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I’m not sure how many are employed at LinkedIn today, but at the end of 2019 there were 65 journalists at the company. This is clearly a strategy to get people

I’m not sure how many are employed at LinkedIn today, but at the end of 2019 there were 65 journalists at the company. This is clearly a strategy to get people to spend more time in the site. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/23/media/linkedin-journalists/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/23/media/linkedin-journalist...

ajcp 3y ago
What an odd comment. According to your link the journalists were employed for a LinkedIn feature called LinkedIn Daily Rundown. This is seemingly a journalistic endeavor, and as with any product offering would be a strategy to keep people engaged with the site. Why not also point to LinkedIn offering direct messaging as "clearly a strategy to get people to spend more time on the site"? I say this because your dangling comment seems to imply that LinkedIn's employment of journalists is so that they may practice their journalistic dark-arts on unsuspecting users in a ploy for them to spend more time on the site.
- facialwipe 3y ago
  Right. Establishing a newsroom and providing dm functionality is an apples-to-apples comparison in the context of a social networking website. It’s totally normal for social networking websites to establish newsrooms and hire lots of journalists. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook… and now LinkedIn. Sorry, Dad. /s
  - ajcp 3y ago
    As a product offering of their platform they are. As well they were transparent that they were establishing a newsroom...as a product they were offering. Just because other social networks didn't do it doesn't meant it's nefarious. Beyond that, why would normal have anything to do with what you're offering your users? Do you think Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook thought "what's a normal social media product we can offer"? I guess the whole "go fast and break things" ethos ends with "but totes don't hire journalists and create a newsroom as a possible profit center because some people don't know how to evaluate disparate sources of information on the internet".

ajcp 3y ago

What an odd comment. According to your link the journalists were employed for a LinkedIn feature called LinkedIn Daily Rundown. This is seemingly a journalistic endeavor, and as with any product offering would be a strategy to keep people engaged with the site. Why not also point to LinkedIn offering direct messaging as "clearly a strategy to get people to spend more time on the site"? I say this because your dangling comment seems to imply that LinkedIn's employment of journalists is so that they may practice their journalistic dark-arts on unsuspecting users in a ploy for them to spend more time on the site.

facialwipe 3y ago
Right. Establishing a newsroom and providing dm functionality is an apples-to-apples comparison in the context of a social networking website. It’s totally normal for social networking websites to establish newsrooms and hire lots of journalists. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook… and now LinkedIn. Sorry, Dad. /s
- ajcp 3y ago
  As a product offering of their platform they are. As well they were transparent that they were establishing a newsroom...as a product they were offering. Just because other social networks didn't do it doesn't meant it's nefarious. Beyond that, why would normal have anything to do with what you're offering your users? Do you think Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook thought "what's a normal social media product we can offer"? I guess the whole "go fast and break things" ethos ends with "but totes don't hire journalists and create a newsroom as a possible profit center because some people don't know how to evaluate disparate sources of information on the internet".