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Besides the problematic assertions this article makes about Tesla's business fundamentals (already addressed in the comments), I just want to call out the absur
by danso 8y ago
Besides the problematic assertions this article makes about Tesla's business fundamentals (already addressed in the comments), I just want to call out the absurdity of its media conspiracy theory:
> Media outlets are doing what they can to survive. They’re laying off seasoned journalists with strong fact-checking instincts. They’re laying off fact-checkers. They’re laying off editors. They’re rethinking how they write headlines to compete with clickbait...Tesla and Musk are big eyeball grabbers. They have been for five years, as this Google Trends graph shows. One publisher I work with regularly told me, anecdotally, that anything with Tesla or Musk in the headline is likely to perform better than average.
Only someone who has his head firmly in the Tesla bubble could imagine that the eyeballs that Tesla/Musk articles attract are any kind of significant blip in the revenues or traffic of a major general news outlet. It's really hard to imagine how clueless this author is, as if he had just woken up from a 2 year nap and doesn't realize what currently dominates the headlines and reader traffic.
Take this Sept. 4 article from BuzzFeed News, which arguably directly led to Musk bringing a libel suit upon himself: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-cave-rescuer-accusations-buzzfeed-email https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
I would bet a decent chunk of money that the reporters who worked on that story get paid more, and put more work into that article than did their colleague for this article from yesterday, "16 Bakers Who Should Be Very, Very Ashamed": https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamiejones/people-who-wont-be-winning-star-baker https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamiejones/people-who-wont-be-winni...
The "16 Bakers" article has 326,000+ views, according to Buzzfeed's own metrics. The BuzzFeedNews domain does not display pageview metrics, perhaps partly to look more dignified, but also because BuzzFeed's reported articles generally are nowhere near as popular in pure pageviews as the standard Buzzfeed listicle. Moreover, the Buzzfeed listicles sell ads (the Bakers' listicle has a sponsored Uncle Ben's ad), whereas the BuzzFeedNews articles rarely have any ads.
So tell me how paying quality reporters to write damaging articles about Tesla/Musk helps BuzzFeed's bottom line?