4 ms·

I'm being a cheeky detractor of NYT here. I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are the future of news, and ancient vehicles like New York Times are lon

I'm being a cheeky detractor of NYT here. I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are the future of news, and ancient vehicles like New York Times are long dead. I think the "general NYT audience" is participating in #FakeNews, and they should radically reconsider their information diet. As vivid example of this, compare James Birdle breaking the "Youtube exploitative kid videos" story way before, and in greater depth, than in any major publication. This is actually the future of news, and pretending like aging institutions like the New York Times are remotely relevant anymore is longshot wishful thinking. Editorialization, fact-checking, and cultural leadership have important roles to play, and I'm excited to see these features unbundled into separate services. I'm long on services like Verrit and Snopes, and wish that I, as an independent publisher, could pay an intern to get official statements, cross-check narratives with history, and perform some of these functions. As is, I think people are operating under the delusion that ONLY NYT-style institutions can perform these functions, which baffles me. (Actually, the future is probably more like James posting on jamesbridle.com, and then aggregating it through sites like Hacker News. But what do I know, I'm just a millennial who doesn't understand all these big partisan topics like modern journalism) https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

untog 9y ago
Hmm. I'm going to disagree with that! I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are and will continue to be great for an engineering audience, but I'm very skeptical that they will be great for a wide audience. For instance, I read and was fascinated by the YouTube kids post, but I do not know anyone outside of the tech industry that read it. And you're wrong to say he reported it way before, the NYT published this two days previous: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki... and Birdle's post itself links to reporting by New York Magazine from 2016. I don't dispute that his post goes into more detail, I just dispute that longer automatically equals better. Someone with domain knowledge reporting a story in great depth and a major publication reporting a simplified version for mass consumption is certainly not a new model. I'd also strongly disagree that NYT is an ageing institution unable to adapt to this modern tech reality. John Herrman writes some of the most perceptive pieces about the state of tech out there: https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-herrman https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-herrman (and a minor quibble: I don't think the post linked here and the Youtube Kids post are in any way comparable. The engineering writeup is not news in any way, shape or form, it's just a guide to how NYT implemented something)
- natural219 9y ago
  Thank you for this good response. I didn't notice the NYT covering this story before, because I have cut NYT out from my life due to their malicious, partisan reporting. So maybe I should be less bold about my evaluations of them and just continue to enjoy my personally-curated, high-information-dense feed.

untog 9y ago

Hmm. I'm going to disagree with that! I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are and will continue to be great for an engineering audience, but I'm very skeptical that they will be great for a wide audience. For instance, I read and was fascinated by the YouTube kids post, but I do not know anyone outside of the tech industry that read it. And you're wrong to say he reported it way before, the NYT published this two days previous: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki... and Birdle's post itself links to reporting by New York Magazine from 2016. I don't dispute that his post goes into more detail, I just dispute that longer automatically equals better. Someone with domain knowledge reporting a story in great depth and a major publication reporting a simplified version for mass consumption is certainly not a new model. I'd also strongly disagree that NYT is an ageing institution unable to adapt to this modern tech reality. John Herrman writes some of the most perceptive pieces about the state of tech out there: https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-herrman https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-herrman (and a minor quibble: I don't think the post linked here and the Youtube Kids post are in any way comparable. The engineering writeup is not news in any way, shape or form, it's just a guide to how NYT implemented something)

natural219 9y ago
Thank you for this good response. I didn't notice the NYT covering this story before, because I have cut NYT out from my life due to their malicious, partisan reporting. So maybe I should be less bold about my evaluations of them and just continue to enjoy my personally-curated, high-information-dense feed.