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Chicago Tribune Stops the Journatic Presses
theodp writes "In April, the Chicago Tribune touted its investment in and use of news outsourcer Journatic. 'We're excited to partner with Journatic, both as an investor and as a customer,' said Dan Kazan, the Trib's Sr. VP of Investments. 'Journatic will expand Tribune's ability to deliver relevant hyperlocal content to our readers, and we believe that many other publishers and advertisers will benefit from its services as well.' That was then. In a Friday-the-13th letter to readers, the Tribune announced a plagiarized and fabricated story has prompted the paper to suspend its relationship with Journatic. The move comes two weeks after Journatic's standards and practices were called into question by This American Life, which noted several Journatic-produced stories had appeared this year on TribLocal online with false bylines. Explaining why he went public about his experience at Journatic, reporter Ryan Smith said he felt 'people should know how their local newspapers are being hollowed out.'"
Journatic: Go with us and you can fire all those expensive reporters on the ground and we'll replace them with cheap freelancers for next-to-nothing! And you won't take any hit in quality, honest. Hey...would we lie to you, pal?
Chicago Tribune: Yay, sounds great! We like money. And words are hard, 'specially the long ones.
Journatic: While we're at it, just between us, we also have some prime Florida real estate we can let you have for a steal...
Chicago Tribune: Yay, more money!!!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
For some reason there was no link to the original source that kinda got the scoop. So here's the link to 'Switcheroo' which is This American Life's episode that covered this. It's free to stream, you can click the third link to Act II just to hear the coverage of this thing. I listened to it on the radio when it aired and sent it around as I found it really interesting (also a follow up here). There's a funny part where Ryan Smith is revealing everything about Journatic and he makes a comment about how it's not what journalism is supposed to be and Sarah Koenig says, "You are so fired. You realize that, right?" And then there's this odd pause and he says "Yeah, I am I guess. I'm okay with that." Another great part of that clip is when the owner of Journatic (CEO Brian Timpone) comes on and openly talks about it and defends his company (quite unsuccessfully, in my opinion). But hats off to him, he is a huge fan of TAL and so instead of giving one of those canned "could not be reached for comment" they got a real person arguing for his business venture. He actually argues that this saves newspapers money and therefore allows them report on the important stuff while outsourcing the inane stuff to Filipino freelancers who get absolutely no credit (and ridiculously low wages) for their (often correspondingly subpar) work.
My work here is dung.
Does that mean "what's happening in this group of 5 houses in this cul-de-sac"?
Seems either pointless, boring, or hyper-gossipy.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I highly recommend review of the This American Life Episode referenced in TFA.
Although broadcast only a few weeks ago, I'm not sure when TAL recorded the interview. That said, the enthusiasm of the company's CEO was striking given the strong line of questioning posed by the This American Life Interviewer. I would imagine the interview was fairly recent.
Although conceding that the stories sometimes lacked full detail on the things going on on the community being covered, with base material consisting often of only a quick phone interview to get a quote and a press release to provide the story -- Journastic CEO Brian Timpone did clalim a degree of passion for enabling some form of coverage for stories that may simply go unreported on.
This kind of enthusiasm for idealistic coverage of Norman Rockwell's Small Town America really files in the face of the general approach of the company to the job at hand -- which included a policy to use falsified (read: made-up) by-lines. That is to say, the off-shore reporters writing the stories for Journastic and then syndicated to newspapers like the Chicago Tribune had a field in the story submission setting for a name to associated with the story. Amazing.
News has been outsourced for years. Read a newspaper and see for yourselves how many stories are AP, Reuters, AFP or syndicated from the NYT, WA Post or LAT. This trend was evident in the early nineties to anyone paying attention to the papers they read. It was not unusual for the front section of the SF dailies to be mostly wire service content and advertising. The net didn't kill the newspaper industry, they were busy digging their own grave before the net became popular. The net just helped them fall into the hole they dug.
From the article:
"offering to pay $50 in âoehush moneyâ to anyone who reported getting a request"
A whole $50? What is that like.... a couple of drinks at Starbucks?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Just another way to say "it just doesn't matter where you are on the Internet".
And apparently it doesn't much matter the quality of your work either, so long as you're doing something.
Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That Ryan Smith guy sure can whine. He is all upset because someone figured out you don't need high-priced workers to copy daily police reports, real estate sales, or sports scores.
...News That's Fit To Print! ;-)
But the in-depth investigative work done for This American Life has been the most compelling, top-notch journalism I've ever seen or heard. They've also done great work covering different aspects of the recent financial crises (I suppose one could argue it's just been one drawn-out, multifaceted crisis rather than several).
I'd like more of that and less David Sedaris, please.
#DeleteChrome
Print is dead.
Yeah, right.
We did receive News from abroad if that is what you are calling "Outsourcing", but it was not anything like what is happening now. I'm not sure how you can even draw a parallel. Let me give you a brief yet well known example.
Carl Marx was a writer, and wrote stories for various news papers in the US. Those were printed as Opinion Pieces, not News. When it came to Newspapers with interest, and later broadcasting media, they sent reporters that were trained in and practiced Journalism across the globe to get "News". Those stories were of course called "News" and not "Opinion Pieces". The difference between the two is so vast that there should no way of confusing what was "News" with what was "Outsourced".
"News" from any source was never perfect and not infallible. Stories had to be about things that people were interested in, which kept the "News" selling and the companies profitable. A story that may harm someone in certain positions may sometimes not make it to print. Other times, stories were printed in a way to present a preferable scenario instead of what was really going on. Those things were not the "Normal" and when caught became scandalous. News, up until very recent times had concerns for their Journalistic reputation and abilities.
People knew how important "News" was to keeping people in power honest. Monopoly laws prevented 2 people from owning every form of media we have and see, which is just about the position we are currently in. Think about that last statement long and hard, then look at who owns 99% of all "News" currently. (My percentage may be a bit off due to "Bloggers", but it should be very very close.)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.