Hell, I ended up here in the first place by searching for stories about Riker and Chakotay.
(slash fanfic has homosexual content, be that Xena and Gabriel hot tubbing together or Cigarette Smoking Man and Mulder... well... you don't want to know. Especially the one with the tomato juice.)
The media takes great delight in making and breaking heroes and zeros by basically being highly-paid ambulance-chasers.
Choke, gasp, gulp. Highly paid? Highly paid? Not print journalists, that's for sure. How does $18K a year sound? Journalists traditionally take less pay as a sacrifice to the importance of our vocation.::cynical laugh::
This forces newspapers and TV stations to get involved with a story if they want to cover it. No longer can they just skim the surface, quickly condemn whoever looks guilty and call it a done deal. Now they have to actually do some investigation and REAL JOURNALISM to get facts to sell their papers! How novel.
Perhaps this hasn't been made clear in the mainstream media, but reporters absolutely love getting their by-lines on top of a nice, juicy story. Unfortunately, many of the media in which those stories would be published are becoming moderately monolithic (You may have noticed a brief or two about a couple of obscure newspaper companies: The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, for example).
Yes, we'd love to spend the time to do research, but the public can't wait, the publisher says. Gotta get the stories out the door. Have to have something to fill up the space we didn't get advertising for.
I was recently sacked from my first honest-to-gods reporting position for spending too much time doing research. Newspaper owners don't want muck-raking. They want press releases that don't quite sounds like PR.
There are papers that aren't like this. For example:
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0003a/default.html
But even most of the local "Independents" aren't.
Yes, I'd love to work for a paper that permitted me to do in-depth reporting. That's what I got in this business for. I think that's what most journalists got in the business for. But the current business model makes it impossible for all but a few to pursue true reporting. I'll let you know if I come up with a solution for this, but don't hold your breath.
Where's my idealism? I know I left it around here somewhere?
"Who has lit his pipe in the morning calm that follows the midnight stress/Hath sold his heart to the old black art we call the daily press." R. Kipling, "The Press"
The Herald article was not labeled so, but must have been an opinion piece. No editor could look at that as objective reporting. It was also in the business section, and -- having just left a business publication -- businessmen are more conservative than almost any other breed of mundanes. Business reporting, unfortunately, caters to this bias.
What you say about the media is true. The most liberaterian papers tend to be conservative-liberaterian, like the Orange County Register chain.
The best way to get your message across to journalists is to a be a quotable, available source when they need one. The fact is -- and I am as guilty of this as any other reporter -- when a breaking story comes in, we talk to the people we know and trust. Geeks tend to come across as unreliable in many cases. They also are -- probably justifiably -- paranoid about talking to us in the first place.
When you see such stories, don't write letters to the editor (Unless it's a really egregious mistake, that's a good way to make an enemy of the reporter. Words printed on the opinion page tend to burn deep). Don't complain about it in a forum where few reporters go. Calm down then write the reporter an e-mail pointing out any wrong information, then offer to be a source when they have to write such stories in the future. Believe me, journalists love a quotable source who juices up a story by pointing out that the establishment is lying. It helps if you have some sort of credentials, but being a joe-Linux-user will still put you above the crowd.
There's a great filk song by Leslie Fish (the queen of filk) that refers to this incident. It's called "Gamers" nee "This Game is Real" at http://www.prometheus-music.com/eli/virtual.html
Interesting. I'm on AOHell and haven't had a problem with it pimping my address. I used to get a fair bit from some sites I've surfed and Usenet, but adjusting the filters on the browser cleared it up. I think AOL users are just generally so clueless that they hand their real addresses out promiscuously and neglect to adjust their filters from the default "Spam me, please" settings. Is this the first step on a slippery slope toward e-mail censorship? This law is satisfying for those who have had their mailboxes flooded by the crap and yet potentially hazardous if legislatures realize what they have on their hands. Most inDuhvidual congresspersons don't yet have the technical savvy to grok the potential control they posess. Please, gods, don't let them wise up!
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I ended up here in the first place by searching for stories about Riker and Chakotay. (slash fanfic has homosexual content, be that Xena and Gabriel hot tubbing together or Cigarette Smoking Man and Mulder... well... you don't want to know. Especially the one with the tomato juice.)
The media takes great delight in making and breaking heroes and zeros by basically being highly-paid ambulance-chasers. Choke, gasp, gulp. Highly paid? Highly paid? Not print journalists, that's for sure. How does $18K a year sound? Journalists traditionally take less pay as a sacrifice to the importance of our vocation. ::cynical laugh::
This forces newspapers and TV stations to get involved with a story if they want to cover it. No longer can they just skim the surface, quickly condemn whoever looks guilty and call it a done deal. Now they have to actually do some investigation and REAL JOURNALISM to get facts to sell their papers! How novel.
Perhaps this hasn't been made clear in the mainstream media, but reporters absolutely love getting their by-lines on top of a nice, juicy story. Unfortunately, many of the media in which those stories would be published are becoming moderately monolithic (You may have noticed a brief or two about a couple of obscure newspaper companies: The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, for example).
Yes, we'd love to spend the time to do research, but the public can't wait, the publisher says. Gotta get the stories out the door. Have to have something to fill up the space we didn't get advertising for.
I was recently sacked from my first honest-to-gods reporting position for spending too much time doing research. Newspaper owners don't want muck-raking. They want press releases that don't quite sounds like PR.
There are papers that aren't like this. For example:
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0003a/default.html
But even most of the local "Independents" aren't.
Yes, I'd love to work for a paper that permitted me to do in-depth reporting. That's what I got in this business for. I think that's what most journalists got in the business for. But the current business model makes it impossible for all but a few to pursue true reporting. I'll let you know if I come up with a solution for this, but don't hold your breath.
Where's my idealism? I know I left it around here somewhere?
"Who has lit his pipe in the morning calm that follows the midnight stress/Hath sold his heart to the old black art we call the daily press." R. Kipling, "The Press"
The Herald article was not labeled so, but must have been an opinion piece. No editor could look at that as objective reporting. It was also in the business section, and -- having just left a business publication -- businessmen are more conservative than almost any other breed of mundanes. Business reporting, unfortunately, caters to this bias. What you say about the media is true. The most liberaterian papers tend to be conservative-liberaterian, like the Orange County Register chain. The best way to get your message across to journalists is to a be a quotable, available source when they need one. The fact is -- and I am as guilty of this as any other reporter -- when a breaking story comes in, we talk to the people we know and trust. Geeks tend to come across as unreliable in many cases. They also are -- probably justifiably -- paranoid about talking to us in the first place. When you see such stories, don't write letters to the editor (Unless it's a really egregious mistake, that's a good way to make an enemy of the reporter. Words printed on the opinion page tend to burn deep). Don't complain about it in a forum where few reporters go. Calm down then write the reporter an e-mail pointing out any wrong information, then offer to be a source when they have to write such stories in the future. Believe me, journalists love a quotable source who juices up a story by pointing out that the establishment is lying. It helps if you have some sort of credentials, but being a joe-Linux-user will still put you above the crowd.
There's a great filk song by Leslie Fish (the queen of filk) that refers to this incident. It's called "Gamers" nee "This Game is Real" at http://www.prometheus-music.com/eli/virtual.html
Interesting. I'm on AOHell and haven't had a problem with it pimping my address. I used to get a fair bit from some sites I've surfed and Usenet, but adjusting the filters on the browser cleared it up. I think AOL users are just generally so clueless that they hand their real addresses out promiscuously and neglect to adjust their filters from the default "Spam me, please" settings. Is this the first step on a slippery slope toward e-mail censorship? This law is satisfying for those who have had their mailboxes flooded by the crap and yet potentially hazardous if legislatures realize what they have on their hands. Most inDuhvidual congresspersons don't yet have the technical savvy to grok the potential control they posess. Please, gods, don't let them wise up!