Misadventures In Online Journalism

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"

Comments

Re:Wait

[noundi]

Yes, it's a bullshit job. Then again, so is being a programmer, lawyer, salesman, investment banker, teacher.... Everybody thinks every other profession is less valuable than their own.

I'm sorry, is that what you think I meant? That I'm a researcher and hence I think that journalism is bullshit? You must have misunderstood me, I'm not a researcher thus it is not my profession. I still find journalism to be a complete and utter bullshit job and researcher not to be. Also I don't think that other professions are less valuable than mine. You seem to be a very egocentric person who thinks that the world thinks like you do which, I can assure you my friend, is not the case.

Not all journalism is good, just like not all programmers are good. But journalism is not a bullshit job. There are some bad ones out there, but the very idea of journalism is reporting, not interpreting, and that is an extremely valuable service. If you would like your information thoroughly researched and verified experimentally then good luck trying to negotiate the real fast-paced world where getting the latest information has strategic value.

There are poor programmers, there are poor doctors, there are poor pizza bakers, yet I have never in my life seen a good journalist. They only seem to be writing sensationalistic bullshit with the end purpose which is not to report, but is to sell a copy.

This is not a defense of sloppy reporting or for not verifying sources and facts, it's mostly a rebuttal to an incredibly broad and useless generalization about the profession of journalism.

No my dear sir, saying that there are a few journalists out there (whom by the way I would be very curious to know about) that don't write sensationalistic nonsense, and thus the profession of journalism should be respected IS an incredibly broad and useless generalization.
 
Journalism is bullshit, journalists cannot be trusted and they never report the truth unless the truth means monetary gain. They are as biased as your next door neighbour. But please, feel free to disprove me. I have a feeling most people relate with my side of the story already.