4 ms·

Having worked with journalists, these sound like typical entitlement complaints. Frankly, a lot of writers have an attitude that they're "artists" who shouldn't

Having worked with journalists, these sound like typical entitlement complaints. Frankly, a lot of writers have an attitude that they're "artists" who shouldn't be rushed and don't have performance requirements. Frankly, it does not sound very hard at all. They have to write 20 posts a day, but each post is only a headline and a brief summary. A focused writer can finish that in 15 minutes. > We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language. Oh no! How dare Facebook strive to be neutral and passive. > After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm Of course they were. Facebook is quite explicitly trying to apply ML throughout their site. Why should they permanently be in the business of employing writers to do something which computers could do reliably and effectively?

SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago
The article also attempts to paint them as overworked and abused and treated differently because they were contractors. Having worked in the big tech industry as a contractor, their description of contractor treatment and workload is pretty normal (no employee perks, quotas, etc.). This is due more to Vizcaino vs. Microsoft [1] than any sort of abusive contractor agenda. 1. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1185&context=btlj http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
- morgante 11y ago
  Of course contractors are treated differently. If they were treated identically to employees, the IRS would probably have some questions. They knew they were signing up for contractor position. Frankly, they were lucky to get any benefits at all. The article fails to provide any evidence of abuse though. The worst that Facebook did was not inviting them to company happy hours.
kyle8 11y ago
I shall just leave a link to Douglas Rushkoff here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass to explain to you the deep flaws in the "default" techie thinking that your comment is a classic example off.
- morgante 11y ago
  I stopped at "spiritual deeply humanistic recharge." There's no way I'm watching 90 minutes of BS. Also, in case it wasn't clear, I have in fact worked at several media companies directly with journalists. I'm not speculating from some distant position about the attitudes of journalists. If you have an actual point, I'd love to hear it. I don't see how writing basic summaries of the news is a valuable or artistic endeavor.
vcarl 11y ago
> We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language. I was just thinking that the Facebook summary headlines are surprisingly journalistic compared to Buzzfeed, Upworthy, etc. Seeing somebody complain about that explains why their title is "news curator" and not "journalist."
- elcapitan 11y ago
  After having become so annoyed by the buzzfeedization of even traditional news, I was positively surprised when I discovered the "Current Events" page of wikipedia [1], which contains per-day lists of actually relevant stuff (ok, I would take out the crime and sports sections, but that's just me). I would love more neutral, concise media like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- krick 11y ago
  Oh, I would say it's a very "journalistic" complaint, unfortunately. Apparently, there is a fair market for that (given the popularity of sites like newyorker.com on HN), but in general what some journalist wants to write is almost opposite to what I want to read. I want to know news, meaning as short and pointed messages as possible, and "no news today" would be actually a good thing. A journalist who thinks he is "good" (note the "graduated from Ivy League" part) wants presence, wants to be someone, a (or, preferably, "the") trendmaker, the Lord of opinions, like that Spider Jerusalem guy. His ego gets in his way. Which is pretty natural, actually — not only for journalists, but for everyone who wants to be a Person, an Individual, not just a smaller part of the system. Which is actually good, I think, for a human. It might be somewhat working with printed media and specialized news agencies — after all, agency wants something close to what the journalist wants: to have presence, for public to pay attention to them, not to some other agency. "No news today" would be a disaster for them. I mean, it's all pretty natural, if we admit that typical news agency's goal is not to "give information". And Facebook's "trending news" section's goal, on the contrary, is quite close to that.
  - kriro 11y ago

SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago

The article also attempts to paint them as overworked and abused and treated differently because they were contractors. Having worked in the big tech industry as a contractor, their description of contractor treatment and workload is pretty normal (no employee perks, quotas, etc.). This is due more to Vizcaino vs. Microsoft [1] than any sort of abusive contractor agenda. 1. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1185&context=btlj http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

morgante 11y ago
Of course contractors are treated differently. If they were treated identically to employees, the IRS would probably have some questions. They knew they were signing up for contractor position. Frankly, they were lucky to get any benefits at all. The article fails to provide any evidence of abuse though. The worst that Facebook did was not inviting them to company happy hours.

kyle8 11y ago

I shall just leave a link to Douglas Rushkoff here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass to explain to you the deep flaws in the "default" techie thinking that your comment is a classic example off.

morgante 11y ago
I stopped at "spiritual deeply humanistic recharge." There's no way I'm watching 90 minutes of BS. Also, in case it wasn't clear, I have in fact worked at several media companies directly with journalists. I'm not speculating from some distant position about the attitudes of journalists. If you have an actual point, I'd love to hear it. I don't see how writing basic summaries of the news is a valuable or artistic endeavor.

vcarl 11y ago

> We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language. I was just thinking that the Facebook summary headlines are surprisingly journalistic compared to Buzzfeed, Upworthy, etc. Seeing somebody complain about that explains why their title is "news curator" and not "journalist."

elcapitan 11y ago
After having become so annoyed by the buzzfeedization of even traditional news, I was positively surprised when I discovered the "Current Events" page of wikipedia [1], which contains per-day lists of actually relevant stuff (ok, I would take out the crime and sports sections, but that's just me). I would love more neutral, concise media like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
krick 11y ago
Oh, I would say it's a very "journalistic" complaint, unfortunately. Apparently, there is a fair market for that (given the popularity of sites like newyorker.com on HN), but in general what some journalist wants to write is almost opposite to what I want to read. I want to know news, meaning as short and pointed messages as possible, and "no news today" would be actually a good thing. A journalist who thinks he is "good" (note the "graduated from Ivy League" part) wants presence, wants to be someone, a (or, preferably, "the") trendmaker, the Lord of opinions, like that Spider Jerusalem guy. His ego gets in his way. Which is pretty natural, actually — not only for journalists, but for everyone who wants to be a Person, an Individual, not just a smaller part of the system. Which is actually good, I think, for a human. It might be somewhat working with printed media and specialized news agencies — after all, agency wants something close to what the journalist wants: to have presence, for public to pay attention to them, not to some other agency. "No news today" would be a disaster for them. I mean, it's all pretty natural, if we admit that typical news agency's goal is not to "give information". And Facebook's "trending news" section's goal, on the contrary, is quite close to that.
- kriro 11y ago