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My big concerns is the author's objectivity. This journalist has now written ten articles (including this one) mentioning Amazon in the headline, and one which

by jfultz 8y ago

My big concerns is the author's objectivity. This journalist has now written ten articles (including this one) mentioning Amazon in the headline, and one which strongly implicates Amazon (and has pictures of Amazon boxes), all since February of this year. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alana-semuels/ https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alana-semuels/ Of these eleven articles, ten of them run against Amazon, its business model, or its affects on society either directly in the headline or in the tagline listed on her author page...the only one I could find that didn't was "Free Shipping Isn't Hurting Amazon" piece. So, as a person who had written a bunch of articles in the last 7 months criticizing Amazon, did that color her expectations of her Amazon Flex experience? It seems pretty clear she took the job so that she could write the piece, even basically admitting at one point that she was carrying around her reporter's notebook while on at least one of her Flex runs. I doubt she made any false statements, but along with the objective statements, she included quite a number of subjective ones which clearly supported a thesis of "Amazon ruthlessly exploits the gig economy". And a significant portion of the article was dedicated to her own "tech support" issues...none of which seemed to be supported by quoted observations from the people she interviewed. I don't doubt that there are valid problems and criticisms of Amazon Flex. I just don't know how much I can trust this article to objectively communicate them.

pm24601 8y ago
How about looking at the facts that she presented. Her articles might be negative because that is what the facts indicate. I trust her article because she focused on the facts: * delivery address information wrong * heavy boxes * No ability to contact recipient for delivery * unreliable app for scanning packages * etc. "Balance" is bs if balance comes at the cost of accuracy.
ivanhoe 8y ago
Or this is what investigative journalism is all about, you suspect something bad or illegal is going on, so you go undercover to try to collect the evidences? Journalists don't stumble on evidences of misconduct by accident, they usually already have an idea about the story that they wish to write, so they investigate in that direction. Her direction seems to be investigating the shitty treatment of employees by Amazon, so she's wrote a series of articles on that subject and got a job so that she could write this one. As long as evidences presented are solid I don't see how this affects the authenticity of her stories? Especially since she's hardly lonely in this, tones of people are writing and complaining about the same kind of problems with Amazon...

by jfultz 8y ago

pm24601 8y ago

How about looking at the facts that she presented. Her articles might be negative because that is what the facts indicate. I trust her article because she focused on the facts: * delivery address information wrong * heavy boxes * No ability to contact recipient for delivery * unreliable app for scanning packages * etc. "Balance" is bs if balance comes at the cost of accuracy.

ivanhoe 8y ago

Or this is what investigative journalism is all about, you suspect something bad or illegal is going on, so you go undercover to try to collect the evidences? Journalists don't stumble on evidences of misconduct by accident, they usually already have an idea about the story that they wish to write, so they investigate in that direction. Her direction seems to be investigating the shitty treatment of employees by Amazon, so she's wrote a series of articles on that subject and got a job so that she could write this one. As long as evidences presented are solid I don't see how this affects the authenticity of her stories? Especially since she's hardly lonely in this, tones of people are writing and complaining about the same kind of problems with Amazon...