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Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories
- cocoa19 6y agoI applaud this note. I wouldn't be surprised if regular newspapers have bullshit metrics that lower the quality: - Words per article - Number of clicks - Articles posted It's the equivalent of measuring lines of code and transforming agile points to man-days.
- vimy 6y agoThe memo is 341 words.
- bjt 6y agoWell within the short bucket that he describes.
- dzink 6y agoPart of the problem is Google - their algorithms reward longer keyword-laden content.
- justaman 6y agoHow many people hit up google search for news? Doesn't most news come from social media feeds these days?
- dont__panic 6y agoThere are a lot of people who don't use social media for news. Besides, sometimes folks want to educate themselves about a recent news subject that their social media feed hasn't surfaced for them so they'll search for additional information... often via Google.
- save_ferris 6y agoThis memo highlights a problem that I’ve noticed recently as the public debates the legitimacy and effectiveness of the media. This chief editor is basically telling his people to write what readers want to read. But there’s a difference between what readers always want to read and what may be necessary to read. For example, if people only read what they wanted to read, how many people would really take interest in a possibly boring but important scandal? The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal comes to mind. It’s impact was global, but it’s not really related to domestic political battles or terrorism or whatever else really sells in the media these days. The problem is worse now because news isn’t sold as a broadsheet anymore, where subscribers might not read everything in an issue, but eyes are on all of the stories. Is that the case when everyone gets to pick a la carte from a website, especially when management like this is telling reporters to focus on what gets the most clicks?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> how many people would really take interest in a possibly boring but important scandal? The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal comes to mind. There's very little that is more attention grabbing than sex scandal. Except sex scandal involving children. Or one involving an large powerful institution around which political and culture war controversy (both internal and external to the institution) is constant, especially on sexual issues. > It’s impact was global, but it’s not really related to domestic political battles Yes, it was, especially because the Catholic Church is perpetually engaged in those battles on sexual issues, and because the scandal immediately intersected with the debate on those issues, as well as ongoing internal organizational debates in the institution such as the role of celibacy and homosexuals in the clergy that directly overlapped with the political and culture war issues the Church is regularly engaged in. So, yeah, worst possible example, even if one grants that you might have a generally valid point.
- spsful 6y agoI think his point was more well-intentioned. If writers wanted to quickly get an issue out to print (or publish), they could make it easily readable at <400 words. But if it's a tell-all, he gives them full authority to make it a long piece. If it's a particularly boring subject then maybe the writers will start making those stories shorter? In that case, the important details would still be there, just not as well explained. I don't think this restricts their journalism at all.
- dade_ 6y agoArticles in The Economist are usually a better investment of my time. I was originally introduced to the magazine by a teacher in high school, but I've come to learn that many other people weren't as fortunate. https://www.economist.com/ https://www.economist.com/
- _jal 6y agoI find that Economist articles about things I don't know much about are great. But the more I know about the topic, the less I think of the article. It isn't just the spin; sometimes you can guess whom they were talking to and whom they weren't by how wrong and they way they get something wrong.
- supernova87a 6y agoI agree -- the Economist is the exact opposite of what Bloomberg is pointing out. They provide a few scant (or no) examples, and then oddly jump to extrapolating what we should do about the universe. They don't seem to build credibility within an article to make you think they should know what should be done on some specific issue. Sorry to fall back on a stereotype, but they come off as Oxford students sitting in college, pontificating on the world they've read about. Maybe I'm mostly thinking about their pseudo-opinion pieces. It just got to the point I didn't enjoy reading them, and no longer do.
- antipaul 6y agoIt looks like the Bloomberg editor in chief is actually the former editor of The Economist, though he switched 5 years ago Learned this in one of the articles in this thread: Shortly after his return, he hired a new editor-in-chief -- John Micklethwait, of The Economist https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/07/bloomberg-fires-digital-editor-josh-topolsky-210295 https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/07/bloomberg-fires...
- razakel 6y ago>But the more I know about the topic, the less I think of the article. Gell-Mann Amnesia, as Michael Crichton put it: "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
- jbob2000 6y agoPart of Bloomberg's business model is news-as-advertising; "This company developed this new therapy, find out more". I think that's what the editor is referring to as "enterprise stories". He's basically saying - listen, when a company is paying for a news article, don't let them stuff the piece or bury the lede. Get their key message down and move on, our readers skim the article for the beef anyways so you're just wasting their time by adding filler.
- antoncohen 6y agoI think it is the other way around. The stories you are implying are paid are from press releases, though they aren't paid to run them. "Enterprise" are stories that don't come from PR, they are stories where enterprising journalists have researched and developed a story. That is why he says: > Before you embark on a piece of enterprise, ask yourself whether it’s really going to be worth the investment, And if an idea doesn’t turn out as envisaged, be prepared to spike it and move on. A week or two spend on source-building, without any story published, is often a much more valuable use of our reporters’ time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_journalism
- paulpauper 6y agowhat would be an example of a paid Bloomberg article?
- duxup 6y ago>enterprise stories What is an enterprise story?
- lemmsjid 6y agoI didn't know either so looked it up: 'Enterprise journalism is reporting that is not generated by news or a press release, but rather generated by a reporter or news organization based on developed sources.' That makes sense because he was in the memo balancing the development of sources (which can lead to enterprise stories) against the investment of writing ones that don't seem to be panning out well.
- hhs 6y agoThere’s a field called enterprise journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_journalism Wonder if the Bloomberg platform defines enterprise stories like this. It might be different, anyone know?
- cgh 6y agoEssentially, it's investigative reporting. It sounds like they want to focus more on "news" as defined by press release, which probably is not a good thing.
- MBCook 6y agoOh, are they finally apologizing (or providing proof for) their story The Big Hack about chips the size of a grain of rice China puts in computers made by Dell and Apple and others? No? Not a word about it? It’s almost like they’re continuing to pretend that their giant journalistic screwup doesn’t exist. Don’t care. ‘Are articles are too long’. How about yours articles are untrustworthy?
- Legogris 6y agoIs this what state-fed misinformation looks like?
- systemvoltage 6y agoPossibly, but just as Bloomberg cannot prove legitimacy of their story, your claim is equal in that regard. So, best to not speculate and conspire.
- ogre_codes 6y agoWhat astounds me is not only have they not apologized, they haven't even done a back-page, quiet retraction. They still present the story as if it's "News".
- close04 6y ago> It’s almost like they’re continuing to pretend that their giant journalistic screwup doesn’t exist It's exactly like. They did not publish a retraction because they stand behind what they wrote. But as long as they keep it short...
- nexuist 6y agoThey stand behind what they wrote despite every company mentioned publicly insisting the claims were BS, despite no evidence being presented then or now, despite the fact that it actively hurts their integrity? Why would they do that?
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- jpalomaki 6y agoGood and concrete advice from the chief editor: "A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900. You either have a simple news story or a single observation (in which case go short) or a yarn or a chance to explain something very complicated (in which case go long"
- chad_strategic 6y agoThis is not good for my ASD, not good at all. ASD = Attention Surplus Disorder I seem to be the only one here that likes Bloomberg, but then again I work in finance.
- nillium 6y agoThis has been our working hypothesis; we're building tools for newsrooms to syndicate the piecemeal updates of breaking stories throughout the day, for people who dont want to commit to long articles or videos. https://blog.nillium.com/what-can-napster-teach-local-news/ https://blog.nillium.com/what-can-napster-teach-local-news/
- Simulacra 6y agoIn my opinion, all of journalism has become too mediocre as it seeks clicks, not readers.
- CrankyBear 6y agoShort, sweet, and to the point has always been Bloomberg's editorial policy. I'm surprised he had to underline it to the staffers this way.
- whoisjuan 6y agoLike when they made up a story about China infiltrating servers of US companies with a nano chip that is not even technically feasible to produce and they simply ignore everyone when they were called out on their bs?
- smolder 6y agoWhy do you say it's technically unfeasible? The articles I saw "debunking" Bloomberg are pretty weak on their arguments. Even if Bloomberg got some things wrong, a tiny chip that subverts motherboard firmware to phone home for instructions is possible in something rice sized, for a sophisticated state actor. Network stacks already exist in firmware. You'd need to inject maybe 4KB of instructions somewhere, but I can't imagine it'd be many orders of magnitude more than that to bootstrap such a process. The suspicious silent non-retraction raises a red flag for me, that there may have been some kind of intervention to stop their reporting on the topic.
- whoisjuan 6y agohttps://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloomberg-supermicro-stories/ https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloom... This is a good explanation. This article is weird because it's paginated. Make sure to use the paginator below the body to read it fully. There are many good arguments in that article but the simplest one is that there's simply no modern lithography methods to produce a chip of that size with processing power, signaling interfaces and networking, which are all required to create a trojan ship like the one described by Bloomberg. Additionally you need to provide power to this hypothetical nano-chip so you need more components like capacitors which of course is never mentioned in the Bloomberg article.
- smolder 6y agoThe chip doesn't need networking, it needs to infect existing firmware with networking. The motherboard/nic firmwares already have that. Nor would it necessarily be limited to the IPMI side nic as they imply. Steganography could be used to get through firewalls on net facing NICs. The part about "most sensitive code" wrongly assumes that means on storage devices and not motherboard firmware. As for the size, there are no commercial lithography methods with that capability, perhaps. It'd be possible to put significant capacitance and logic in a very tiny package with advanced lithographic techniques, say like gates printed into layers of a small cap? Yeah I'm getting really out there, but to say there's nothing so interesting in the highly compartmentalized world of spy tech is to make a claim in ignorance, naturally. Unless you're in a position to say precisely what technology they have, in which case, please contact me privately, since I'm curious. ;)
- motohagiography 6y agoHis comment about respecting and saving readers' time, that was one of the smartest things I've read about journalism. If it doesn't do that, it's not worth writing or reading.
- bitxbit 6y agoI am still pissed about their story on Elemental Technologies.
- fizixer 6y agoUlysses journalism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780937
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cm2187 6y agoWhich is why publishing a misleading headline followed by a misleading first paragraph, and burying the facts in the middle or bottom of the article is such a common practice. Journalists know only a small fraction of the readers will read the whole thing and it is one of the many ways to lie without lying.
- pdog 6y agoA lot of good writing advice in this memo: The key person to think about is the reader. People generally read only one screen and SELDOM read more than two screens. (A screen typically is around 300 words.) A long story on a complicated topic can save readers time if it replaces the need to read a lot of short ones. Readers either want to have a quick piece of information or something that justifies the longer read. A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900. Taking 700 words or 800 words to make a single point will just annoy readers. Keep it short. Think of the reader.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoAnd, if it's going to be 900 words, then in the first 400, you'd better make it clear that you've got 900 words that are actually worth my time to read. You make it clear, not by telling me that you've got something relevant to say, but by demonstrating it.
- ghaff 6y ago>A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900. I'm not sure the evidence supports that. The online tech pubs I write for (not news stories), posts/articles tend to be in the 800-1200 word range. Shorter than that and it's hard to get into a topic. Longer than that and people stop reading (as supported by data). If you need 3,000 words, the advice is to turn it into a series. Shorter may be OK if you're just communicating a fact and no background is needed. Although standard journalism practice would be to hit the new stuff in the first few paragraphs and add more content in inverted pyramid style that provides context.
- greatgib 6y agoThe point of the chief editor is so true that I'm surprised to read that from them. I have noticed that a lot of times with this kind of web media. - You have a clickbait title like this: "How a normal guy managed to hack WallStreet with a simple pen" - Then, you have one page of interesting introduction on the topic but without the reply to the title question. "In november 2018, WallStreet was busy with the introduction of xxxx, and suddenly a problem happened, everything went black. To understand, wallstreet works with computers that are connected with a modern system... 300 words ... and on that cold night of the 23 nov 2020, one man John Crowford destroyed all of that." - Then you have 10 pages of useless crap and fake intervews about the childhood of the guy and a lot of things that are not interesting, and not related to the subject. "His mother was blond, she liked to eat fries. But despite that, John Crowford liked to eat popcorn. So much that his friend reported that, one time, he stayed at a movie theater for a whole day just to eat popcorns ... Studies at the yyy school were ok, but he followed them without passion until he met Carolinas Brocolis a hot night of summer 1992. Together they got 3 kids ... he was not supposed to live in New York as he was born in California, but he found a job there, ..." - And then, you finally have the explanation that is, most of the time, short and straightforward. "So, he was hired as a Janitor in Wall Street, and accidentally put his pen inside the holes of a power plug, resulting in a major power failure. THE END" After reading such a story, either you did skip to the end directly, or you are very angry to have lost so much time reading useless things.
- function_seven 6y agoMy god you hit the nail on the head. It's frustrating to try and read those articles. Even when they have an actual story to tell, but choose to interleave some sort of "B plot" all throughout the writing. I'm left guessing which pages I can skip and which ones are worth reading. Wishing they'd just put all the background info in a standalone section.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoThe world needs more heroes like John Crowford, now more than ever.
- Youden 6y ago
- callamdelaney 6y agoI unsubscribed from Bloomberg. Their articles are only relevant for finance professionals. The FT has things like personal finance and general news too - although both are of questionable political neutrality.
- mrtweetyhack 6y agothat's a good word. I'm going to use it in my enterprise sentences
- variable11 6y ago"We publish too much billionaire fellatio."
- spikels 6y agoThis is more evidence the news media is self destructing. “Enterprise stories” are where reporters take the time to learn something rather than just rewrite a press release or someone else’s reporting. This type of reporting has been under pressure for years because it’s expensive and media budgets are very tight. This editor-in-chief is saying the clicks don’t justify the expense. The story of the destruction of the media is well known but some of the details are underappreciated: * Individual articles are now the fundamental unit. They are promoted on social media then carefully tracked and evaluated. A hot story get orders of magnitude more clicks/revenue so they focus on trying to produce that an ignore everything else. This narrows the scope tremendously. * Reporting is no longer a profession but more like a calling similar to the arts. The demands are too high and the pay is too low. It takes sustained outside support (rich family, spouse, sponsor) for most reporters to make it today. Many reporters have strong ideological motivations which substitute for pay but can compromise reporting. For the reader the bottom line is the news media is no longer the neutral source of information we used to think it was. First it is now highly biased to provoke a response, usually emotional and often just to the headline (clickbait), at this point the job is done, the ad is sold. Second the people writing and editing the stories have strong beliefs coloring their selection and content. The result is the article contains biased, incomplete and inaccurate information. And once you let that bad information into your head it is very hard to unlearn it. You often know less after reading a news article these days! ... Fascinating developments. Matt Taibbi has done some good reporting on this but it is typically covered very superficially by media critics. There are a few books I have yet to read but pointers to thoughtful analysis would be appreciated. This is a complex and still evolving issue.
- doonesbury 6y ago"'Strictly speaking ... readers aren't what they used to be ... so being a writer isn't what it used to be.' J.F. Powers" [1] pg100 "We are all suckers for statements about culture - which is not surprising when culture at first glance seems so balefully homogenous, but upon closer inspection, is so unappealingly atomized. A new angle is invariably more charismatic, more assimilable, handier in every way than the work which presumably springs from it." [1] pg20 I can't lay my hands on the exact quote but in [1] the author makes an point in the context of inflation (of ideas, and everything American): when no idea is worth a anything the only thing to do in this environment is come up with an even more seriously hyped idea I presume to sooth that gnawing sense of emptiness. This feedback loop ensures each idea is inflated keeping the inflation of ideas going and thus cheapening each idea. One unintended result in my view is paranoia, alienation, conspiracy that comes from atomization which we see in spades nowadays. This also has strong connections to another HN post in the top 50 stories on creative management. Way underneath the original article is something far deeper than I think [1] sunk his teeth into way back in 1984. The BBG editor is struggling with how to deal with the reader who deals with zillions of possible stories and how BBG will add value for time the reader will spend. The editor's stance is but only the highest ceiling on a much deeper problem. Gents, the reader has changed. And too much of today's culture coddles him (us, me) as an anxiety ridden middle-class person trying to fight the good fight. Well, I am not so generous. A lot of readers are lazy. A lot of readers want meaning handed to them because getting experience and ideas are becoming separate islands. In Reddit Pro Life Tips format: 99.9% of what you need to know you're gonna have to learn yourself. I close with a quote from the forward in [1]: "'No longer is it, 'When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver.' We are permitted instead, 'Culture sits so well in my pock that whenever I hear the world "thought" I smile' Phillip Sollers" [1] [1] Salmagundi "The Post-Modern Aura" Charles Newman No.63-64 Spring-Summer 1984