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In Tech, you have sites like Techcrunch... That's a fail right there. Techcrunch is the bete noir of tech journalism, as Last.FM showed, and as Alex Payne rante

by bonaldi 18y ago

In Tech, you have sites like Techcrunch... That's a fail right there. Techcrunch is the bete noir of tech journalism, as Last.FM showed, and as Alex Payne ranted about: http://al3x.net/2009/03/03/towards-better-technology-journalism.html http://al3x.net/2009/03/03/towards-better-technology-journal... The larger problem isn't really coverage however -- it's not about getting the stories out there, although that will ultimately become a problem as societies formerly brought together by newspapers fracture into interest groups. There's no shortage of coverage online. The problem is in the reporting. Many of the things you link to are actually about commentary on reporting done by others ("commentary" is even in Naked Capitalism's site description). The actual reporting and investigation is, by and large, still done by journalists working for newspapers. Print media and businesses supported by it, like the newswires, are the wellspring of the vast majority of our news, and we drink from the river of information they ultimately become. Formerly the problem was merely that the wellsprings were tainted by bias and poor stewardship, and we were trying to make online solutions to clean it up -- which proved to be a difficult task. Now the wellsprings are drying up, and we've got an even tougher job to do.

bokonist 18y ago
The actual reporting and investigation is, by and large, still done by journalists working for newspapers. Most reporting I see is just summarization of press releases or a collection of quotes from contacts of the journalist. The analysis of sites like Naked Capitalism is much informative and hard hitting. Do have good examples of actual investigation done by newspapers? It seems very rare to me. As for Techcrunch, it's by no means perfect, but it's better than anything in the newspapers.
- bonaldi 18y ago
  Most reporting I see is just summarization of press releases or a collection of quotes from contacts of the journalist. I tried to address this -- this used to be the problem we faced: newspapers had grown complacent and corpulent and were content to rest on their laurels, and we were inventing online ways of giving them reasonable competition. But now we have to try and replace them wholesale, which really isn't easy. News reporting requires a lot of people to do very boring things for a long amount of time. Online hasn't yet been able to come up with the pay that would reward them for doing it, and the opportunity cost for reporters of doing it for free is, in general, far too high. Also, I think you're confusing analysis with reporting. Comment is free, the saying goes, because it doesn't take much to analyse something: you just need a brain and a comfy chair. The reporting is the hard bit: sending someone to dig through files, to attend the dull meetings, to nose around. I can think of countless examples of newspaper investigation, but they're probably going to be meaningless to you as I'm in Scotland. But here, a head of government (Henry McLeish) and the leader of a major political party (Wendy Alexander) were both forced to resign for scandals uncovered by print journalists. It's local reporting like this that will ultimately suffer most. (As for Techcrunch: it's covering tech. If the web can't do better than that on its home turf, it doesn't have a hope in hell of doing it for difficult stuff like local politics. That's why it's such an embarrassing example for all of us).
  - bokonist 18y ago
    newspapers had grown complacent and corpulent and were content to rest on their laurels, There never was a golden age of journalism. Before the FTC and the Fairness Doctrine, yellow journalism used to routinely whip people into frenzied states of war mongering. During the Fairness Doctrine era reporting was bland and extremely biased towards the status quo. The journalism of today mostly alternates between summarized press releases and tabloid smears. Further note that much of the raw material of news reporting is now online: press releases, CSPAN videos, documents, reports, economic statistics. When everything is online, there is much less reason to attend meetings and sift through files (not that pint journalists used to do that anyway). Your arm chair online journalists can report on these just as well, if not better, than your on the ground news paper journalist. For example, the site Read the Stimulus ( http://readthestimulus.org/ http://readthestimulus.org/ ) has done the best work on what is actually contained in the stimulus package. A blog Verum Serum did a better job investigating the Obama - Bill Ayers connection than any newspaper ( see this post http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907 http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907 ). The best economic writing comes from Brad Setser who routinely analyses the data from its original sources. Even Naked Capitalism, which routinely references newspapers, usually only does so to quote a bank executive or a government official. Naked Capitalism almost never relies on "investigations" done by print journalists. Without newspapers, those officials could just post their quote directly to a blog, without having to go through a newspaper. Most newspaper journalism has always sucked. Most online journalism sucks. It takes time and patience to build a set of sources you can trust. In my opinion, the rise of the internet has both increased the level of noise and crappy sources, but also increased the number of truly worthwhile sources. I now find, that in almost every subject, the best source of information is an online news source. Can you name one subject on which the best print news source is better than the best online source?
    - bonaldi 18y ago
      Off the top of my head, no, but that's because the best are now both. But it's the wrong question entirely. There's nothing at all relevant in the medium. Print isn't better because it's on paper, but because it has a business model that up until now has allowed for lots of journalists to get paid. Can you name one website that financially supports 300 journalists? There are countless thousands of newspapers that do. Sure, some of their work - regardless of what you think of it's quality, it was the best we had - can be replaced by volunteers, and some of it we won't miss in the least. But a sizeable amount we will. (It's not the quotes officials are happy to put out on blogs or otherwise that matter; it's those that are forced out of them). The solution to this problem isn't going to come from going "pah, who needs them, they suck anyway amirite?", which is how your first post reads. It's going to come from admitting where online is weak, what is currently unique about print reporting, and working out the hell we can rescue those parts before we lose them entirely. A free press is a hallmark of a democracy. We don't have an online one yet, just a bloated op-ed section. We need to get one, fast.

by bonaldi 18y ago

bokonist 18y ago

The actual reporting and investigation is, by and large, still done by journalists working for newspapers. Most reporting I see is just summarization of press releases or a collection of quotes from contacts of the journalist. The analysis of sites like Naked Capitalism is much informative and hard hitting. Do have good examples of actual investigation done by newspapers? It seems very rare to me. As for Techcrunch, it's by no means perfect, but it's better than anything in the newspapers.

bonaldi 18y ago
Most reporting I see is just summarization of press releases or a collection of quotes from contacts of the journalist. I tried to address this -- this used to be the problem we faced: newspapers had grown complacent and corpulent and were content to rest on their laurels, and we were inventing online ways of giving them reasonable competition. But now we have to try and replace them wholesale, which really isn't easy. News reporting requires a lot of people to do very boring things for a long amount of time. Online hasn't yet been able to come up with the pay that would reward them for doing it, and the opportunity cost for reporters of doing it for free is, in general, far too high. Also, I think you're confusing analysis with reporting. Comment is free, the saying goes, because it doesn't take much to analyse something: you just need a brain and a comfy chair. The reporting is the hard bit: sending someone to dig through files, to attend the dull meetings, to nose around. I can think of countless examples of newspaper investigation, but they're probably going to be meaningless to you as I'm in Scotland. But here, a head of government (Henry McLeish) and the leader of a major political party (Wendy Alexander) were both forced to resign for scandals uncovered by print journalists. It's local reporting like this that will ultimately suffer most. (As for Techcrunch: it's covering tech. If the web can't do better than that on its home turf, it doesn't have a hope in hell of doing it for difficult stuff like local politics. That's why it's such an embarrassing example for all of us).
- bokonist 18y ago
  newspapers had grown complacent and corpulent and were content to rest on their laurels, There never was a golden age of journalism. Before the FTC and the Fairness Doctrine, yellow journalism used to routinely whip people into frenzied states of war mongering. During the Fairness Doctrine era reporting was bland and extremely biased towards the status quo. The journalism of today mostly alternates between summarized press releases and tabloid smears. Further note that much of the raw material of news reporting is now online: press releases, CSPAN videos, documents, reports, economic statistics. When everything is online, there is much less reason to attend meetings and sift through files (not that pint journalists used to do that anyway). Your arm chair online journalists can report on these just as well, if not better, than your on the ground news paper journalist. For example, the site Read the Stimulus ( http://readthestimulus.org/ http://readthestimulus.org/ ) has done the best work on what is actually contained in the stimulus package. A blog Verum Serum did a better job investigating the Obama - Bill Ayers connection than any newspaper ( see this post http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907 http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907 ). The best economic writing comes from Brad Setser who routinely analyses the data from its original sources. Even Naked Capitalism, which routinely references newspapers, usually only does so to quote a bank executive or a government official. Naked Capitalism almost never relies on "investigations" done by print journalists. Without newspapers, those officials could just post their quote directly to a blog, without having to go through a newspaper. Most newspaper journalism has always sucked. Most online journalism sucks. It takes time and patience to build a set of sources you can trust. In my opinion, the rise of the internet has both increased the level of noise and crappy sources, but also increased the number of truly worthwhile sources. I now find, that in almost every subject, the best source of information is an online news source. Can you name one subject on which the best print news source is better than the best online source?
  - bonaldi 18y ago
    Off the top of my head, no, but that's because the best are now both. But it's the wrong question entirely. There's nothing at all relevant in the medium. Print isn't better because it's on paper, but because it has a business model that up until now has allowed for lots of journalists to get paid. Can you name one website that financially supports 300 journalists? There are countless thousands of newspapers that do. Sure, some of their work - regardless of what you think of it's quality, it was the best we had - can be replaced by volunteers, and some of it we won't miss in the least. But a sizeable amount we will. (It's not the quotes officials are happy to put out on blogs or otherwise that matter; it's those that are forced out of them). The solution to this problem isn't going to come from going "pah, who needs them, they suck anyway amirite?", which is how your first post reads. It's going to come from admitting where online is weak, what is currently unique about print reporting, and working out the hell we can rescue those parts before we lose them entirely. A free press is a hallmark of a democracy. We don't have an online one yet, just a bloated op-ed section. We need to get one, fast.