Slashdot Mirror
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism
The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some more. Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that) explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column translates and deconstructs Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson became the latest journo to bemoan the death of journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?) bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists.
Who exactly are they referring to?
- Political journalists, who help their sources insult people and ruin careers anonymously? Or do what Stephen Colbert pointed out was "the White House tells you what to write, you write it down, and print it."
- Sports journalists, who basically are professional sports fans, desperately clinging to rumor, conjecture, and hearsay?
- Business journalists, who often act as cheerleaders for a company's stock more than anything else?
- Slashdot editors? (enough said)
These are not the days of Bernstein, Woodward, Hersch, etc.
I am officially gone from
The wonders of the internet and the change they have brought about.(sigh)
When Ford mass produced the "A" and "T" a lot of buggy whip mfg., saddle mfg. and liveries went out of business. Hay production declined in favor of food crops.Horse breeders and trainers suffered. You might say a big industry went teats up. We simply didn't need their services or needed limited quantities. Before that Coach services were displaced by Rail services.
When News, Music and Movie industries cannot adapt to serve the needs/desires of their benefactors , they die like dinosaurs in a glacier. Of course there will be a lot of whining about lost jobs and hyperbole about the affected economy, but all in all, it's for the best and I welcome it. These were industries that were not friendly or really helpful to the benefactors (us) so their passing for something better is to be welcomed with open arms, minds and hearts. As for the displaced...They too will have to adapt. In the words of the Judge Smales character in the Movie Caddyshack " Well, Danny, the world needs ditchdiggers too."
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
for years the model was to sell the newspaper for the cost of print and let advertising cover everything else including the profits. in the late 1990's the newspapers should have bought up Ebay and Craigslist or at the very least started a competitor. instead the trust fund babies who run most of the newspapers allowed their content to be commoditized by Google, they lost the advertising market probably because they thought it was beneath them to go online. and now they are crying. the WSJ was an exception to this for a few years, but there are some good financial bloggers out there now that will give them a lot of competition.
I remember 10 years ago if you wanted to sell your apartment in NYC you had to advertise in the NY Times and pay their ridiculous rates. and the supposedly liberal pro-blue collar newspaper that the NY Times is supposed to be has the snobbiest RE section i've ever seen. on sundays you would see people walking around with a copy of the Real Estate section checking out buildings to buy in. these days the realtors still advertise in the NY Times but it's a generic add with the same properties that probably aren't on the market anymore and the goal is to get people to call the office. not to sell a specific property. all the properties for sale are listed on redfin, craiglist, MLS which is open to everyone now
and there have been so many new immigrants in the NYC area lately that it makes sense to advertise in their ethnic non-english newspapers as well.
We used to yell at the TV, complain at the breakfast table to our spouse, hit the steering wheel. If we were really engaged, we'd write a letter to the editor or call the radio station. There was no option for TV, except being in the right place at the right time (the tornado hit my trailer). Now, we can respond within seconds of an article being published, vent anger or correct mistakes. Add insight and expand the story. I find the comments more interesting than the story a surprising amount of the time.
I take it by your "government is always worse than private sector" bias that you're most likely american.
Here in Sweden the general consensus seems to be that SVT ("Sveriges Television" lit. "The swedish television") is the most reliable broadcaster while private ones are considered a lot less reliable by most people except for the extreme right who insist on SVT being "communist", "leftist" and "government controlled", they even use these descriptions now even though we currently have a right-wing coalition government.
What's important is that there is separation between government-funded media outlets and the government that funds them, not that governments shouldn't fund media outlets (SVT has a lot of advantages over privately funded television networks, such as how they can broadcast shows that only appeal to a fairly small subset of the population while the private networks prefer constantly going for the least common denominator).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Bad writing has don its damage as well. TFA was BORING. I read maybe the first four paragraphs and almost fell asleep. The guy writes as if he's being paid by the word.
When a blog is informative and readable, and the newspaper article reads like the writer didn't really want to write it but slogged though it for the money, why would I read the paper?
Free Martian Whores!
Let's see, the big news stories this week: (1) Tiger Woods gets in a fender bender after he gets in a fight with his wife, and (2) the White House party crashers apparently lied about other stuff, too.
Journalism is already dead.
Pants-shitting cowards afraid of gay marriage, pot, change and any boogeyman they learn about so long as it can be 'fought' by the military. The boogeyman of climate change is of course not real because tanks and guns cannot stop it in any way.
Liberals won't cut social spending for fear of Americans starving because they have no money for food conservatives won't cut military spending for fear of attacks by groups against which traditional military is fairly useless.
It's all fear. We need to harden the fuck up as a country.
Blar.
Neither of you replied to precisely the point I made -- you can't trust anything you read or hear in the media right now because there is no standard of truth to which they are legally bound.
I mentioned only Fox News because they're the ones who fought for the right to lie to the public, not because I think there's any difference between them and the rest. In fact my argument implied the opposite -- that I think all media can and will lie to us at any time for ratings.
You can find the reporting on the case from whichever outlet you prefer by Googling something like "fox news truth first amendment florida court case" which worked for me, although several of the headlines seem to read things like "Fox News gets okay to misinform public".
I love how you put words in my mouth, by the way, without asking what kind of regulation I'd insinuated at all because you believe that government people are inherently more crooked than private sector people.
I believe strongly that Fox News should have lost this case, that knowingly publishing falsehoods and claiming them to be true ought to be illegal for any media outlet, and I believe most of the American public expects this to be the case already when it clearly is not.
PS the First Amendment is government intervention. Jeez.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
As one of those who put up some gripes with modern-day journalism, the biggest problem I was alluding to was not the censorship by the news organizations, which blog-based journalism could remedy, but 5 much more critical problems:
1. The mixing of editorializing and reporting. The telltale sign for that is only 1 major source for a story rather than 2 or 3 sources (some of whom disagree with each other).
2. The mix of advertising and reporting. This is the big one for the business press. For instance, a story with a headline of "CEO John Doe of Initech announces launch of FlimFlam" combined with an advertising link to buy shares of Initech.
3. The dependency of journalists on their sources. This causes all sorts of problems, the most common of which is that the source can threaten to cut off the reporter if the reporter doesn't print something favorable to the source. This is a huge problem in political reporting, because reporter's careers tend to depend on getting and keeping insider sources.
4. If 2-3 sources say the same thing, and it's not dug into more deeply, reporters will not infrequently incorrectly assume that the 2-3 sources aren't organized. A classic case of this is the Pentagon paying retired generals to stick to a party line, while reporters were using the retired generals as independent analysts (kudos to the reporters who did look more deeply and figure that one out).
5. A perception by a lot of news organizations that speed beats accuracy.
I am officially gone from
People like to heap scorn on traditional journalism, but there's a very good reason for fact-checking, and there's a very good reason for objectivity. I'm all for new journalism and I read plenty of blogs. I do think that form of journalism is, more or less, the future. But let's not be quite so hasty to discard everything that made traditional journalism what it was (even if it's tarnished, in this day and age), and let's not be quite so quick to put all our faith in blogging. I'm confident that a more concrete code of ethics will develop in blogging, and bloggers who lie and distort will get weeded out just like traditional journalists who've committed the same transgressions tend to be (eventually), but I'm not quite ready to hang up my sad little hat with the press pass or my dreaded red editor's pen just yet.
Events in recent memory when the "traditional" press has failed us:
How many times can you expect to fuck up and still receive a pay check? The press played a role in the eight year clusterfuck of the Bush administration. Too bad if you're out of work, too. Payback's a bitch, aint it?
Holy crap man, thanks for reminding me about Crossfire, I just went and watched it again. It's hilarious to see how they just don't get it that he's not a journalist.
I think you have a point, but I also think its because he comes from a comedy background where blunt honesty is pretty common.