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I think that real journalism can happen under profit seeking organizations, because people find value in real journalism. However, real journalists don't do or

I think that real journalism can happen under profit seeking organizations, because people find value in real journalism. However, real journalists don't do original research, they compile insights from experts. Journalists have a tendency to get it wrong when they try to add original insight in an article. Just about every person who is an expert in a field has a story about when their field made it into the news cycle and the journalists butchered some important concept. I'm a statistician, and we always work with investigators that are experts in their field- unless we are researching statistical methods, then we act as our own experts. The statisticians handle the data analysis and make sure that the investigators don't make silly data mistakes. The investigators handle the reasoning and mechanisms behind the research. When they work together they can collect good data that they are familiar with and know how to interpret correctly. When they work separately they are prone to mistakes. Fivethirtyeight (and also the ASU researchers) fell into this trap. They were not involved in the data collection, so they don't really know what each variable means, and just took someone's word for it who, (back to the economic motives) has an incentive to sell their dataset and not to tell the researchers to go look elsewhere. I'll admit I was too harsh in comparing fivethirtyeight to an article about Trump's tweet, 538 is typically decent investigative journalism. However, I maintain that it isn't on the level of peer-reviewed academic research. Articles on 538 don't go through peer review. They aren't submitted and languish for months with revisions and answering follow up questions. I'm not saying that this mistake would have been caught by a referee, but in the peer-review process a referee could have caught it by asking questions about the analysis process and if it's valid to use a variable named "X" was being used as a proxy for a variable named "broadband access."

azeotropic 9y ago
>I think that real journalism can happen under profit seeking organizations, because people find value in real journalism. However, real journalists don't do original research, they compile insights from experts. Journalists have a tendency to get it wrong when they try to add original insight in an article. Just about every person who is an expert in a field has a story about when their field made it into the news cycle and the journalists butchered some important concept. It's much much worse than this. I was once interviewed about my research by an NPR reporter. He had already decided what his story was about and tried a variety of tricks get me to say some pithy quote he had devised so he could use it on air. The problem was that my research actually debunked, rather that supported, the story he wanted to run, and the pithy quote was scientifically unsupportable. I often wonder whether some of the quotes I hear on NPR are edited versions of the interviewees saying "no it wouldn't be accurate to say x" cut down to "x".

azeotropic 9y ago

>I think that real journalism can happen under profit seeking organizations, because people find value in real journalism. However, real journalists don't do original research, they compile insights from experts. Journalists have a tendency to get it wrong when they try to add original insight in an article. Just about every person who is an expert in a field has a story about when their field made it into the news cycle and the journalists butchered some important concept. It's much much worse than this. I was once interviewed about my research by an NPR reporter. He had already decided what his story was about and tried a variety of tricks get me to say some pithy quote he had devised so he could use it on air. The problem was that my research actually debunked, rather that supported, the story he wanted to run, and the pithy quote was scientifically unsupportable. I often wonder whether some of the quotes I hear on NPR are edited versions of the interviewees saying "no it wouldn't be accurate to say x" cut down to "x".