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Explaining the Lack of Quality Journalism In the Internet Age (gawker.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-it's-so-easy-to-complain-about-it dept.

schnell writes: While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article argues that the inescapable problem is that you need a paying (in some form) audience (of a large enough size) to do it. There are plenty of free "news" sources to be found online, especially blogs simply regurgitating and putting a spin on wire news reports. But as the article notes, "The audience for quality prestige content is small. Even smaller than the actual output of quality prestige content, which itself is smaller than most media outlets like to imagine." Even highly respected news sources like the New York Times are resorting to wine clubs, and the Washington Post is giving free subscriptions to Amazon Prime members to drive more corporate synergy and revenue. Rich parent companies are giving up on boutique, high-quality, niche journalism projects like ESPN's Grantland and Al Jazeera America because there simply aren't enough TV viewers/online ad clickers to pay the bills. So how do we reconcile our collectively-stated desire for high quality journalism with our (seeming) collective unwillingness to pay for it?

50 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Pot, meet kettle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article

    Ok, stopped reading here.

    1. Re:Pot, meet kettle by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

      While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article

      Ok, stopped reading here.

      In defense of Gawker: TFA doesn't say what the summary says it says. TFA explains why journalism is mostly garbage. It does NOT say, as the summary claims, that the problem is getting worse, and journalism was once better than it is today. Journalism has always been 90% crap (Sturgeon's Law). In decades past, journalists almost missed Watergate, and the Monica Lewinski scanal was first reported by tabloids. The mainstream media was too busy reporting on the millions of abused and murdered children by Satanic Ritual Abuse. Only years later, after many lives were ruined by false accusations, did it become clear that the actual number of SRA victims was zero. Crappy journalism is nothing new.

    2. Re:Pot, meet kettle by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ok, stopped reading here.

      Oh, you missed the part where the answer was "give Gawker more money so we don't go bankrupt".

      The fall in journalistic quality is easy to blame on "SJW!", but that's just a symptom. The larger problem is the abandonment of any pretense of objectivity or journalistic integrity by all the mainstream outlets. For most, any scandal involving a Democrat "isn't newsworthy" or "is a local story" or if the story won't die it can be dismissed as a GOP hit job. Swap that for Fox and the rest.

      Stories that "carry the desired narrative" are run without even the thinnest shred of editorial fact-checking, while stories that oppose the narrative are simply buried. This was particularly egregious during the Iraq War, when for example a blatantly-Photoshopped image of a burning hospital (the smoke from a nearby building that was hit was just copy-pasted to make the hospital look like is was burning too) was published by AP and run by a great number of newspapers. Even a glance at the image showed it to be fake - you can't just duplicate smoke for goodness sake - but everyone ran it because everyone was against the US being there, and wanted us to be the villains.

      "Truthiness" has replaced truth in journalism, and it's not SJWs or the left or Fox, it's everyone. Turns out people won't pay much for low-quality fiction, and revenue is tanking everywhere. It's not "the internet", it's the "politics first" approach. There's way more entertaining fiction out there, with way better special effects than poorly-Photoshopped images.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    3. Re:Pot, meet kettle by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Journalism jumped the shark long before they could blame the Internet for their problems. The ability to do your own fact checking and route around your local news outlet just makes it easier to recognize bullshit and the editor's pet political agenda for what it is.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  2. We never had it by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We never had quality journalism in the first place. People look at history through rose colored glasses, yet journalists have been lying to the people for years.

    1. Re:We never had it by wizkid · · Score: 2

      Yep. The mainstream journalistic sources are garbage. NYT, forbes etc are so influenced by corporate management that anything they write is slanted to their views. They go for sensationalism and blow off little things like facts.

      --
      I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong :)
    2. Re: We never had it by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      I understand the problem. The problem is that the old journalist media and the new journalist media is having problems making money. However the premise here is that it is due to the fact that the common folk won't pay for quality journalism like we used to. That is a faulty premise because we never had quality journalism in the first place. The correct question is how can we make the common folk pay us like they used to for our previous product?

    3. Re:We never had it by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2

      This. The phrase "if it bleeds it leads" existed long before the Internet.

    4. Re:We never had it by swb · · Score: 3

      Do think this is always true, and if so, how do you explain something like the NY Times publication of the Pentagon Papers or the Washington Post investigation into Watergate?

      In both of those cases, the paper went heavily against establishment interests, which would presumably mean for the most part, corporate interests, too.

    5. Re:We never had it by castionsosa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are ways to have quality journalism... but it starts with having people that are trusted to actually do fair and accurate reporting as opposed to the usual stuff we encounter.

      This isn't going to be solved by a business. Want good news, we will have to move to a decentralized structure, similar to PGP's reputation, and in some ways, similar to Slashdot's moderation system.

      First, articles would be signed by their maker. This can be a nym or real name, poster's choice.
      Second, there would be people who sign that the person's content is up to par, and this would be a positive or negative value, rating the person (not the article.)
      Third, someone reading it can place their trust in the second set of parties. As said in a previous Slashdot posting, the trust level would be a floating point value from 0 to 1, where 0 means the trust is ignored, a 1 means it is heeded.

      This way, anyone can post, but in general, it would allow people to have a set of trusted article reviewers, and filter out the signal from the noise fairly easily. Since there is no single point of failure, it would be resistant from various attack methods.

      As for a method of moving articles, why not just go back to a NNTP-like protocol, store, forward, and expire when disk space allocated hits a high water mark. Any modifications to the articles posted would be immediately detected by a broken signature. For signatures and reputation, OpenPGP packets can easily handle this.

      tl;dr, decentralize things, have multiple parties vet news article writers in a secure fashion.

    6. Re: We never had it by Frobnicator · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem is that the old journalist media and the new journalist media is having problems making money.

      I think that is part of it. The financial concerns are also related to the larger number of news outlets, the 24/7 news cycle, instant online publication, and search engine rankings.

      Let's review a few decades ago, back when there was a better ratio of good journalism to bad journalism...

      A few decades ago to get all the news outlets an individual could talk to the local affiliate of CBS, NBC, ABC, and possibly a few additional locals that weren't affiliated with the big three. For a big public statement that meant a few phone calls to schedule a common time, up to six reporters come visit bringing their photographer, and you were done. For a smaller public statement it meant talking to even less, maybe just the local unaffiliated reporters or only one major reporter. There might be a few calls from distant papers that want to run the story, but those few initial interviews all generated high quality original reports for the networks. The reporters actually came out to interview, news stories via phone calls were rare. Since there were limited news outlets they each had a fairly big piece of the pie when it came to revenues from ads and subscriptions, so they could pay more for better reporters. All of them combined to give much better journalism. When one outlet wanted to cover something done by another sometimes they would rewrite the stories off the wire, but generally there was an actual discussion to those having the newsworthy experience.

      Contrast with today.

      If something is big news there are a huge number of media companies that want to talk about it. There are so many outlets that each one individually gets a tiny sliver of the interested viewers, so they have less money to invest in the story from relatively fewer advertisement eyeballs. Instead of investing time and money doing investigation and contacting the original sources (tending toward better quality journalism), they quickly rewrite the existing story and publish it immediately in an effort to show up early in web searches, giving worse quality journalism. For the individual or company with the newsworthy event, instead of being contacted by a handful of local reporters they get calls and emails from hundreds of them across the globe, each asking for a statement immediately for publication. Generally there is no opportunity to get back to them, no opportunity to leave a message; if they cannot provide a statement with that first phone call the article gets a line "company was not immediately available for comment." From discussions with some reporter friends in the past, today's reporters frequently write the story first and then contact the newsmakers for a quote in the hope to fill in a quote that meets the story they wrote rather than talk to the people first and write the story based on what was learned.

      So summing it up:

      • * Fewer news agencies meant individuals could talk to everyone, versus today's many unanswered phone calls
      • * Fewer news agencies meant more filtering of stories, versus today's unfiltered deluge of reports
      • * Fewer news agencies meant more money per reporter, versus today's many reporters with no budget
      • * Fewer better funded reporters meant better stories with original content, versus today's low-paid reporters who do a quick rewrite
      • * Daily publication meant time to write based on the facts, versus today's rush for an early story that doesn't have time for facts

      Generally when you get a low quality news article you can figure out who the original source was, who it was that actually sent a real live human being reporter to talk in person with another real life human being, and that version of the article will have quality journalism.

      --
      //TODO: Think of witty sig statement
    7. Re:We never had it by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Like most generalizations, that's an exaggeration. I know because I'm almost 60 years old now, and I actually remember the way things used to be, and not with rose-colored glasses. Most things are way better than they used to be, but journalism isn't one of those things.

      Journalism were never perfect; like any human institution it had its faults and biases. But it used to work far, far better than it does today. Take science reporting; if you lived in a major-ish city the leading newspaper in your town probably had a reporter dedicated to covering science topics -- sometimes more than one (thanks, Sputnik!). When there wasn't a major story like the moon landing those reporters churned out weekly science supplements.

      We can actually measure the declinein dedicated science reporting by counting the number of newspapers with weekly science supplements. According to the Columbia Journalism Review in 1989 95 American newspapers had science supplements. By 2008 that had dropped to 35, and as of 2013 there were only 19 science supplements left. So when you have a science related story like climate change, or Ebola, the people the public turns to for information on those things have no more understanding of science or mathematics than they do.

      There have been similar measurable declines in foreign affairs coverage as well, and while relatively more people are getting news from non-print media like TV those news sources have been increasingly moving to cheap, profitable, but less informative opinion "journalism".

      Now there are some bright spots as well, it's not all doom and gloom. I think some of the better infotainment shows like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight are tremendous assets, taking the place of news/opinion magazines for younger people today and in often doing that pretty well. I think their obvious snarkiness is actually less dangerous than the implicit biases of journalism back in the day. But there's no substitute for wearing out shoe leather tracking down facts, something that's in decline across the board.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:We never had it by HiThere · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's true that the garbage journalism has always heavily outweighed the quality journalism. It's also true that there have been periods in the past that were either worse or nearly as bad as the current state of events.

      OTOH, it's also true that quality journalism is usually only recognized retrospectively. Some exceptions are "the muckrakers", like Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) and, at a much later date, Racheal Carlson (Silent Spring). Currently there seems to be almost no memory of prior quality journalism, which *is* a change that is probably attributable to a combination of TV and the Internet. When people are drowning in information, they tend to set their filters too tight, so weak signals are lost.

      But I *don't* think it's a matter of economics. I think it's a matter of "it's easier to generate garbage than quality" and "information overload". When people were hungry for news they not only tended to trust it more, they tended to think about it more. This doesn't happen when you're checking your e-mail every 5 minutes. (Or twitter, or facebook...supply your favorite noisy media channel.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  3. Who cast the first stone? by skovnymfe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who cast the first stone? Did people stop reading newspapers because they were becoming shit filled with advertisements and no content, or did the newspapers become shit filled with advertisements and no content because people stopped reading them?

    The trend I've observed was that people used to buy newspapers, but then free newspapers, and later online newspapers, filled with ads and ADHD-quality content started becoming a thing, and they rather quickly eliminated their competition, or at the very least forced the competition to fight on their level, which in the end hasn't turned out well for anyone.

  4. Cheap & Lazy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Real journalism is hard work. Hard work costs money. People found out that they could put up blogs like Gawker, HuffPo, Tmblr, and Slashdot where they could copy free stuff for use as clickbait. It cost them little or nothing and the clicks/ads made them rich.

    Everyone else tried to follow that model. Now there are few real journalists and even fewer good investigative journalists, so we're fed a contrant stream of click bait like Kim Kardashian's ass.

  5. The Internet is Not the Answer by Geste · · Score: 3, Informative

    This recent book (The Internet is Not the Answer) by Andrew Keen covers this area -- call it "the death of journalism" -- pretty well. A very good, but very sad, read.

    1. Re:The Internet is Not the Answer by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Getting rid of advertising would fix the problem.
      (I admit that's a hypothesis, but it's one I'm willing to try)

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  6. Nobody actually wants it by captaindomon · · Score: 2

    People aren't willing to pay for it, because they don't really want it. It was subsidized as a sort of "tax" on people paying for access to news, i.e. the newspaper used some of it's revenues for in-depth articles that only a tiny portion of its reader base actually read. Now that news is pretty much free across the board, nobody wants to pay to read twenty pages of someone else's opinion, especially with the plethora of other entertainment out there. They'd rather watch a cable news anchor argue about it for twenty minutes with a guest instead.

    --
    Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
  7. Obvious anwer by Bugler412 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    online advertising business models cannot support the salaries and infrastructure of a proper formal news organization, therefore the quality drops to a level that is supportable by the business.

    1. Re:Obvious anwer by kencurry · · Score: 2

      online advertising business models cannot support the salaries and infrastructure of a proper formal news organization, therefore the quality drops to a level that is supportable by the business.

      For a while I thought that it was not about the story, it was about the group discussion/posts. That used to be the slashdot success for me. But that model has degraded also. Sad to say.

      --
      sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
  8. "Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The rise of "social justice" has meant that good journalism is deemed "intolerant", "bigoted", "racist", "sexist", "homophobic", "transphobic", and any number of similar false accusations.

    Take what's happening in Europe right now. We see an influx of young men, many of them clearly with violence and rape on their minds (as we've seen in Cologne, Paris, and other cities), entering Europe illegally. Yet despite this being a form of an invasion by hostile foreign invaders, we never see it described as such in the media. Instead, they try to sugarcoat the reality by using terms like "migrants" or "refugees", because not doing so would result in these media outlets getting attacked by the "social justice" crowd.

    We see it happening in America, too. Lately there have been a small number of cases of black youth violently attacking police officers, typically after being confronted for some crime these youth had committed, and then the police officers do the only reasonable thing and defend themselves using their guns. Not wanting to be falsely accused of being "racist" by the "social justice" supporters, the media ends up putting more focus on blaming the police officers, and they only briefly, if even at all, mention how the youth were fully responsible for what happened.

    The media should start to report on the whole "social justice" situation itself. This would help free them from the shackles that "social justice" currently imposes on the media. The media should make it more widely known that the "social justice" community is very loud, yet actually quite small. It's mostly made up of failed academics, angry lesbians and transsexuals, and weak white men who feel guilty about incidents that happened decades or centuries before they were even born. Emphasis should be put on their hypocrisy, and how their tactics are an extreme form of the bullying that they claim to despise.

    When they're seen for the failures that they are, the "social justice" community starts to look like a total joke, and the media won't have to worry about putting politically correct twists on stories. They can just go back to reporting the facts, even if it makes a small number of "social justice" folk feel "offended".

    1. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What is it with SlashDot lately, with all these right-wing idiots coming in, derping their right-wing talking points? Go away please.

    2. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That type of attitude from the left is what's going to get Trump into the White House in a year.

      The simple fact is GamerGate is a backlash against the idea that being a normal American is evil. Keep in mind there are plenty of minorities in GamerGate. They don't want to see games destroyed "for their benefit" any more than any other Gamer does.

    3. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's highly amusing to see SocJus'ers prove what the GP is saying through their responses here. The GP made an in-depth, intelligent, rational comment. Yet instead of trying to refute the points, we see people like you and some others here immediately resorting to the abusive SocJus tactics that the GP describes: name-calling and false accusations ("Donald", "right-wing idiot", "idiot"). The best evidence to support the GP's claims is not in the comment itself, but in how SocJus'ers react to the comment exactly as it predicted they would.

    4. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Gamergate certainly had an effect. Many people, when faced with hostile dogmatic intrusion into their lives, reflexively polarized to oppose it. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it was a disaster. Gamers were villainized and social acceptance of gaming lost decades of progress, and social change became a dirty word and many middle-of-the-road people were polarized into extreme positions.

    5. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Old97 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The far left and the far right are both autocratic. Taking an extreme view requires a high degree of certainty which correlates to a closed mind.

      --
      Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
    6. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Jawnn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Take what's happening in Europe right now. We see an influx of young men, many of them clearly with violence and rape on their minds (as we've seen in Cologne, Paris, and other cities), entering Europe illegally. Yet despite this being a form of an invasion by hostile foreign invaders, we never see it described as such in the media. Instead, they try to sugarcoat the reality by using terms like "migrants" or "refugees", because not doing so would result in these media outlets getting attacked by the "social justice" crowd.

      Oversimplify much? I mean, I get it, nuance is pretty much beyond you, but jeezuz... Do you really have only a brush that paints entire groups of people with the color you chose? You don't consider it even remotely possible that the vast majority of Syrian refugees a fleeing for their fucking lives?

      Let's be clear, Middle Eastern culture, in general, has a long way to go when it comes to gender issues. In that culture, unescorted women are fair game for just about anything. In Germany, such an attitude is unacceptable and is, IMO, grounds for tossing their ignorant, mysoginistic asses back on a boat. But to suggest that every single immigrant is possessed of such attitudes and incapable of change is absurd.

      We see it happening in America, too. Lately there have been a small number of cases of black youth violently attacking police officers, typically after being confronted for some crime these youth had committed, and then the police officers do the only reasonable thing and defend themselves using their guns. Not wanting to be falsely accused of being "racist" by the "social justice" supporters

      Generalize much? After a career in emergency services that spanned three decades, I probably have more respect and sympathy for law enforcement than most, and I will be the first to say that pointing a gun, even a convincing replica, at a cop is a good way to get yourself shot. Race has nothing to do with that. On the other hand, the video footage in some of these cases makes it pretty fucking clear that there are some bad cops out there.

    7. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by martinux · · Score: 3, Informative

      From what I've saw of them this may be true of some people flying the GamerGate flag but there are people who are vociferously ethics only who don't like all of the identity politics crosstalk.

      This is perhaps informative (unless one believes that the majority of the respondents are being disingenuous) http://gamepolitics.com/2015/0...

      "I asked my first question, “What is GamerGate?” because that will be asked at the upcoming SPJ AirPlay discussion on August 15 and I wanted to compare answers."

      "Their top-voted response explained, “GamerGate is a movement dedicated to fighting for ethics in (gaming) journalism and against censorship and the politicization of (gaming) media and games. It arose after several corruption scandals in the gaming media, attacks on the gamer identity and attempts by the gaming media and ‘cultural critics’ to force a political ideology down the throats of gamers.”"

      I guess that there is a chance that a much larger group of people (including international Gamergaters?) that agree with your analysis missed Brad Glasgow's questions but assuming this isn't the case the group consensus seems to be focused on ethics.

      Ultimately I accept that people are drawn to the group for different reasons but I think it's reasonable, if one is going to generalise, to look at the majority opinion and use it as a basis of describing the group.

    8. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by orgelspieler · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What's with the scare quotes? Social justice is the notion that everyone in a society deserves justice. Pretty simple really. I think refugees deserve justice. I think rape victims deserve justice. I think hedge fund managers deserve justice. I think transsexuals deserve justice. The list goes on. You do what is right in your society, and your society should do right by you. Even if you do wrong, you still deserve justice (it just might be bad for you).

      What would you like to call people fleeing Syria because of the violence there? I don't think "refugee" is a sugar coat, it is just a helpful term signifying that the person is not from the country. Words seem very important to you, but I find it interesting that you don't offer what terminology should be used. Do you really think it would be meaningful for CNN to talk about the "hostile foreign invading influx" in Cologne? Nobody would know what the fuck you were talking about. If you say they were refugees, everybody has a better picture what you mean.

      Give me an example of what you think the "'social justice' crowd" is and how they would go about attacking media outlets. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around that. Would it be a twitter campaign? Oh noes! However will their stock price recover from such a horrible long-lasting event?!

      Let's talk about police officers next. I find it sad that you think the "only reasonable thing" a police officer can do in ANY circumstance would be to shoot an unarmed youth. There are several other reasonable things that other police forces across the planet do, that don't end up with dead unarmed people. Surely our cops are bright enough to figure some of these alternatives out. It might also help if they don't give people shit on purpose trying to get their dander up. Take the guy with the bright headlights, for example. What crime did Deven Guilford commit?

      So now we get to the real meat of your argument. That the media should report on social justice as if it is some breaking news story. Well, this probably makes perfect sense in your head, because you are using social justice to mean some bizarre mix of things you don't like (although you haven't really defined it). Luckily, most people understand that social justice isn't really a news story so much as an extension of the social contract. You may not like that we try to treat people with dignity and respect, but we do. And I think society is better for it.

      There are other ways we could go. Assume all refugees are rapists. Allow cops to be judge jury and executioner. Declare everyone who disagrees with you is weak or angry or irrational. No thank you. I would choose social justice over these other options any day.

      I could make the comment that news outlets aren't covering the lawsuit against the Center for Medical Progress. And then I could claim that it was some vast anti-choice conspiracy to ignore the crimes of fraudulent so-called journalists. I could even throw in some scare quotes. But I realize that it's probably just because the suit hasn't progressed very far, and it's not clear if it will, so there's no real reason to devote a lot of news time to it. Likewise, CNN's use of the word refugee probably isn't a conspiracy. And maybe, just maybe, news outlets blame police for shooting unarmed youth because they hold police to a higher standard (as do most of their viewers).

    9. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Fragnet · · Score: 2

      Yes, Gameragaters are pro good journalism (not fans of Fox, by the way) and generally libertarian. They are socially liberal. Most of them identify themselves as being on left politically. They are pro gay rights, for example. They are equality feminists. They are anti-racist.

      What they're not is believers in conspiracy theories ("the patriarchy"), poor math (rape and sexual assault statistics) and don't see women as victims in modern western society. They think Bruce Jenner being handed a woman of the year award is utterly absurd. They're against the political correctness, safe spaces and other weapons of the far left, used to shut down robust debate and argument on any and every issue.

      What's not to like.

    10. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by XXongo · · Score: 2

      We see it happening in America, too. Lately there have been a small number of cases of black youth violently attacking police officers, typically after being confronted for some crime these youth had committed, and then the police officers do the only reasonable thing and defend themselves using their guns. Not wanting to be falsely accused of being "racist" by the "social justice" supporters

      The recent outrage is about police shooting unarmed black youths. In many cases, shooting them in the back.

      Here's the video of the one in Chicago that everybody's upset about. As you can see, the teenager was shot in the back while running AWAY from the police. He was unarmed.
      https://www.dnainfo.com/chicag...

      Here's another one: the guy had a gun... but the police had already taken it away and had him face down on the ground. Then shot him when he was face down on the ground and unresisting:
      http://www.courthousenews.com/...

      And here's one where the video shows that they shot an unarmed man who was face down with his hands handcuffed behind him... then the video shows them planting a gun on him.
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367933/Shocking-video-shows-cops-planting-gun-shooting-handcuffed-man-23-dead-execution.html
      http://www.alternet.org/civil-...

    11. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You are incorrect and thanks for providing a sterling example of what jaded SJWs who rushed to the defense of their corrupt gaming journalist idols sounds like ^

      Now here's the truth: "Gamer Gate" began as a spat between lovers in the gaming industry which turned into domino effect where corruption in Journalism was exposed by the spurned lover causing a tidal wave of previously unaware fans to turn on the industry while the industry turned back on them while trying to cover it up. The aftermath later led to sites having to offer more if not full disclosure about their agendas, more independent and credible youtube reviewer, the public humiliation of corrupt journalists, and finally the unfortunate corruption/censorship of once previously respected social media such as Reddit/Imgur/Twitter.

    12. Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      She wasn't accused of leaving her boyfriend for some other guy. She was outed for sleeping around in the industry for promotions/favorable reviews for her work. That snowballed when other corrupt industry figures came to her rescue like the white knights they are, not to mention her own underhanded tactics to silence critics. It completely blew up in their faces and set SJWs gamers back to the stone age. The joke about her and 5 guys burgers (thanks to the 5 guys she slept with for favorable reviews) is priceless.

      http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate

      http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/quinnspiracy

      The most disgusting thing of all tho, is the SJW media is turning it into a movie to try and cast Quinn in a favorable light despite being a disgusting corrupt figure. This doesn't surprise me when it comes to Hollywood and their liberal agenda.

  9. Just watch the movie "Idiocracy" by jmcwork · · Score: 2

    The first 15 minutes explain everything. The average person is not interested in a thought provoking article on a politicians policy on government spending, details on a new medical procedure, or common sense advice on how to eat better. They want to know who the politician slept with (and what techniques they used), how someones plastic surgery went horribly wrong so they look like John Merrick, or what drug they can take to lose weight while stuffing their faces with fast food and Ding Dongs. (Ding Dongs are OK every so often ;-) People will buy or watch the latter material and ignore / not understand the other.

  10. Gawker by martinux · · Score: 3, Informative

    Archive link for those who prefer not to support the reprehensible Gawker: https://archive.is/PP7q2

    IMHO Gawker is an absolutely vile clickbait machine that portrays itself as a progressive voice while selling outrage.
    It undermines what I consider valid, socially responsible goals by trivialising most of them, generating needless conflict by labelling "bad" people and maintaining a ludicrous left-wing good, right-wing evil narrative. It produces propaganda and hatred for cash.

    Nick Denton - the CEO of Gawker - has admitted that the company has a severe empathy problem and tried to relaunch it:
    http://www.thewrap.com/nick-de...
    http://www.salon.com/2015/07/2...

    The problem with journalism is not that one needs an audience, the problem with journalism is that factual reporting is no longer the main goal. Truth is secondary to page-views. Nolan suggests that people are the problem because they won't pay for factual material, http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ demonstrates that one can successfully run a publication that focuses on the pursuit and publication of truth (with a healthy injection of humour).

    TFA is an attempt to blame absolutely shitty "journalism" on the audience, what in fact is happening is that those of us who do care about quality journalism recognise Gawker for what it is and don't give it ad-revenue or page-impressions.

  11. We're just not that interested by drew_kime · · Score: 2

    Crime is worse than it's ever been! Kids can't walk to school safely these days!

    Except not, and we all know that. We just talked about it earlier this week. As media became national, then international, they started reporting every little thing that happened as though we should care, and maybe we've all started to realize that we don't actually give a shit what's happening in East Bumfuckistan.

    In my perfect world if the story is important - and it better be, else why are you wasting my time telling me about it - then take the time to explain why I should care. "Because we have adorable photos of the missing girl" doesn't count.

    John Oliver takes on serious issues on a weekly basis and gets ratings doing it. What he doesn't do is pander to fear-mongering and scare tactics, which just get old. Can someone other than Comedy Central please start doing this?

    --
    Nope, no sig
  12. Death of newspapers by Andy+Smith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Will newspapers die? Hopefully not.
    Are they dying right now? Yes.

    Or, more accurately, they're being killed from within. What you have to remember is that newspapers aren't run by journalists, they're run by managers and salesmen who don't seem to understand their target market (readers) or their product (quality reporting). They don't seem to look further than the next issue -- if that hits the streets then great, job done. Who cares how it's achieved.

    Here in the UK, so many quality journalists and photographers are being let go because managers see staff as an expendable resource. Got 20 journalists working their arses off to produce the paper? Cool, sack 10 of them and use agency copy. The public will never notice, right? That's £200,000 saved per year. When the readership halves because of rubbish content, we'll dream up some other excuse to explain that away. And then we'll sack more staff. Never the managers. They're not expendable. Always the journalists.

    I'll give you an insight in to where the power lies at newspapers. About 2 years ago I was working at a great bi-weekly city newspaper. We were working on a story for the next day's paper and I went over to talk to the news editor. He told me that there might not be space to run the story anymore, because four news pages had been dropped. Why? Because the paper liked to have a 50/50 split between editorial and adverts. The ad sales team had sold a full four pages less adverts than they were meant to. So to make everything look right with the upper management, the manager of the ad sales team simply had four news pages dropped.

    It wasn't like we were short-staffed that week or there had been a shortage of stories. The news was written, the photos had been taken, the pages were being made up. And four pages were wiped out, just like that, to make one sales guy look good.

    Ask anyone who works in newspapers if they've ever heard of the editorial team having ad pages dropped to make space for news. Go on, have a guess how often that happens.

    tl;dr: Newspaper sales are dropping. Managers try to save money by making the newspapers worse. Sales drop further. And so on.

  13. Have you tried it? by mattwarden · · Score: 2

    Have you ever tried in-depth quality journalism? Not in my lifetime. Maybe you can blame the readers. Or maybe journalism lost value when it lost its methodology of removing the authors' own biases as much as possible. Why would I want to pay money to read some random author's opinion? I don't even know this person. I would, however, pay money to read investigative journalism. Journalists from the 40 years may need to google that term to know what I mean.

  14. Pet peeve #37 by Grunschev · · Score: 2

    "... lack of quality ..."

    Quality is like temperature. Everything has it. It can be either high or low, but everything has it.

  15. Free is the Problem by Thyamine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I love the random news sites/aggregators I visit, and I use ad blockers, but we are the problem. I don't pay for any of the sites I visit, I don't donate money to them, and I get annoyed with bad/aggressive ads, and worry about malware, so I use ad blockers. This means that sites I visit are not generating revenue. Most of us here probably do the same thing. So that means they have less money to do _any_ journalism let alone good journalism.

    There are the hardcore people who feel everything should be free, but I doubt they go to work and do their job for free. Now, some random person blogging for fun, yes I get annoyed when they have ads all over the place, and the click-bait sites that put every sentence on a different page. Those are their own categories. But nothing is going to change until all we have is complete crap. Then someone will start charging and it will be seen as an innovation. People will say, "amazing! they charge us money and we get quality things!" but we aren't there yet. We have to hit bottom, or someone has to come up with an actual way to allow the give and take that is fair and non-obtrusive.

    --
    I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
  16. Echo Chamber + Too Much Choice + GIFWT by ErichTheRed · · Score: 2

    I think it's a two-fold problem:

    1. To quote The Matrix, "The problem is choice." There are tons and tons of choices for news services these days, and they're of varying quality. By quality, I'm referring to well-researched reporting mostly sticking to the facts (I'm well aware that all news sources have some bias.) Quality costs money. You have to pay for an NYT subscription to keep their journalists writing, the BBC has to collect TV license fees to run World Service, and the major news channels need to be paid by advertisers. By nature, people are cheap and gravitate to "free" services. Online, that means random blogger dudes paying the bills using Google ad revenue, or targeted news sites that have an obvious agenda and may be funded by someone without the best of intentions. Random blogger dudes don't have the resources to do actual investigative journalism, i.e. exposing corruption or keeping officials honest. Outside groups have an interest in selling people on their way of thinking, so the bias that's there anyway gets magnified many times over in favor of that group's POV.

    2. This leads to Internet journalism becoming a sort of echo chamber for some people. Someone who's conservative isn't going to read the Huffington Post, no matter what they say. A liberal wouldn't read the Drudge Report. This is magnified _again_ by social media honing in on your preferences and likes, and only presenting you content that you would personally be interested in. You may think you're immune to this, but the unfortunate fact is that the Public writ large is not very bright, and many are very influenced by targeted news. (Mainstream examples: MSNBC, Fox News, etc.)

    3. Finally, there's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory -- and yes, I never thought I'd ever reference this in a post. People love to tout how awful SJWs are and how stifling political correctness is, but frankly there is a lot less civil discourse of any kind these days. People who make the most bombastic statements are the ones who are listened to. People aren't nice because nice doesn't get noticed in all the chaos. Look at Trump -- agree or disagree with his agenda, but he gets attention because he's loud, angry, and taps into the loud angry conservative mindset. Even the mainstream Republicans are trying to keep things somewhat civil, but people gravitate towards the angriest most outrageous voices.

    It's really too bad, because I've been feeling lately like we might as well just pack it in and establish a monarchy to keep order. When people aren't educated in politics, and can't see the compromises that are required to run a civil society that doesn't end up eating itself alive, the only thing to do is just take the decisions out of the hands of the common man. I don't think it should happen, but I think it could if it gets bad enough!

  17. Gawker complains about the quality of Journalism?? by sciengin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seriously this has to be a joke.
    Gawker of all places.
    Gawker who got scolded by the FTC for not even bothering to separate paid advertising from actual articles.
    Gawker who doxed all gun owners in new york.
    Gawker whose editor once proclaimed that "Nerds should be bullied into submission". (Sam Bidle)
    Gawker who was penalized and mentioned by name by Google when explained their new "fact based algorithm" and its benefits.
    Gawker who knowingly stole photographs from an amateur and explained to her that she should be happy that her photos were deemed worthy of Gawker.
    Gawker who is currently being sued by Hulk Hogan for the leak of his sex tape, by their interns for refusing to pay them anything yet working them like regular employees.(You can read more about the unpaid interns with the hashtag #Fairpay I am told, unfortunately I am not familiar with twitter)
    Gawker who is set up using multiple shell companies in New-York, Hungary and the Caymans to avoid all and any taxes.
    Gawker who criticized "Charlie Hebdo" immediately after 10 of the employees there were murdered by terrorists with an article titled "How much did we need this blasphemy?"
      And of course tons of "Quality" article such as "If you dont want to watch a fish suck a dick, here is a description", "Is the new york post edited by a Bigoted Drunk who fucks pigs?" and lastly "Born this way: Sympathy and Science for those who want to have sex with children".
    That is probably only the tip of the iceberg.

    Gawker should not be read, linked to or even mentioned in any way or form.

  18. Do not want by Tailhook · · Score: 2

    The history of "Quality Journalism" is filled with well compensated hucksters like Walter Duranty, polluting the world with fictions and lies. When you pay journalists celebrity wages you get celebrity journalists promulgating the views of their powerful allies.

    Do not want. We're no worse off with our contemporary "journalism" and we may indeed be better.

    --
    Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  19. French counter example by grinob · · Score: 3, Informative

    In france, there is a successful new (well, created in 2008) completely independent news source called mediapart. It only has a website and does *not* have a printed version and runs absolutely no ads.

    How do they do it? Well, they somehow managed to get 112,000 paying subscribers on board so far who pay 9 Euros per month.

    It really shows that they are independent in the sense that they have unearthed several scoops in the last few years that have shaken the French establishment.

    Amongst others for example, they have nailed France's Minister for the Budget, Jerome Cahuzac, in a fiscal fraud case. You got to laugh at the irony...

  20. A feedback loop by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 2

    I did work for a newspaper chain around 1998. The guy was out buying one newspaper after another and what he wanted to do was to reduce his AP costs. The idea was that all the articles put into any one of his newspapers would be readily available to all the others; basically his own internal AP.

    Without going into all the details what every one of his ideas were about was to fill the pages with crap for the lowest cost possible to pay back the huge money he had borrowed to buy up all these newspapers.

    To a guy like this the whole idea of ethics in journalism and whatnot was complete crap. Also if the local news staff were to really mount a protest he could always shut down one newspaper as a warning to the others. Also since his company was a news machine it was no big deal to shut down the Metro Times and open up the Times Metro in the local business park.

    One effect of this was that, while newspapers have often been beholden to certain interests, his newspapers became owned by many of them. His political views were the only political views, the real-estate and car sales advertisers wouldn't tolerate any investigative journalism into their practices. My favourite was that a local house inspector with an engineering degree and a reputation for being the best was not able to advertise in any of the traditional media. It was quite simple, take his tiny ad, lose our steady firehose of ads.

    Then you get articles where the real-estate market is in freefall and the newspaper will have a near daily article saying that it is levelling out and that you are stupid if you don't buy now at the very bottom. Then the next month's numbers will come out and it is just worse, yet they will print the same advice.

    Then there is this stream of news telling us what we should think. Often this is way way way to the left. I am not advocating Fox news (way way way to the right) but it is all the most PC crap imaginable. This whole new crap about micro aggressions. WTF.

    So we now have this thing called the internet where we can choose our news sources. If we start to suspect they are shilling or lying then we move on to the 1 million other choices.

    Personally, where I suspect this is going to end is that individual investigative journalists are going to realize that while there isn't enough money to run a newsroom, that if they are really good that there is enough money to keep them sustained as they do what they love. In the end I also suspect that someone is going to start to gather these individuals into a central repository so that any consumer will have a steady menu of interesting stories. I am not talking about a huffpo type crap where they keep all the cookies, but something more like an Uber for news. (yes I went with that one). I can just see its mission statement, "No opinions, just journalism."

  21. 2016 Slashdot by cje · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There was a point in time (and it's well over a decade past) where Slashdot was the definitive go-to site for smart discussions, both on technical topics as well as society in the larger sense. I use the word "discussions" very deliberately, because then (as now) the articles were really just a jumping-off point for a conversation. Nobody ever actually read the articles; why bother? You had a lot of very intelligent people gathered together to share their experiences and impart their knowledge. That was what made Slashdot what is was.

    These days, I very rarely visit this site, and this particular conversation is a prime example of why this is. The grandparent post, which at the current time has a score of 4, suggests that the media establishment is made up of (among others) "angry lesbians and transsexuals." Now, I have no doubt that you personally find this type of discourse to be "in-depth, intelligent, and rational." But there are lots of decent people, people who were here very early on and still remember how great this place used to be, who have simply grown tired of this kind of thing.

    Most of the intelligent conversation here has been replaced by spoutings so deranged that they make The Protocols of the Elders of Zion read like the owner's manual to a 1987 Buick Skylark. And I'm not just talking about trolls here (although they've been around since the early days as well.) Today, this kind of semiliterate gibbering is just as likely to have a score of 5 as it is to be at -1. Now, I know what you're thinking; I'm either a unwitting tool of the "SJW establishment" or (gasp! dare one think it?) an SJW myself, and I'm just having troubles coming to terms with the fact that the old rules have been usurped and it's now finally permissible to get out The Truth about minorities, women, gays, etc.

    The truth of the matter is that I'm just a regular guy who occasionally thinks about how nice it would be to have the old Slashdot back, before it became dominated by angry, pear-shaped, basement-dwelling virgins. Now, to be fair, there were doubtless plenty of basement-dwelling virgins on 1998 Slashdot as well. It's just that the 2016 variant has made the site essentially intolerable and a hollow shell of its former self.

    --
    We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
    1. Re:2016 Slashdot by epyT-R · · Score: 2

      ..and yet here you are claiming supposed intellectual superiority with appeals to antiquity. You think it invalidates their arguments, and yet you still can't help dragging yourself down to the level of those 'pear shaped basement dwelling virgins' anyway. Name calling doesn't make an argument. Neither does the use of stuffy, insufferable language.

  22. I'll tell you why I don't pay by crbowman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'll tell you why I don't pay for quality journalism: I don't see any of it. Even when I read a NY Times or WaPo article, it's always something like this: some court has come to a decision and here is what a ton of people I don't care about think about it. There is never a link to the actual decision, there is never a summary of the legal basis for the decision, let alone an analysis of why the decision may or may not be sound. There are never any links to primary sources if want to follow up. The only links are to other stories by the same organization that I can click on and drive more revenue to the site. Exactly what value are you giving me?Pass.

  23. It's there, but not enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Vice News, FrontLine (PBS), 60 Minutes, and even John Oliver focus on one topic somewhat more in depth than a quick 4 minute story. Now, there should be more reporters, and follow-ups to figure out what is going on now too. I think a lot of journalists have now gone into documentary movie making, where you can make more money and have a bigger impact. I want to see investigative journalism going in that direction, with hour long TV shows and documentary movies on different subjects. I even want to see the talking heads on TV discuss one issue for an hour.

  24. Niche Journalism is better done by reddit now. by TheNarrator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have been following the Syrian Civil War and reading http://reddit.com/r/syriancivi... is about the best there is. It's got a lot better content than anything they write in the New York Times or any other mainstream news. It's basically the perfect news feed: Lots of different opinions from all sides. Occasional analysis, minute by minute updates, etc. I can't imagine how a newspaper could do a better job.