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It's nice to see journalists actually reflecting on how to make journalism better for once. Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession

It's nice to see journalists actually reflecting on how to make journalism better for once. Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. But it's kind of a weird and poorly constructed argument: It’s easy to see why some readers would feel whiplashed by the current, critical coverage of Facebook and Google, which seems to come out of nowhere. Whiplash ... came out of nowhere ... so journalists changed their view too fast then. Next sentence: That’s our fault as journalists: We’ve been too slow to spot how things have changed Wait, did journalists change their views on tech too fast or too slow? It seems to be both at once in this paragraph. Later he appears to lament the historical dearth of "serious tech journalists", but he defines serious as journalists that "hold tech to account" which in turn simply seems to mean attacking them because they're big. I guess I'd use a definition more like "understands technology", with Jon Stokes at Ars Technica being a good example. We do need a new model for tech journalism and indeed all journalism - we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy. Given the contents of this essay I'm not holding my breath.

chickenfries 8y ago
> Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. Journalists are literally doing this all the time. What makes you think that engineers and doctors are the only people who have conferences? Also, if we're talking about industry, most tech conferences are hardly very self-critical (this is changing at some conferences) most are about selling products to developers / other people in the tech industry or self-promotion and recruiting.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Can you show me where to find conference papers written by journalists on how to do journalism better? I thought maybe the site hosting this article was one, but it appears to not be the case judging from the contents (it may think it is).
rossdavidh 8y ago
"We do need a new model for tech journalism and indeed all journalism - we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy..." That is the best summary of the problem I've heard yet. Much better than this article, for example.
watwut 8y ago
Pretty much every complicated enough profession I know of has conferences, books, blogs or something about how to do do things. Their conferences are less of circus and games usually and except academia they tend to be cheaper (conferences are expensive and I am not even sure they make you better) but the information exchange still exist.
matt4077 8y ago
I believe your dismissal of journalists is the result not of their failings, but of your relative ignorance of the profession. Compared to software engineers at least, journalism has far more advanced professional ethics and procedures, including codes of conducts, mandatory disclosures, processes for spotting and correcting errors, independent watchdogs etc. As but one specific example: here's a great article on the process that goes into editing a single article at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/06/how-to-copyedit-the-atlantic/562211/ https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/06/how-to-copyedit-th... Note the pages covered in red ink. Here's a similar photo from Der Spiegel: http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1175804-860_galleryfree-hhry-1175804.jpg http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1175804-860_galleryfree-.... Note how every single word is required to be be checked and crossed out.
- repolfx 8y ago
  That's clearly nonsense. If journalism had "far more advanced ethics and procedures" I wouldn't find glaring errors in journalism and obviously agenda-driven reporting so frequently. Editors rewriting things is no evidence of rigour, I'm afraid. I worked on a news story with one journalist at The Economist. I demonstrated to him that some of the claims circulating at the time on a particular topic were false and he accepted that my argument was correct. The final story made those same claims. The journalist apologised to me and said they'd been inserted by the editors (the claims in question were politically popular amongst the sort of people who write and read the Economist at the time). So I'm afraid I'm far from ignorant about journalism. I've done a lot of fact checking myself and worked with journalists many times. The level of effort that goes into correctness in engineering is orders of magnitude greater than anything journalism even attempts.
iamdave 8y ago
we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy I feel like we have lots more of those than you may be giving the industry credit for-or taken at face value, at least.
CM30 8y ago
> It's nice to see journalists actually reflecting on how to make journalism better for once. Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. Journalists actually do have tech conferences and events, as well as blogs about the profession. Though the former are ridiculously expensive given their audience, making me almost wonder how any actual journalist could afford to attend one. It's not like in tech where someone can get a few hundred grand a year in some jobs, it's 'would struggle with rent in a medium sized town' level salaries.
- iamdave 8y ago
  Probably paid for by their publication.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Journalists have tech conferences? That isn't quite what I meant. What I mean is, what's the journalism equivalent of proggit or hacker news or arxiv - a place where people come together to debate the latest techniques for raising the quality of journalism on a massive scale? Do they have one? In all my years of reading I've never encountered a rigorous attempt by journalists to define new systems for better quality journalism or debate the decline in their trust.
rsingel 8y ago
Lol. There's no such thing as "neutrally reporting accurate facts and news." If I was going to report on your comment, should I talk about how many sentences you wrote? How many uppercase letters you used. When you posted it? The italics? The fact that you posted on a website run by investors? The world is a sea of facts. Choosing which ones to talk about is inherently subjective. The "view from nowhere" you espouse does not exist. That view, while purporting to be apolitical is deeply political, meaning "journalists" should write from a place that does not question any larger contexts. Understanding tech and holding tech to account/having a point of view are not mutually exclusive. For instance, see Jon Stokes's takes on 3-D printed guns.
- rsingel 8y ago
  Lol on being downvoted. I was a writer and editor for Wired for a decade, including writing the first story ever about YC, covering security and breaking news on the NSA and AT&T's spying of Americans. But sure, what journalism needs is "neutral reporting of facts." F*ckin' engineers should spend less time debating React vs. Vue.js and try the humanities some time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - flexball 8y ago
    F'ing engineers can read just fine, the humanities are not the bastion of enlightenment and hard work that its graduates think it is. That was already clear to me in college when their weekly course and work load was approximately half of ours. I have since then read a book or two, yes. A better question is: how many journalists know how to code? Because that's the skill necessary to make sense of the world today and the massive volume of data it throws your way. I don't expect completely neutral reporting, but I do expect some basic data literacy rather than anecdotes spun into narrative and repeated breathlessly from outlet to outlet. Plus, if we are awash in manipulation, I'd prefer to find that out from an independent source rather than a three letter acronym with a long rep sheet of human rights abuses. The GDPR cookie debacle revealed this better than anything: what really drives the news industry now is tech, they're beholden to it. Plus, it's all third party. They no longer own their beat, the beat owns them. All the griping about FB and Twitter is exceedingly amusing to me for this reason. It's the news industry that capitulated, but is now chiding the rest of us for not having stood up, using the giants as a scape goat. We need journalism more than ever, but journalism needs to get its shit together first.
sid-kap 8y ago
I think you missed the point regarding whiplash. He's saying journalists should have been more skeptical about these companies all along, and should have dashed in some skepticism into their reporting throughout the last 10 years. Instead, they didn't pay attention to these things until recently, at which point everyone realized there are some things about Facebook and Google which seem questionable. So they waited too long to start looking at these companies critically, and when it became a salient topic and everyone started criticizing Google and Facebook all at once, they also had to jump onto the criticism bandwagon seemingly out of nowhere, causing the readers whiplash. Does that argument make sense?
- repolfx 8y ago
  Yes, it does, on re-reading I think you're right. That said, I don't believe his analysis is correct. I remember the short period of time in which coverage of Google and (a bit later) Facebook went from glowing to extremely nasty. It wasn't due to any sort of intellectual awakening amongst journalists. The cause was much simpler: Google launched Google News, and Facebook's news feed started to really begin kicking off major referral traffic to news sites. Journalists and their editors started to realise: a) How dependent they were becoming on G&F for traffic b) How the decline in their profitability was terminal and not going to be easily turned around via some superficial "digital strategy" c) How profitable these tech firms really were. They started attacking G&F not due to any actual or real problems but as part of a negotiating tactic, which you can see still playing out today with the various EU attempts at a "link tax" which is really a tax on Google News. Rupert Murdoch in particular was decisive in this war because at some point he concluded that the iPad was the future of newspapers (because it looked like a newspaper) whereas Google News was a horrible dystopian future. I remember that once Murdoch gave a speech outlining this belief his stable of newspapers turned on a dime to begin attacking Google and praising Apple, often with the most spurious of stories. But hey, they thought (wrongly) that Big Tech was taking away their employment.

chickenfries 8y ago

> Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. Journalists are literally doing this all the time. What makes you think that engineers and doctors are the only people who have conferences? Also, if we're talking about industry, most tech conferences are hardly very self-critical (this is changing at some conferences) most are about selling products to developers / other people in the tech industry or self-promotion and recruiting.

repolfx 8y ago
Can you show me where to find conference papers written by journalists on how to do journalism better? I thought maybe the site hosting this article was one, but it appears to not be the case judging from the contents (it may think it is).

rossdavidh 8y ago

"We do need a new model for tech journalism and indeed all journalism - we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy..." That is the best summary of the problem I've heard yet. Much better than this article, for example.

watwut 8y ago

Pretty much every complicated enough profession I know of has conferences, books, blogs or something about how to do do things. Their conferences are less of circus and games usually and except academia they tend to be cheaper (conferences are expensive and I am not even sure they make you better) but the information exchange still exist.

matt4077 8y ago

I believe your dismissal of journalists is the result not of their failings, but of your relative ignorance of the profession. Compared to software engineers at least, journalism has far more advanced professional ethics and procedures, including codes of conducts, mandatory disclosures, processes for spotting and correcting errors, independent watchdogs etc. As but one specific example: here's a great article on the process that goes into editing a single article at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/06/how-to-copyedit-the-atlantic/562211/ https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/06/how-to-copyedit-th... Note the pages covered in red ink. Here's a similar photo from Der Spiegel: http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1175804-860_galleryfree-hhry-1175804.jpg http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1175804-860_galleryfree-.... Note how every single word is required to be be checked and crossed out.

repolfx 8y ago
That's clearly nonsense. If journalism had "far more advanced ethics and procedures" I wouldn't find glaring errors in journalism and obviously agenda-driven reporting so frequently. Editors rewriting things is no evidence of rigour, I'm afraid. I worked on a news story with one journalist at The Economist. I demonstrated to him that some of the claims circulating at the time on a particular topic were false and he accepted that my argument was correct. The final story made those same claims. The journalist apologised to me and said they'd been inserted by the editors (the claims in question were politically popular amongst the sort of people who write and read the Economist at the time). So I'm afraid I'm far from ignorant about journalism. I've done a lot of fact checking myself and worked with journalists many times. The level of effort that goes into correctness in engineering is orders of magnitude greater than anything journalism even attempts.

iamdave 8y ago

we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy I feel like we have lots more of those than you may be giving the industry credit for-or taken at face value, at least.

CM30 8y ago

> It's nice to see journalists actually reflecting on how to make journalism better for once. Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. Journalists actually do have tech conferences and events, as well as blogs about the profession. Though the former are ridiculously expensive given their audience, making me almost wonder how any actual journalist could afford to attend one. It's not like in tech where someone can get a few hundred grand a year in some jobs, it's 'would struggle with rent in a medium sized town' level salaries.

iamdave 8y ago
Probably paid for by their publication.
repolfx 8y ago
Journalists have tech conferences? That isn't quite what I meant. What I mean is, what's the journalism equivalent of proggit or hacker news or arxiv - a place where people come together to debate the latest techniques for raising the quality of journalism on a massive scale? Do they have one? In all my years of reading I've never encountered a rigorous attempt by journalists to define new systems for better quality journalism or debate the decline in their trust.

rsingel 8y ago

Lol. There's no such thing as "neutrally reporting accurate facts and news." If I was going to report on your comment, should I talk about how many sentences you wrote? How many uppercase letters you used. When you posted it? The italics? The fact that you posted on a website run by investors? The world is a sea of facts. Choosing which ones to talk about is inherently subjective. The "view from nowhere" you espouse does not exist. That view, while purporting to be apolitical is deeply political, meaning "journalists" should write from a place that does not question any larger contexts. Understanding tech and holding tech to account/having a point of view are not mutually exclusive. For instance, see Jon Stokes's takes on 3-D printed guns.

rsingel 8y ago
Lol on being downvoted. I was a writer and editor for Wired for a decade, including writing the first story ever about YC, covering security and breaking news on the NSA and AT&T's spying of Americans. But sure, what journalism needs is "neutral reporting of facts." F*ckin' engineers should spend less time debating React vs. Vue.js and try the humanities some time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- flexball 8y ago
  F'ing engineers can read just fine, the humanities are not the bastion of enlightenment and hard work that its graduates think it is. That was already clear to me in college when their weekly course and work load was approximately half of ours. I have since then read a book or two, yes. A better question is: how many journalists know how to code? Because that's the skill necessary to make sense of the world today and the massive volume of data it throws your way. I don't expect completely neutral reporting, but I do expect some basic data literacy rather than anecdotes spun into narrative and repeated breathlessly from outlet to outlet. Plus, if we are awash in manipulation, I'd prefer to find that out from an independent source rather than a three letter acronym with a long rep sheet of human rights abuses. The GDPR cookie debacle revealed this better than anything: what really drives the news industry now is tech, they're beholden to it. Plus, it's all third party. They no longer own their beat, the beat owns them. All the griping about FB and Twitter is exceedingly amusing to me for this reason. It's the news industry that capitulated, but is now chiding the rest of us for not having stood up, using the giants as a scape goat. We need journalism more than ever, but journalism needs to get its shit together first.

sid-kap 8y ago

I think you missed the point regarding whiplash. He's saying journalists should have been more skeptical about these companies all along, and should have dashed in some skepticism into their reporting throughout the last 10 years. Instead, they didn't pay attention to these things until recently, at which point everyone realized there are some things about Facebook and Google which seem questionable. So they waited too long to start looking at these companies critically, and when it became a salient topic and everyone started criticizing Google and Facebook all at once, they also had to jump onto the criticism bandwagon seemingly out of nowhere, causing the readers whiplash. Does that argument make sense?

repolfx 8y ago
Yes, it does, on re-reading I think you're right. That said, I don't believe his analysis is correct. I remember the short period of time in which coverage of Google and (a bit later) Facebook went from glowing to extremely nasty. It wasn't due to any sort of intellectual awakening amongst journalists. The cause was much simpler: Google launched Google News, and Facebook's news feed started to really begin kicking off major referral traffic to news sites. Journalists and their editors started to realise: a) How dependent they were becoming on G&F for traffic b) How the decline in their profitability was terminal and not going to be easily turned around via some superficial "digital strategy" c) How profitable these tech firms really were. They started attacking G&F not due to any actual or real problems but as part of a negotiating tactic, which you can see still playing out today with the various EU attempts at a "link tax" which is really a tax on Google News. Rupert Murdoch in particular was decisive in this war because at some point he concluded that the iPad was the future of newspapers (because it looked like a newspaper) whereas Google News was a horrible dystopian future. I remember that once Murdoch gave a speech outlining this belief his stable of newspapers turned on a dime to begin attacking Google and praising Apple, often with the most spurious of stories. But hey, they thought (wrongly) that Big Tech was taking away their employment.