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

Wait

[noundi]

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.

Isn't this every journalists job description?
 
Disclaimer: Yes I'm trying to say that journalism is a bullshit job. The non bullshit version of a journalist is called a researcher. A researcher provides data, often in form of experimental results, along with their conclusion. A journalist interprets (they say cites, but anybody who's ever been cited knows this is bullshit) "sources".

Re:Wait

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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 the vast majority of journalists are bad, produce poor work and actively damage serious discourse in our society, why should we care if there are a few diamonds in the rough?

Journalism is a bullshit job. They deal in bullshit, write bullshit, reprint bullshit, make up bullshit, bullshit about bullshit, and generally do an awful job at what they ostensibly claim to be doing. The reality is that most bloggers are at least on par with journalistic mainstream because what most journalists produce a) isn't very difficult to write and b) isn't of a very high standard.

This is nothing like programmers or actors or teachers or even lawyers. Each of these professions produces something of quantifiable worth; computer code, a performance, educated students, a legal representation. What do journalists produce? Reports? I can have PR men do that? Opinion? I can ask people on a park bench for more insight and expect to get it. Investigative journalism? Don't make me laugh.

The journalist is a jack of all trades and a master of none. Even the best their profession can produce can do little better investigation or writing than can be had from high school students and bloggers. What do good journalists go on to become? Editors. Writers. PR men. Wine reviewers. There is no journalistic gold standard, no technical training, no solid scale of merit. Journalists need no qualifications, and gain none over the course of their careers. Their skills are as nebulous as their results.

Journalism is the quintessential bullshit profession.

Now I'm sympathetic to the idea of professional and valuable journalists. But they are essentially a myth, or are so diluted that they may as well be. Journalists are not the fourth estate so lauded in political discourse. Where they are not removed from politics entirely, they can be found in intimate familiarity with those in power. In both cases, they wield significant power in an of themselves, and are frequently found abusing it. Lives, industries and indeed free countries have all been destroyed under the pen of journalists. Few have ever been created by them. That job lies with the pamphleteer, the writer, the philosopher and perhaps now the blogger.

There is a theory of journalism. But there is the practice of journalism. We are better off without the latter.

ZD does journalism? In what universe?

[bob_calder]

What idiot reads ZD FUD and thinks it's real? You may as well believe Fox News.