6 ms·

More relevant than "social media" is the shift in journalism from reporting facts to "get as many pageviews as you can", driven by the fact that we pay with our

by Lxr 10y ago

More relevant than "social media" is the shift in journalism from reporting facts to "get as many pageviews as you can", driven by the fact that we pay with our attention and our data rather than our money.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Page-views has always been the priority even for print media. In agregate, there was no past where print media were know for reporting facts, where people and organisations didn't allow their biases to come through. The only thing different now is the scale.
- usrusr 10y ago
  The sensational headlines of pre-radio print, yes, today's clickbait isn't half as fresh as we like to think. But it's not just scale: Online has massively lowered the barrier of entry for the technical prerequisites of reaching people, but the barriers of entry for actually getting attention were still basically the same as before. Until social came along and added that skewed lottery of "viral" on top.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Yes, good points about the very low barriers to entry and virulence. I'm not sure I've seen the word virulence used in reference to the internet term viral, but it sure does seem fitting. It certainly does seem that with every new technological advance we create new ways to do amazing things both good and bad.
makomk 10y ago
It probably doesn't help that journalists think they can literally just make shit up on Twitter because journalistic standards don't apply there, and it then spreads virally due to their reputation and other journalists retweeting it. It's even more unlikely people will see any corrections on social media too.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Maybe "journalists" isn't the right word for them. It's closer to "comedians", I think. But there's a twisted way how lies can be tacitly acknowledged as lies. And yet considered truth. Not in a factual sense, but metaphorically, with a wink and a nod. In a word, lulz.
ekianjo 10y ago
> shift in journalism from reporting facts Erm, no, Journalism has been stuck in delivering biased information/junk facts for a long, long time, well before the Internet.
- carlmungz 10y ago
  Depending on the subject matter, you're more likely to get more objective reporting from local/regional press than nationals because local journalists tend to live in the area they're covering, so it's in their best interests to be straight with their reporting.
  - uncletaco 10y ago
    So you're saying we're likely to get more objective coverage from people who are more invested in the community in question? If a local journalist writes an unflattering story about new zoning laws taking place in her city, zoning laws that will send her child to another elementary school where the children do not score as high on standardized tests, would you assume she's more objective? When a local journalist writes positively about a highway extension that's going to level a "bad" neighborhood but make it easier for him to commute back and forth to his office downtown, would you not question his impartiality? In fact, when reporting on a local story don't national news papers and stations usually defer to the AP or reporters from a local affiliate? Whenever something in my town makes national news, NPR generally has a reporter from our local affiliate on to talk about the issue. I think most of the local/regional news coverage is handled by reporters actually on the ground who live in the areas. I just don't see how local/regional news organizations would be any more or less objective than a national organization by being based in the area.
    - carlmungz 10y ago
      I guess I was talking more from my experience as a local reporter for four years in the UK. If I had developed a reputation for being unfair and unbalanced, no sources would have spoken to me or given me useful inside knowledge. The same principle is true to national and international press but being geographically confined to a particular area in my experience helps to focus the mind more. At least in my case it made want to take extra steps when possible to make sure I covered all angles and different viewpoints.
matt4077 10y ago
The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong. There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the role of journalism in a democracy. Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call. Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism. Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their experience in that process. In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money, quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for: single-article micro payments.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Never underestimate the ability of people to romanticise a past that never existed.
- Retric 10y ago
  Try reading actual newspaper archives from the 80's or 50's. The real difference is manpower -> investigations. Small town corruption investigations where somewhat common, but we don't have nearly the news independent coverage which suggests people are simply getting away with more corruption.
- marincounty 10y ago
  "The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong" 1. I don't want to get into a debate, but don't you think a serious lack of money affects journalism? 2. In the past, the big newspapers could pay for due diligence. The best reporters rose to the top, and built a reputation on honestly/ethics. 3. Now--with their shoe strong budgets, the news stories seem thrown together, and all of us here, usually pick them apart piece by piece. 4. I'm not claiming that a certain generation had more ethics than another, but it's just a matter of economics. If you don't have money to hire talent, you hire whomever is willing to work. 5. A few days ago, someone said The Economist has a lot of annoymous articles. Why?
pixelmonkey 10y ago
Tim Wu wrote an entire book called "The Attention Merchants" documenting the long history (going back to the 1800s) of various forms of media being commercialized with attention and data. The "penny press" -- starting in the 1830s -- offered low-cost newspapers, basically at a loss, which were then subsidized with advertising. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press) A similar business model was then used for most newspapers, radio, network television stations, national magazines, cable news/TV subscriptions and on, and on. At each stage, the level of demographic and geographic targeting became more sophisticated. The modern web-based media is basically the logical conclusion of this two-century evolution. What's more, profitable subscriptions for media are at an all-time high. The issue is that the spoils go to only a few winners, like Amazon, Netflix, SirusXM, Spotify, Comcast/TimeWarner, etc. A real issue is that people are more willing to pay subscriptions for music & entertainment than for news & analysis. But that's changing. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ have large-scale digital subscriber programs, and mid-market publishers are following suit. But, it's never going to have as much scale as ad/attention-based monetization. I tend to agree with the sentiment embedded in your statement -- that if media are subscriber-based, they tend to be better aligned with those readers. But people are definitely accustomed to free on the web. I recommend you check out "The Attention Merchants" to learn a bit about how news and information has been paid for over time. You shouldn't blame measurement; you should, if anything, blame the media industry's unit economics: http://amzn.to/2osFiNz http://amzn.to/2osFiNz
- losteverything 10y ago
  Thanks. Any recommendations written by a historian instead of the author?
  - pixelmonkey 10y ago
    I haven't come across anything that is like a "history textbook of marketing", but would be glad to read something like that one day. I am sure something similar must show up in marketing/communications/journalism graduate schools.
    - 10y ago
dragontamer 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism > The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal Uh huh... yeah. 1890. I think this sort of crap has been going on for centuries.

by Lxr 10y ago

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

Page-views has always been the priority even for print media. In agregate, there was no past where print media were know for reporting facts, where people and organisations didn't allow their biases to come through. The only thing different now is the scale.

usrusr 10y ago
The sensational headlines of pre-radio print, yes, today's clickbait isn't half as fresh as we like to think. But it's not just scale: Online has massively lowered the barrier of entry for the technical prerequisites of reaching people, but the barriers of entry for actually getting attention were still basically the same as before. Until social came along and added that skewed lottery of "viral" on top.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Yes, good points about the very low barriers to entry and virulence. I'm not sure I've seen the word virulence used in reference to the internet term viral, but it sure does seem fitting. It certainly does seem that with every new technological advance we create new ways to do amazing things both good and bad.

makomk 10y ago

It probably doesn't help that journalists think they can literally just make shit up on Twitter because journalistic standards don't apply there, and it then spreads virally due to their reputation and other journalists retweeting it. It's even more unlikely people will see any corrections on social media too.

mirimir 10y ago
Maybe "journalists" isn't the right word for them. It's closer to "comedians", I think. But there's a twisted way how lies can be tacitly acknowledged as lies. And yet considered truth. Not in a factual sense, but metaphorically, with a wink and a nod. In a word, lulz.

ekianjo 10y ago

> shift in journalism from reporting facts Erm, no, Journalism has been stuck in delivering biased information/junk facts for a long, long time, well before the Internet.

carlmungz 10y ago
Depending on the subject matter, you're more likely to get more objective reporting from local/regional press than nationals because local journalists tend to live in the area they're covering, so it's in their best interests to be straight with their reporting.
- uncletaco 10y ago
  So you're saying we're likely to get more objective coverage from people who are more invested in the community in question? If a local journalist writes an unflattering story about new zoning laws taking place in her city, zoning laws that will send her child to another elementary school where the children do not score as high on standardized tests, would you assume she's more objective? When a local journalist writes positively about a highway extension that's going to level a "bad" neighborhood but make it easier for him to commute back and forth to his office downtown, would you not question his impartiality? In fact, when reporting on a local story don't national news papers and stations usually defer to the AP or reporters from a local affiliate? Whenever something in my town makes national news, NPR generally has a reporter from our local affiliate on to talk about the issue. I think most of the local/regional news coverage is handled by reporters actually on the ground who live in the areas. I just don't see how local/regional news organizations would be any more or less objective than a national organization by being based in the area.
  - carlmungz 10y ago
    I guess I was talking more from my experience as a local reporter for four years in the UK. If I had developed a reputation for being unfair and unbalanced, no sources would have spoken to me or given me useful inside knowledge. The same principle is true to national and international press but being geographically confined to a particular area in my experience helps to focus the mind more. At least in my case it made want to take extra steps when possible to make sure I covered all angles and different viewpoints.

matt4077 10y ago

The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong. There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the role of journalism in a democracy. Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call. Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism. Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their experience in that process. In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money, quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for: single-article micro payments.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Never underestimate the ability of people to romanticise a past that never existed.
Retric 10y ago
Try reading actual newspaper archives from the 80's or 50's. The real difference is manpower -> investigations. Small town corruption investigations where somewhat common, but we don't have nearly the news independent coverage which suggests people are simply getting away with more corruption.
marincounty 10y ago
"The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong" 1. I don't want to get into a debate, but don't you think a serious lack of money affects journalism? 2. In the past, the big newspapers could pay for due diligence. The best reporters rose to the top, and built a reputation on honestly/ethics. 3. Now--with their shoe strong budgets, the news stories seem thrown together, and all of us here, usually pick them apart piece by piece. 4. I'm not claiming that a certain generation had more ethics than another, but it's just a matter of economics. If you don't have money to hire talent, you hire whomever is willing to work. 5. A few days ago, someone said The Economist has a lot of annoymous articles. Why?

pixelmonkey 10y ago

Tim Wu wrote an entire book called "The Attention Merchants" documenting the long history (going back to the 1800s) of various forms of media being commercialized with attention and data. The "penny press" -- starting in the 1830s -- offered low-cost newspapers, basically at a loss, which were then subsidized with advertising. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press) A similar business model was then used for most newspapers, radio, network television stations, national magazines, cable news/TV subscriptions and on, and on. At each stage, the level of demographic and geographic targeting became more sophisticated. The modern web-based media is basically the logical conclusion of this two-century evolution. What's more, profitable subscriptions for media are at an all-time high. The issue is that the spoils go to only a few winners, like Amazon, Netflix, SirusXM, Spotify, Comcast/TimeWarner, etc. A real issue is that people are more willing to pay subscriptions for music & entertainment than for news & analysis. But that's changing. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ have large-scale digital subscriber programs, and mid-market publishers are following suit. But, it's never going to have as much scale as ad/attention-based monetization. I tend to agree with the sentiment embedded in your statement -- that if media are subscriber-based, they tend to be better aligned with those readers. But people are definitely accustomed to free on the web. I recommend you check out "The Attention Merchants" to learn a bit about how news and information has been paid for over time. You shouldn't blame measurement; you should, if anything, blame the media industry's unit economics: http://amzn.to/2osFiNz http://amzn.to/2osFiNz

losteverything 10y ago
Thanks. Any recommendations written by a historian instead of the author?
- pixelmonkey 10y ago
  I haven't come across anything that is like a "history textbook of marketing", but would be glad to read something like that one day. I am sure something similar must show up in marketing/communications/journalism graduate schools.
  - 10y ago

dragontamer 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism > The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal Uh huh... yeah. 1890. I think this sort of crap has been going on for centuries.