4 ms·
If engineers were journalists
- af3 14y agoOFFTOP: gatech sounds like georgia tech ;)
- kumarski 14y agoYes, I go to Georgia Tech.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoAll writing would be presented in a dry, dull list format.
- kumarski 14y agoI think there's a chance for a compromise. A chance for journalists to have an engineer's quantitative veracity coupled with qualitative polish. I would cite Christopher Hitchens as an example.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI meant this specifically as a dig at this article. Personally, I've really enjoyed everything Randall Munroe has ever written; they're educational and relatively accurate, but they have a charm that a lot of writing lacks. Never read Hitchens or Feynman, but my understanding is that many technical people can also write quite well.
- goostavos 14y agoFeynman is one of those writers who's voice comes clearly through the text. All of his writing carries a very specific rhythm with it. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman is an absolutely fantastic read -- doubly so if you have any interest in the history of the Manhattan Project. It's usually painted as a completely serious affair, so reading feynman's account of goofing around with security and trying to sneak codes to his wife brought a very human side to the history. I highly recommend all of his writings.
- Xcelerate 14y agoI'm not really sure that's a bad thing??
- jamesjporter 14y agoThe problem with 6 is that often the PDF of a research article is behind the paywall of the journal that published it. I agree that news organizations often do a horrible job of citing their sources for science coverage though; they could at least link to the journal's webpage for the abstract.
- kumarski 14y agoGood point. If the author used the article, they have access to it, as well as the bibliography of that article.
- rohern 14y agoI would subscribe to a news organization that met these standards. Startup!
- kumarski 14y agoThere's lots of news organizations that believe in these standards. It is difficult to meet them. It might be incredibly boring as well.
- wam 14y agoHmm. Stay away from words that carry connotations? That's what words do. Narrative journalism exists because we are storytellers, culturally if not innately. Producing tools that help analyze and interpret media narratives is a good idea, but it's also a hard problem that doesn't show signs of being eased by crowdsourcing or noun/verb extraction. Fact-checking has already been completely politicized: What's bare fact to one person is obvious bias to another. You can certainly classify bias and hyperbole from your point of view. But even in peer-reviewed scientific publications you find bitter fights over "theory-loaded" paradigm biases. Alongside this I'd like to know what you think journalists do well? Edit: For a sociolinguistic perspective, see Lakoff (both of them). On the representation of "fact," Ian Hacking has an excellent book, "Representing and Intervening" which looks at Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc.
- kumarski 14y agoMaybe my protest is more against eye-grabbing-headlines than connotation... Now that you've put it that way, the word journalist might be too broad in its definition. I think there are good and bad journalists with different positive skill sets. I wrote the blog post after seeing too many scientific topics where journalists were inaccurate. This doesn't represent all journalists. I think photo and video journalists do a particularly good job of news casting. Sometimes their content becomes described inaccurately. The napalm girl photo of Vietnam is a good example of this. Thanks for the comment. Just checked out the book.
- rflrob 14y agoI'm not---and never have been---a journalist, but this piece is assuming that journalists are, by and large, happy with the state of reportage today. Yes, it would be great if you could exhaustively fact check every piece, or carefully and skeptically examine every assumption and statement a source makes, but when your editor is breathing down your neck because the presses are running, and you still haven't turned in your article, standards slip. I suspect that many (though not all) of these points are things that get taught over and over in journalism school, but there are eventually quality and quantity trade-offs, and if there's little incentive for the extra quantum of quality, then it's only rational that quality would win out.
- kumarski 14y agoI could see how the writing would indicate that. We can't exhaustively fact check our pieces, but we can at least link to our sources. Maybe false information is the cost of doing business in high speed journalism? Thanks for the comment.
- tristan_louis 14y agoStrikes me as what most journalist learn and try to do. Don't confuse pundits with journalists.
- kumarski 14y agoIt's hard to differentiate between the two.