3 ms·

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

by 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.
  - bokonist 18y ago
    Off the top of my head, no, but that's because the best are now both. Let me rephrase, can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience). (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). That happens on blogs too. For instance, Techcrunch runs a nasty article calling out Google on some issue, and Google is forced to respond on its blog. 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 Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses.
    - bonaldi 18y ago
      can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience). Sure. Scottish politics. The best two sources of information on political life in Scotland are the country's two quality newspapers - The Scotsman and the Herald. (This isn't saying much: appropriately, they're both very, very poor shadows of their former selves). They are far and away better than the Scottish TV news, which mostly reports on their reporting or on events which are a matter of public record. Online coverage that isn't merely opinion or repurposing from the print stuff is incredibly scarce. Without those papers -- and both are in fairly unhappy financial situations -- I'm not sure who is going to cover this stuff at all, in fact. The country already suffers from a deep deficit of investigative reporting: many of the local councils are virtual fiefdoms. And don't think it doesn't matter on a wider scale: The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and former Bank of Scotland (HBOS) both played key roles in bringing disaster down on the UK and global economies. Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses I don't grant the premise: we may not have ever had a mass media that lived up to our ideals, but I'd say we certainly have one that attempted to: Watergate (the entrance of which is rapidly becoming the Godwining of dying-newspaper threads) is proof enough of that. Ultimately, the role that journalism provides is accountability. It holds power to account. If you can come up with a structure of government that takes into account human nature and is one where the rulers don't need to be held to account by the governed and has a realistic implementation plan, I'll be amazed. But I think it might be a whole lot easier to sort out how we do the accountability thing without print media. Even though I think that's going to be hard :)

by bonaldi 18y ago

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.
- bokonist 18y ago
  Off the top of my head, no, but that's because the best are now both. Let me rephrase, can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience). (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). That happens on blogs too. For instance, Techcrunch runs a nasty article calling out Google on some issue, and Google is forced to respond on its blog. 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 Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses.
  - bonaldi 18y ago
    can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience). Sure. Scottish politics. The best two sources of information on political life in Scotland are the country's two quality newspapers - The Scotsman and the Herald. (This isn't saying much: appropriately, they're both very, very poor shadows of their former selves). They are far and away better than the Scottish TV news, which mostly reports on their reporting or on events which are a matter of public record. Online coverage that isn't merely opinion or repurposing from the print stuff is incredibly scarce. Without those papers -- and both are in fairly unhappy financial situations -- I'm not sure who is going to cover this stuff at all, in fact. The country already suffers from a deep deficit of investigative reporting: many of the local councils are virtual fiefdoms. And don't think it doesn't matter on a wider scale: The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and former Bank of Scotland (HBOS) both played key roles in bringing disaster down on the UK and global economies. Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses I don't grant the premise: we may not have ever had a mass media that lived up to our ideals, but I'd say we certainly have one that attempted to: Watergate (the entrance of which is rapidly becoming the Godwining of dying-newspaper threads) is proof enough of that. Ultimately, the role that journalism provides is accountability. It holds power to account. If you can come up with a structure of government that takes into account human nature and is one where the rulers don't need to be held to account by the governed and has a realistic implementation plan, I'll be amazed. But I think it might be a whole lot easier to sort out how we do the accountability thing without print media. Even though I think that's going to be hard :)