9 ms·

Too big to cover alone: Newsrooms team up

67 points by samizdis 5y ago

groby_b 5y ago
Looka like the astroturf brigade is going strong today. Newsrooms have collaborated on stories for a long time, especially when large amounts of data are involved. It's near impossible to do reporting on these issues (Facebook, Panama/Paradise/Pandora papers, etc) without bringing large amounts of journalists to bear, quickly. Or, I suppose, you could run with the global conspiracy idea.
- 8eye 5y ago
  i think it’s just an old system. it’s time for it to retire. who really watches major news networks these days anymore? besides anyone in their mid thirties, barely anyone below that demographic. even those in their 40s are kinda meh about the news. i should say broadcast media because news will always be around just not in this current format
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Do you have evidence of that? Local TV news has the biggest audience, IIRC.
h2odragon 5y ago
Helps reduce those troublesome variances in the Narrative, too.
- toomim 5y ago
  I smell sarcasm.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    I don't. I smell Human Psychology 101. Groups of humans tend to unify. The US media is already too binary, too lacking in the ability (read: willingness) to communicate the subtlety of issues. Having them work together is only going to amplify that mono-minded approach. There's also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
samizdis 5y ago
> Parts of the group's embargo fell apart Friday night, and some participating newsrooms posted a batch of articles ahead of the weekend. That is such a shame, and reflects poorly on those who saw fit to break ranks. However, the overall idea is sound and, I think, positive and encouraging. I've worked on editorial CMS tools linked to interactive planning modules (open source, and with a stripped-down SaaS variant in the offing) that could be spun up really quickly for such cross-outlet access/collaboration use cases.
- posix_me_less 5y ago
  The idea of different news organizations coordinating on publications hitting their common hated competitor is a "sound idea"? Don't you want independent and balanced reporting without group think and narrative coordination?
  - manquer 5y ago
    Even the largest news organizations can no longer afford to staff large investigative teams who can research on stories for months and go through tens of thousands of documents to produce few stories. The collusion is a far lesser problem than getting the story at all, that capacity is diminishing every year.
    - bogantech 5y ago
      > The collusion is a far lesser problem than getting the story at all That depends on whether you're the pawn or the billionaire media owner
      - shapefrog 5y ago
        PR agencies are more than happy to provide the entire story, even the litteral words for the article. All you need to do is slap your name at the top and click publish.
        5y ago
lettergram 5y ago
Kinda like how they control the narrative and release / orchestrate propaganda at the same time... https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1420050776785883136/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1420050776785883136/photo... ???
- TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
  Not sure where to even get started with this. Could you elucidate your point a bit more without the clickbaity link? Tim Pool is also a cherry-picker and propagandist in his own right. He creates a cult following by sowing distrust in the legacy media while pushing alt-media as a beacon of truth. There are tons of fair and valid criticisms to be made of existing media, but this fails to hit the mark.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  That's a weird way to spin competent reporting (of misdeeds by the powerful).
  - twofornone 5y ago
    If you look closely, the point is that media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda. When you collect the headlines and list them side by side, the implicitly (or explicitly?) coordinated propaganda becomes obvious.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > If you look closely, the point is that media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda. One is more likely to read political/cultural agendas into everything they can when one primarily consumes media that compulsively frames everything it doesn't like in political/cultural terms.
      - stronglikedan 5y ago
        No, it really is as simple as "media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda." It's blatantly obvious, and not even questionable. However, it's also not new.
thenanyu 5y ago
How is this not anti-competitive collusion.
- posix_me_less 5y ago
  Mainstream/establishment media like to hit at Facebook, probably because it is eating their profits. But it's a curious double standard - Twitter and Google allow similar nasty stuff on their platforms too but are being tolerated. Facebook has been chosen as the public enemy No.1. Maybe it's because Facebook prefers profits and is not obeying establishment narratives?
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > it's a curious double standard - Twitter and Google allow similar nasty stuff on their platforms too but are being tolerated This is a curiously-repeated line. The nastiness isn't the crux of the issue. It's the core of the issue. But what puts Facebook front and centre is its abysmal track record of lying.
    - Nasrudith 5y ago
      Google and twitter direct traffic to them and aren't seen as a competitor by most. You can always tell how untrustworthy a news company is when the knives come out against any target who isn't good for their business interests while they lob softball whomever is in power in exchange for access to information they will never even properly cover!
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Twitter is literally built on a lie. Their founding story is a a complete lie and disgrace. I am sure Twitter and Google lie just as much.
- Traster 5y ago
  Well I mean, let's add up all of the news organisations that have joined together and pit them against their single largest competitor. They're still less than 1/10th the size of their neartest competitor (facebook).
throwaway_dcnt 5y ago
I am alarmed that the media in its pursuit of clicks and eyeballs would amplify the divisions using such collusion. An example article put forward by a main stream news organization: https://abcnews.go.com/US/type-gun-us-homicides-ar-15/story?id=78689504 https://abcnews.go.com/US/type-gun-us-homicides-ar-15/story?... The topic is already quite sensitive and divisive. Was it really necessary to use the image with a gun covered in american flag? If this is not fanning the flames of divisions, what is? And now they want to collude?
- kodah 5y ago
  I think you have a point, however, there's a fair amount of folks that think news coverage is just fine. I'm sure where you use the word collude those folks use the word "collaborate". The way I understand it is this: if you have multiple companies covering the same topic using their own channels, then someone has to try to stick out in the variety. This could be good or this could be bad. There's a lot of ways I can think to interpret that image, but I'd say it's probably planted to agitate liberals. That's a company trying to stick out in a negative way. If they work together, they can produce common narratives -- even if they're wrong, but especially under certain pervasive ideologies that may be trendy at the time. The whole Covington incident and the outpouring of blind rage was a fairly good example of this very thing. Entire reporting fueled off of a tweet and other companies speculative reports. This tells me there's something deeper wrong, or at least - this is not the place to institute a patch. For those that need an update on Covington: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memoria...
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Perhaps it's because gun owners love to festoon everything they own with American flags and not because of some nefarious plan to "sow division," a kind of paranoia that sounds to me like a mirror image of the liberals seeing Russians under the bed every night.
throwaway224466 5y ago
Globalized newsrooms...aka coordinated propaganda and censorship. Trump did everyone the favor of opening their eyes to how fake the mass media is.
YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
It is not unheard of for large caches of documents to be vetted by multiple new outlets who coordinate which stories they will cover. For example, the Panama Papers were handled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), who in turn helped coordinate reporters from The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more. https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/ https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d... For the pandora papers, ICIJ coordinated and worked with journalists from 91 outlets, including The Washington Post, Frontline, The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers#Participating_media_outlets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers#Participating_m...
- wolverine876 5y ago
  The article goes into detail about that.
TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
Nothing groundbreaking here. Ever heard of the Associated Press? When dealing with large complex issues you need to collaborate to try and provide accurate reporting. It's best to operate under the assumption that most reporting is incomplete or it contains inaccuracies lest you fall for the trap of believing you have a perfectly accurate picture of reality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press
- emodendroket 5y ago
  In some sense you're right, but I feel like this is also a symptom of how unhealthy news organizations are and will accelerate the trend where local news reporting is anemic and toothless outside of the major media markets.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    I have always viewed local news as anemic. As a young child I found it super boring and would always look forward to national and international news. In my hometown, the last time our major news paper ran a good corruption story it got attacked by Carl Lindner and subsequently neutered. Fast forward a few decades and our city was found to be a hotbed of corruption, not by local journalism, but by the FBI. It was unchecked but could have easily been uncovered by decent journalism a lot sooner.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      At one point American cities all had multiple newspapers with staff doing real investigative work but those days are getting to be pretty far behind us. Now you've got one guy who covers an entire region and is obviously just writing up press releases.
8eye 5y ago
this is hilarious, they are finally doomed. sorry not sorry. i was a media major, i have nothing against the people themselves but, it’s an old system, it’s connected to old school broadcast tv. there are more voices now, ones of the people. not saying broadcast employees are not people, clearly they are but the system is changing just like cassettes and cds, out with the old in with the new
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Actually what's been happening is they've been replaced with the voices of moneyed interests who have the means to do "reporting" at a loss, but hey at least a lot of people got fired.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Speaking of coordinated reporting, what ever happened to the Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election story? It's been bugging me for a long time. It just dropped out of existence all of a sudden. For a couple of straight that made up what felt like 50% of everything I heard of coming out of most news corporations and politicians, talkshows, twiter, everywhere. Then suddenly they all pretty much in unison stopped talking about it. This is going off topic I realize, but it's bugged me. Does nobody care to follow up on this or find out who knew what and when and what went wrong? We were assured many times there was ample evidence of this by many politicians and journalists. So either it's been kept secret and even seemingly hidden from special council Mueller, or else it doesn't exist and it was all a huge coordinated lie. I don't really see a 3rd option, so anything would be a huge story I would have thought. Nobody seems to care though. EDIT: I have to ask who is down voting this. Am I not supposed to be wondering about this massively weird thing that happened and has apparently been memory holed? Is it verboten to ask the wrong questions?
- dash2 5y ago
  > or else it doesn't exist and it was all a huge coordinated lie. Or people were gullible, keen to sell an anti-Trump story, overestimated the chances of something being true, were embarrassed about it later...? I think that story is mostly dead but Matt Taibbi will probably tell you about it, in between ranting.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Well I don't know I don't think it's dead at all, it's massively interesting. It's not just hack entertainers masquerading as journalists selling tabloid conspiracy theories here, it was an entire political party (maybe both parties) plus the state security and surveillance apparatus who were all saying there was evidence here and going to secret courts and all this crazy stuff. Where is it? The Mueller report says plain as day they did not find evidence to substantiate claims that Trump or his campaign associates colluded (conspired) in any way with Russia.
- dmpk2k 5y ago
  > Nobody seems to care though. It would be more accurate to say that nobody who matters cares. Manufacturing Consent was broadly correct, but now add the surprising power of the Twitter echo chamber, where most American journalists spend their time. That, and Trump got eyeballs.

67 points by samizdis 5y ago

Looka like the astroturf brigade is going strong today. Newsrooms have collaborated on stories for a long time, especially when large amounts of data are involved. It's near impossible to do reporting on these issues (Facebook, Panama/Paradise/Pandora papers, etc) without bringing large amounts of journalists to bear, quickly. Or, I suppose, you could run with the global conspiracy idea.

8eye 5y ago
i think it’s just an old system. it’s time for it to retire. who really watches major news networks these days anymore? besides anyone in their mid thirties, barely anyone below that demographic. even those in their 40s are kinda meh about the news. i should say broadcast media because news will always be around just not in this current format
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Do you have evidence of that? Local TV news has the biggest audience, IIRC.

h2odragon 5y ago

Helps reduce those troublesome variances in the Narrative, too.

toomim 5y ago
I smell sarcasm.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  I don't. I smell Human Psychology 101. Groups of humans tend to unify. The US media is already too binary, too lacking in the ability (read: willingness) to communicate the subtlety of issues. Having them work together is only going to amplify that mono-minded approach. There's also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

samizdis 5y ago

> Parts of the group's embargo fell apart Friday night, and some participating newsrooms posted a batch of articles ahead of the weekend. That is such a shame, and reflects poorly on those who saw fit to break ranks. However, the overall idea is sound and, I think, positive and encouraging. I've worked on editorial CMS tools linked to interactive planning modules (open source, and with a stripped-down SaaS variant in the offing) that could be spun up really quickly for such cross-outlet access/collaboration use cases.

posix_me_less 5y ago
The idea of different news organizations coordinating on publications hitting their common hated competitor is a "sound idea"? Don't you want independent and balanced reporting without group think and narrative coordination?
- manquer 5y ago
  Even the largest news organizations can no longer afford to staff large investigative teams who can research on stories for months and go through tens of thousands of documents to produce few stories. The collusion is a far lesser problem than getting the story at all, that capacity is diminishing every year.
  - bogantech 5y ago
    > The collusion is a far lesser problem than getting the story at all That depends on whether you're the pawn or the billionaire media owner
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      PR agencies are more than happy to provide the entire story, even the litteral words for the article. All you need to do is slap your name at the top and click publish.
      - 5y ago

lettergram 5y ago

Kinda like how they control the narrative and release / orchestrate propaganda at the same time... https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1420050776785883136/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1420050776785883136/photo... ???

TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
Not sure where to even get started with this. Could you elucidate your point a bit more without the clickbaity link? Tim Pool is also a cherry-picker and propagandist in his own right. He creates a cult following by sowing distrust in the legacy media while pushing alt-media as a beacon of truth. There are tons of fair and valid criticisms to be made of existing media, but this fails to hit the mark.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
That's a weird way to spin competent reporting (of misdeeds by the powerful).
- twofornone 5y ago
  If you look closely, the point is that media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda. When you collect the headlines and list them side by side, the implicitly (or explicitly?) coordinated propaganda becomes obvious.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > If you look closely, the point is that media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda. One is more likely to read political/cultural agendas into everything they can when one primarily consumes media that compulsively frames everything it doesn't like in political/cultural terms.
    - stronglikedan 5y ago
      No, it really is as simple as "media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda." It's blatantly obvious, and not even questionable. However, it's also not new.

thenanyu 5y ago

How is this not anti-competitive collusion.

posix_me_less 5y ago
Mainstream/establishment media like to hit at Facebook, probably because it is eating their profits. But it's a curious double standard - Twitter and Google allow similar nasty stuff on their platforms too but are being tolerated. Facebook has been chosen as the public enemy No.1. Maybe it's because Facebook prefers profits and is not obeying establishment narratives?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > it's a curious double standard - Twitter and Google allow similar nasty stuff on their platforms too but are being tolerated This is a curiously-repeated line. The nastiness isn't the crux of the issue. It's the core of the issue. But what puts Facebook front and centre is its abysmal track record of lying.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Google and twitter direct traffic to them and aren't seen as a competitor by most. You can always tell how untrustworthy a news company is when the knives come out against any target who isn't good for their business interests while they lob softball whomever is in power in exchange for access to information they will never even properly cover!
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Twitter is literally built on a lie. Their founding story is a a complete lie and disgrace. I am sure Twitter and Google lie just as much.
Traster 5y ago
Well I mean, let's add up all of the news organisations that have joined together and pit them against their single largest competitor. They're still less than 1/10th the size of their neartest competitor (facebook).

throwaway_dcnt 5y ago

I am alarmed that the media in its pursuit of clicks and eyeballs would amplify the divisions using such collusion. An example article put forward by a main stream news organization: https://abcnews.go.com/US/type-gun-us-homicides-ar-15/story?id=78689504 https://abcnews.go.com/US/type-gun-us-homicides-ar-15/story?... The topic is already quite sensitive and divisive. Was it really necessary to use the image with a gun covered in american flag? If this is not fanning the flames of divisions, what is? And now they want to collude?

kodah 5y ago
I think you have a point, however, there's a fair amount of folks that think news coverage is just fine. I'm sure where you use the word collude those folks use the word "collaborate". The way I understand it is this: if you have multiple companies covering the same topic using their own channels, then someone has to try to stick out in the variety. This could be good or this could be bad. There's a lot of ways I can think to interpret that image, but I'd say it's probably planted to agitate liberals. That's a company trying to stick out in a negative way. If they work together, they can produce common narratives -- even if they're wrong, but especially under certain pervasive ideologies that may be trendy at the time. The whole Covington incident and the outpouring of blind rage was a fairly good example of this very thing. Entire reporting fueled off of a tweet and other companies speculative reports. This tells me there's something deeper wrong, or at least - this is not the place to institute a patch. For those that need an update on Covington: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memoria...
emodendroket 5y ago
Perhaps it's because gun owners love to festoon everything they own with American flags and not because of some nefarious plan to "sow division," a kind of paranoia that sounds to me like a mirror image of the liberals seeing Russians under the bed every night.

throwaway224466 5y ago

Globalized newsrooms...aka coordinated propaganda and censorship. Trump did everyone the favor of opening their eyes to how fake the mass media is.

YossarianFrPrez 5y ago

It is not unheard of for large caches of documents to be vetted by multiple new outlets who coordinate which stories they will cover. For example, the Panama Papers were handled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), who in turn helped coordinate reporters from The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more. https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/ https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d... For the pandora papers, ICIJ coordinated and worked with journalists from 91 outlets, including The Washington Post, Frontline, The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers#Participating_media_outlets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers#Participating_m...

wolverine876 5y ago
The article goes into detail about that.

TheAceOfHearts 5y ago

Nothing groundbreaking here. Ever heard of the Associated Press? When dealing with large complex issues you need to collaborate to try and provide accurate reporting. It's best to operate under the assumption that most reporting is incomplete or it contains inaccuracies lest you fall for the trap of believing you have a perfectly accurate picture of reality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press

emodendroket 5y ago
In some sense you're right, but I feel like this is also a symptom of how unhealthy news organizations are and will accelerate the trend where local news reporting is anemic and toothless outside of the major media markets.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  I have always viewed local news as anemic. As a young child I found it super boring and would always look forward to national and international news. In my hometown, the last time our major news paper ran a good corruption story it got attacked by Carl Lindner and subsequently neutered. Fast forward a few decades and our city was found to be a hotbed of corruption, not by local journalism, but by the FBI. It was unchecked but could have easily been uncovered by decent journalism a lot sooner.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    At one point American cities all had multiple newspapers with staff doing real investigative work but those days are getting to be pretty far behind us. Now you've got one guy who covers an entire region and is obviously just writing up press releases.

8eye 5y ago

this is hilarious, they are finally doomed. sorry not sorry. i was a media major, i have nothing against the people themselves but, it’s an old system, it’s connected to old school broadcast tv. there are more voices now, ones of the people. not saying broadcast employees are not people, clearly they are but the system is changing just like cassettes and cds, out with the old in with the new

emodendroket 5y ago
Actually what's been happening is they've been replaced with the voices of moneyed interests who have the means to do "reporting" at a loss, but hey at least a lot of people got fired.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Speaking of coordinated reporting, what ever happened to the Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election story? It's been bugging me for a long time. It just dropped out of existence all of a sudden. For a couple of straight that made up what felt like 50% of everything I heard of coming out of most news corporations and politicians, talkshows, twiter, everywhere. Then suddenly they all pretty much in unison stopped talking about it. This is going off topic I realize, but it's bugged me. Does nobody care to follow up on this or find out who knew what and when and what went wrong? We were assured many times there was ample evidence of this by many politicians and journalists. So either it's been kept secret and even seemingly hidden from special council Mueller, or else it doesn't exist and it was all a huge coordinated lie. I don't really see a 3rd option, so anything would be a huge story I would have thought. Nobody seems to care though. EDIT: I have to ask who is down voting this. Am I not supposed to be wondering about this massively weird thing that happened and has apparently been memory holed? Is it verboten to ask the wrong questions?

dash2 5y ago
> or else it doesn't exist and it was all a huge coordinated lie. Or people were gullible, keen to sell an anti-Trump story, overestimated the chances of something being true, were embarrassed about it later...? I think that story is mostly dead but Matt Taibbi will probably tell you about it, in between ranting.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Well I don't know I don't think it's dead at all, it's massively interesting. It's not just hack entertainers masquerading as journalists selling tabloid conspiracy theories here, it was an entire political party (maybe both parties) plus the state security and surveillance apparatus who were all saying there was evidence here and going to secret courts and all this crazy stuff. Where is it? The Mueller report says plain as day they did not find evidence to substantiate claims that Trump or his campaign associates colluded (conspired) in any way with Russia.
dmpk2k 5y ago
> Nobody seems to care though. It would be more accurate to say that nobody who matters cares. Manufacturing Consent was broadly correct, but now add the surprising power of the Twitter echo chamber, where most American journalists spend their time. That, and Trump got eyeballs.