems to bemoan that 'incorrect' information is no longer being filtered out from what is available to the hoi polloi. People still go to journalists to provide them context. That context is provided by years of experience and professionalism in whatever topics the journalists specialize in. I'd take the word of Robert Fisk or Seymour Hersh on war reporting over some two-bit "internet expert".
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Aug 24, 2016 09:23
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:People still go to journalists to provide them context. That context is provided by years of experience and professionalism in whatever topics the journalists specialize in. I'd take the word of Robert Fisk or Seymour Hersh on war reporting over some two-bit "internet expert". let me introduce you to this medium blog which...
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Aug 24, 2016 10:04
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:People still go to journalists to provide them context. That context is provided by years of experience and professionalism in whatever topics the journalists specialize in. I'd take the word of Robert Fisk or Seymour Hersh on war reporting over some two-bit "internet expert". Plenty of non-internet experts and professional journalists also think Fisk's and Hersh's recent work has been poo poo, so there's that.
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Aug 24, 2016 10:13
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:People still go to journalists to provide them context. That context is provided by years of experience and professionalism in whatever topics the journalists specialize in. I'd take the word of Robert Fisk or Seymour Hersh on war reporting over some two-bit "internet expert". Too bad they aren't able to provide this context when talking about the "latest study". That sort of reporting has done a great deal to undermine public trust in the medical and science fields.
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Aug 24, 2016 14:30
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Main Paineframe posted:people feel less tied to a particular brand The biggest problem is that because republishing stories is now fast and instant, both by other news outlets and via social media sharing, the competitive advantage of information doesn't really exist any more. People value reporting, and they value the big news brands, but they don't value it enough to pay for it when there is always someone who will regurgitate their stories and give them out for free. The same problem is why journalism has become increasingly "editorialized" and "evangelical": They can't distinguish themselves by information any more, but they can distinguish themselves with style, controversy, and sensation.
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Aug 24, 2016 15:02
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FactsAreUseless posted:Even most of my English classes were focused on producing publishable work Where did you take English classes? Because clearly I went to the wrong ones
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Aug 24, 2016 16:33
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Solkanar512 posted:Too bad they aren't able to provide this context when talking about the "latest study". That sort of reporting has done a great deal to undermine public trust in the medical and science fields. There are some eye-opening chapters in The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin, which covers the battle over vaccines in the US, that talk about these issues. I don't have the book handy to pull out a few excerpts, but this Washington Post article sheds some light on it: quote:Mnookin's contention that the controversy would not have achieved staying power without uncritical or at times blatantly irresponsible reporting by numerous media outlets - including NBC, the Huffington Post, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post (
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Aug 24, 2016 16:58
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Unrelated, I also want to say what the hell is up with these Facebook posts from news outlets doing live streams? Some of the ones that are just live discussions or roundtables or whatever are fine, but there are so many being done by big outlets like the NYT that are just interviews between two people being streamed over a horribly shakey smartphone camera. What's the loving point? Just use a real camera or get a tripod or something.
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Aug 24, 2016 17:11
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Chokes McGee posted:Where did you take English classes? Because clearly I went to the wrong ones
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Aug 24, 2016 17:47
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Solkanar512 posted:Too bad they aren't able to provide this context when talking about the "latest study". That sort of reporting has done a great deal to undermine public trust in the medical and science fields. It's not all the journalists' fault. A lot of times researchers when explaining their work to the press do not put their work in the proper context partly because if they were to actually do that it would diminish the importance and relevance of their work and at least in applied science, partly because they don't really understand the current technology. They do the same stuff in scientific journal papers, too. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Aug 24, 2016 |
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Aug 24, 2016 19:26
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Where can I apply for a job manipulating the news
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Aug 24, 2016 19:59
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You have to slaughter a conservative and bathe in their blood to pledge your undying loyalty to George Soros before you can be accepted 
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Aug 24, 2016 20:13
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NigelsPoppet posted:Where can I apply for a job manipulating the news
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Aug 25, 2016 00:41
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blowfish posted:Thanks for this comprehensive description of everything that's wrong with the UK media (aka the entirety of the UK media). Well, not ALL UK Media Although it is a sorry state of affairs when a satirical magazine is also one of the best sources of journalism in the UK....
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Aug 25, 2016 16:18
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Good journalism is definitely still happening. From Mother Jones to Last Week Tonight to The Big Short, there is still deep investigative journalism. I think the main problem, why journalism is perceived to be hosed, is that the post-print/mainstream media consolidation hasn't really finished yet. I could be wrong, and this could be a case of oversimplifying the past, but it seems like journalism tends to rally around central figures, adopting their formats and methods. The early 1900's had McClure's and Sinclair, the mid 1900's had Gellhorn and Cronkite, we have these figures even if they aren't identified yet. The problem is it seems like there's nobody who's been around in the new media environment long enough to have built up unwavering trust from the public. Eventually there will be one, or several, and I imagine some form of network or another will build up around them. The majority of people will never be well-informed. They never have been. The goal should always be to have more people than before well-informed, and make sure sharp and inquisitive minds are turned towards the right targets, and are able to attack them in public using arguments crafted from those established journalists in a way that can shape public opinion.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:28
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It's kind of incredible that this thread has gone a full three pages without anyone pointing out that it's us--the news consumers--who have turbofucked journalism. And it's because everyone is a whiny dipshit about ads. I work for a mid-sized publishing company (12 or so community newspapers; dailies and weeklies mixed in; no market larger than about 200k) currently as an audience/data director and formerly as the digital advertising operations director and lemme tell you that printing newspapers is simply not profitable anymore because people have a stick up their asses about ads. The largest chunks of newspaper revenue used to be classifieds: that's almost entirely dried up because it was the most easily replaced. To make up for that loss of revenue, papers have tried time and time again to refine the advertising experience online only to be greeted with incredulity from an audience that expects reporting on city hall but doesn't want to sit through 15 seconds of pre-roll advertising before their video; or gets pissy about having to click an X to close an interstitial ad. The real bummer is that no form of media is immune; all I ever hear from friends/colleagues during NPR pledge weeks is them whining about the content being interrupted. The worst part is that it's already too late. Everyone who hasn't whitelisted journalism websites from their adblocker is to blame, but if everyone suddenly did whitelist every newspaper site, it's not like the revenue would flood back in. My company is lucky enough to also own some very profitable cable/fiber companies as well, and they keep the lights on and basically fund the papers as a public good of sorts. But I can tell you from a corporate perspective, publishing companies don't see their papers as profit generators, and every single daily paper you have in your towns is likely less than 5 years away from becoming a weekly, or losing a couple days (or going away altogether). And it's because no one likes ads.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:09
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^^^^ the ads companies hosed up big in the mid 2000s. Who would have guessed having ads starting at full volume like i am watching tv every time i go to an online newspaper main page would encourage people to get an adblocker?Venmoch posted:Well, not ALL UK Media Toplowtech fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 21:28
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Waffles Inc. posted:It's kind of incredible that this thread has gone a full three pages without anyone pointing out that it's us--the news consumers--who have turbofucked journalism. And it's because everyone is a whiny dipshit about ads.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:45
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I think there's ways ads can be done well. For example, my city's alt-newspaper The Stranger has been a free newspaper (albeit twice a week) and relies on it's ads. Their website is an easy read and features prominent ads next to the articles. I think it's the only time I've actually clicked on an ad and purchased something (it was tickets to see Aziz Ansari). Here's their main newspage: http://www.thestranger.com/slog
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Aug 25, 2016 21:54
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Waffles Inc. posted:And it's because no one likes ads. Ads suck, find a better business model.
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Aug 25, 2016 22:29
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WampaLord posted:Ads suck, find a better business model. Ads do work but they're a small to tiny cornerstone of a larger strategy. Spamming ads all over the place won't get you poo poo, even if they aren't blocked. There's a reason click through rates are measured in 0.01 percents. ... JOURNALISM
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Aug 26, 2016 00:34
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Waffles Inc. posted:It's kind of incredible that this thread has gone a full three pages without anyone pointing out that it's us--the news consumers--who have turbofucked journalism. And it's because everyone is a whiny dipshit about ads. No one likes ads because, as was said above, the ad industry hosed up royally at the start of the Internet age, and had just doubled down since. They made their product an annoyance at best, and an active detriment to using the sites hosting it at worst. That worst is all too common, even now.
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Aug 26, 2016 00:57
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:The ad experience online has been full of terrible bullshit since its inception. Pop-ups, pop-unders, downloaders, autoplay audio/video, belly fat banner ads, bloated Flash players, useless sponsored content, links to scams on otherwise legitimate sites. I could go on. Even with how much better things are today than the dark ages of the late 90s and early 2000s, it's still bad enough that it's unreasonable to expect an intelligent person to refrain from installing or selectively disabling an ad blocker because they want to passively support journalism. The ad-supported model is a dead end until the internet ad industry cleans its act up. Don't forget literal malware forcibly installed on your computer on page-visit that forces you to click ads whenever they appear on screen. Jesus loving Christ nothing will ever make me turn off my adblocker. Not even being denied access to some news websites.
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Aug 26, 2016 02:30
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Waffles Inc. posted:It's kind of incredible that this thread has gone a full three pages without anyone pointing out that it's us--the news consumers--who have turbofucked journalism. And it's because everyone is a whiny dipshit about ads. probably nobody has pointed that out because it is a really stupid angle
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Aug 26, 2016 02:41
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Toplowtech posted:^^^^ the ads companies hosed up big in the mid 2000s. Who would have guessed having ads starting at full volume like i am watching tv every time i go to an online newspaper main page would encourage people to get an adblocker? The damage is mostly done at this point. Nobody that has an ad blocker is going to turn it off out of sympathy, and the new installs aren't going to stop unless there's an industry-wide cleanup. That said, I don't think ad blockers are going to last once sites serving ads start developing countermeasures that aren't terrible. Why aren't there dynamic DOM/content obfuscators to make it incredibly hard to create working filters? Why are interstitial video ads blockable at all, why aren't you just serving the ad in the video stream? Chokes McGee posted:Ads do work but they're a small to tiny cornerstone of a larger strategy. Spamming ads all over the place won't get you poo poo, even if they aren't blocked. There's a reason click through rates are measured in 0.01 percents.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:20
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