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You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers.

You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. They've also were spamming basically anything as "Breaking News" for awhile that I had to block all notifications for the app. I've generally found WaPo to be a bit more pleasant.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.
- antigonemerlin 3y ago
  God bless the good reporters who put a one paragraph article into one paragraph, unlike some reporters who insist on stretching it out into an entire essay that says nothing. And they use bullet points! Bullet points! Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Axios is (i think) unreadable in that way
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    That’s not the impression i notice, so far, with respect to agenda biases but it’s clear that the overtly biased sites do pick up and seemingly bias content from apnews and reuters. It would be interesting (in this experiment) to find two articles if different bias both based on a single feed from apnews or reuters.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Why do you say anyone other than backers of NYTimes or their editors sets their agenda?
deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
> Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. When I was a kid, I used to play with my older cousins at family events. They were in high school and in wrestling programs, much bigger and stronger than me. Inevitably in my case, and probably all across family events in America, our play eventually devolved into the “stop hitting yourself” game. Seems that’s where we’re at now.
snowwrestler 3y ago
> You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. They all have multiple dashboards that track site traffic minute by minute and make editorial decisions on an hourly time scale. Specifically they rewrite headlines, metadata, ledes, and add/alter keywords within copy if a story seems to be underperforming. On a daily basis they make writing assignments based on this data. Big news services can to some extent “push” stories at the beginning, but not for long, maybe a day or two at most. They’re so dependent on traffic for the business model, and so close to the edge of not making money, that they have be acutely aware and reactive to organic traffic patterns.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. I thought about it and just had to rage recently. What is _organic traffic_ for something like the NYTimes that is a subscribtion paper and not any public ad-invested news site. I can tell you, nobody uses the NYTimes search function to find old articles, people inherently just open up the site or app and browse what's fed to them. Are we saying NYTimes using the X free article day to bombard paid subscribers with shitty content when subscribers generally want curated good content? But also if NYTimes is then curating what a subscriber sees as the daily paper, why do they go and gaslight the subscribers?
tivert 3y ago
> You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top... Yeah. Recently I've noticed they've promoted "Opinion" over "World" in their app. World News used to be the second section after "Most Popular"; now it's 3rd, after "Games" and "Opinion. IMHO, it's a bad sign. One of the main reasons I subscribed to them was I liked their in-depth coverage of world news, specifically China, but that's gotten noticeably worse. Maybe Ukraine has sucked up all their budget for that (though for little good, IMHO those stories haven't been very informative or interesting for the last several months). > ...that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. > Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. I'm not sure if that's gaslighting so much as an appeal to their subscriber's smugness and outrage. I kind of feel they have a lot of subscribers who'd like to be outraged over something like that. And also feel like they'd be happy to oblige.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

jjtheblunt 3y ago

I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

antigonemerlin 3y ago
God bless the good reporters who put a one paragraph article into one paragraph, unlike some reporters who insist on stretching it out into an entire essay that says nothing. And they use bullet points! Bullet points! Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Axios is (i think) unreadable in that way
goodbyesf 3y ago
> I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  That’s not the impression i notice, so far, with respect to agenda biases but it’s clear that the overtly biased sites do pick up and seemingly bias content from apnews and reuters. It would be interesting (in this experiment) to find two articles if different bias both based on a single feed from apnews or reuters.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Why do you say anyone other than backers of NYTimes or their editors sets their agenda?

deepsquirrelnet 3y ago

> Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. When I was a kid, I used to play with my older cousins at family events. They were in high school and in wrestling programs, much bigger and stronger than me. Inevitably in my case, and probably all across family events in America, our play eventually devolved into the “stop hitting yourself” game. Seems that’s where we’re at now.

snowwrestler 3y ago

> You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. They all have multiple dashboards that track site traffic minute by minute and make editorial decisions on an hourly time scale. Specifically they rewrite headlines, metadata, ledes, and add/alter keywords within copy if a story seems to be underperforming. On a daily basis they make writing assignments based on this data. Big news services can to some extent “push” stories at the beginning, but not for long, maybe a day or two at most. They’re so dependent on traffic for the business model, and so close to the edge of not making money, that they have be acutely aware and reactive to organic traffic patterns.

delfinom 3y ago
>The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. I thought about it and just had to rage recently. What is _organic traffic_ for something like the NYTimes that is a subscribtion paper and not any public ad-invested news site. I can tell you, nobody uses the NYTimes search function to find old articles, people inherently just open up the site or app and browse what's fed to them. Are we saying NYTimes using the X free article day to bombard paid subscribers with shitty content when subscribers generally want curated good content? But also if NYTimes is then curating what a subscriber sees as the daily paper, why do they go and gaslight the subscribers?

tivert 3y ago

> You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top... Yeah. Recently I've noticed they've promoted "Opinion" over "World" in their app. World News used to be the second section after "Most Popular"; now it's 3rd, after "Games" and "Opinion. IMHO, it's a bad sign. One of the main reasons I subscribed to them was I liked their in-depth coverage of world news, specifically China, but that's gotten noticeably worse. Maybe Ukraine has sucked up all their budget for that (though for little good, IMHO those stories haven't been very informative or interesting for the last several months). > ...that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. > Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. I'm not sure if that's gaslighting so much as an appeal to their subscriber's smugness and outrage. I kind of feel they have a lot of subscribers who'd like to be outraged over something like that. And also feel like they'd be happy to oblige.

onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]