4 ms·

Wasn't the "baseball test" an accepted norm in journalism? "A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as

Wasn't the "baseball test" an accepted norm in journalism? "A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball."[1] Shouldn't media outlets be embarrassed into retracting stories written by people who know nothing about the subject? Shouldn't the reputation of the media outlet suffer? 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2007/08/the-baseball-test/54682/ https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2007/08/the-bas...

kazinator 9y ago
So from this it follows, for instance, that a reporter assigned to cover baseball should have the same understanding as a writer writing about baseball: it is an assertion that there be a level standard of topic competence when reporters and writers are compared. But then under what condition should a writer not be assigned to write about baseball? (Unless he or she as knowledgeable about baseball as a baseball reporter?)
dogruck 9y ago
It's an ilformed test. Can a writer truly understand baseball as well as a baseball player? But, isn't a baseball player bound to be heavily biased toward the consensus baseball view? Or, take finance. If a financial journalist truly understood finance, wouldn't they be running a hedge fund instead of scraping by pumping out articles?
- weberc2 9y ago
  He said baseball writer, not player, unless he edited his comment between your post and mine.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    I think we read the same post. I'm just saying that a writer's bias is correlated with his expertise.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fenomas 9y ago
  Most baseball writers aren't former players or coaches, and nobody expects them to be. That's the whole point of the analogy. They're just expected to understand the rules of the game, know what the various acronyms mean, and generally be able to converse intelligently about the game. That's the standard being suggested for reporters covering other topics.
- tpeo 9y ago
  To answer the second question, a financial journalist might not take up a hedge fund management position on the basis of the risks involved, career stability, hedonic factors, etc. besides the purely monetary gains involved. Understanding something doesn't imply that's also the optimal course of action.
- pjc50 9y ago
  There's an entire sub-industry of financial journalism which is extremely well paid. It's just that it's paid for by charging the recipients (investors) a lot, and the people involved are called "analysts" rather than journalists. It's the sort of stuff available on Bloomberg terminals.
tpeo 9y ago
I'm starting to believe that there isn't such a thing as reputation when it comes to news. Or rather, that low quality news has such little impact on readership due the strategic nature of news reading (e.g. even if you might not like a certain news organization, you might still want to read it, if only to know what other people are reading) that a news organization can coast indefinitely on a readership built on it's prior reputation.
pjc50 9y ago
Baseball coverage once included broadcasts made by reconstructing games from telegraph reports, in some cases making up the game from whole cloth. Or, in modern parlance, "fake news". (Story often told about Reagan, but he's not the only one. https://www.thoughtco.com/ronald-reagans-radio-career-2843361 https://www.thoughtco.com/ronald-reagans-radio-career-284336... para 5-7)
freshhawk 9y ago
Their reputations probably would suffer if anyone cared or if it wasn't ubiquitous. There are 5 PR hacks for every reporter in America. And that counts people who are functionally equivalent to PR hacks as reporters because of their job title. The market has spoken, and actual journalism has been deemed unnecessary. The short era of actual journalism, with journalistic ethics classes and investigative journalism and the "baseball test" was a short term market inefficiency that has been solved (the idea of this era was also always very overblown).
- convivialdingo 9y ago
  PR hacks are mostly Government and Corporations. They routinely dribble out acronym babble and veiled feel-good propaganda. I read a lot of foreign policy and corporate announcements, so it's pretty common to see PR spread out across the net unattributed. Oftentimes PR firms are happy for you to print their copy - but they answer no questions and offer no insights.

kazinator 9y ago

So from this it follows, for instance, that a reporter assigned to cover baseball should have the same understanding as a writer writing about baseball: it is an assertion that there be a level standard of topic competence when reporters and writers are compared. But then under what condition should a writer not be assigned to write about baseball? (Unless he or she as knowledgeable about baseball as a baseball reporter?)

dogruck 9y ago

It's an ilformed test. Can a writer truly understand baseball as well as a baseball player? But, isn't a baseball player bound to be heavily biased toward the consensus baseball view? Or, take finance. If a financial journalist truly understood finance, wouldn't they be running a hedge fund instead of scraping by pumping out articles?

weberc2 9y ago
He said baseball writer, not player, unless he edited his comment between your post and mine.
- dogruck 9y ago
  I think we read the same post. I'm just saying that a writer's bias is correlated with his expertise.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fenomas 9y ago
Most baseball writers aren't former players or coaches, and nobody expects them to be. That's the whole point of the analogy. They're just expected to understand the rules of the game, know what the various acronyms mean, and generally be able to converse intelligently about the game. That's the standard being suggested for reporters covering other topics.
tpeo 9y ago
To answer the second question, a financial journalist might not take up a hedge fund management position on the basis of the risks involved, career stability, hedonic factors, etc. besides the purely monetary gains involved. Understanding something doesn't imply that's also the optimal course of action.
pjc50 9y ago
There's an entire sub-industry of financial journalism which is extremely well paid. It's just that it's paid for by charging the recipients (investors) a lot, and the people involved are called "analysts" rather than journalists. It's the sort of stuff available on Bloomberg terminals.

tpeo 9y ago

I'm starting to believe that there isn't such a thing as reputation when it comes to news. Or rather, that low quality news has such little impact on readership due the strategic nature of news reading (e.g. even if you might not like a certain news organization, you might still want to read it, if only to know what other people are reading) that a news organization can coast indefinitely on a readership built on it's prior reputation.

pjc50 9y ago

Baseball coverage once included broadcasts made by reconstructing games from telegraph reports, in some cases making up the game from whole cloth. Or, in modern parlance, "fake news". (Story often told about Reagan, but he's not the only one. https://www.thoughtco.com/ronald-reagans-radio-career-2843361 https://www.thoughtco.com/ronald-reagans-radio-career-284336... para 5-7)

freshhawk 9y ago

Their reputations probably would suffer if anyone cared or if it wasn't ubiquitous. There are 5 PR hacks for every reporter in America. And that counts people who are functionally equivalent to PR hacks as reporters because of their job title. The market has spoken, and actual journalism has been deemed unnecessary. The short era of actual journalism, with journalistic ethics classes and investigative journalism and the "baseball test" was a short term market inefficiency that has been solved (the idea of this era was also always very overblown).

convivialdingo 9y ago
PR hacks are mostly Government and Corporations. They routinely dribble out acronym babble and veiled feel-good propaganda. I read a lot of foreign policy and corporate announcements, so it's pretty common to see PR spread out across the net unattributed. Oftentimes PR firms are happy for you to print their copy - but they answer no questions and offer no insights.