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This is awesome. I've been waiting for them to show this and get it out there for peer review so no-one can say it's just he-said he-said. It's yet another exa

This is awesome. I've been waiting for them to show this and get it out there for peer review so no-one can say it's just he-said he-said. It's yet another example of how the New York Times which complains so much about the hardships it is suffering in the new media economy has brought most of the problem on itself by no longer being worthy of its once-exalted status.

jcdavis 14y ago
Maybe I'm being too nice, but I'm willing to give the NYT a little benefit of the doubt that this might just have been a single journalist embellishing a story for publicity, as has been known to happen both there and at so many other publications many times over.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  I came to the US in 1999, and understood the NYT to be the "newspaper of record". Then witnessed their atrocious coverage of WMDs and the drumbeat to the Iraq invasion. There was Jayson Blair. There was Rick Bragg. Just off the top of my head. They're always "isolated incidents" ...until it becomes a pattern of behavior. Just my 2c YMMV
  - ics 14y ago
    Americans can see the same effect just from being out of the country for a while. A few years, months, or weeks of not being subjected to the psychological burden of following 'the news' and its gradual narrative, whether that's NYT or otherwise, can have quite effective results on how ably you judge things in the future.
- Ygg2 14y ago
  If I didn't live next to a journalist, I'd say it was a single journalist. But job of journalist is not to discuss the truth, inform the public, but to garner eyeballs. "Enhanching" the truth is their standard MO.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  This wasn't "embellishment" - no reasonable person can look at those charging logs and not believe that this "reporter" deliberately set out to discharge a battery and then write a story about it. I do blame Tesla, somewhat, for not having the good sense to realize that this guy was going to do a hatchet job. Perhaps they'll learn from this and deal with actual journalists in the future.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- userulluipeste 14y ago
  You do understand that NYT made previously a statement for unconditionally supporting their journalist, although Tesla promised contradicting evidences?
btilly 14y ago
The problems that the New York Times complains about are not at all incompatible with the self-inflicted wounds. When your budget is being decimated, it is hard to attract and support the quality employees who can deliver the product that you want. It gets worse with the way that new media is turning into a more virulent rehash of the old "yellow press", thereby lowering journalistic standards among the companies that the New York Times has to compete with. This means that people you try to hire are unlikely to come from a culture that cares about facts - which accelerates the downward spiral. I do not personally believe that it will get better until it has gotten so clearly bad that the public hungers for high quality news enough to pay a premium to subscribe to it. (Which is how institutions like The New York Times got started in the first place.)
- rdl 14y ago
  I assume people are willing to pay for actionable intelligence on things that matter to them. Or to be entertained. But you pay an entirely different amount of money to find out an answer to "should I build a factory using natural gas in the midwest, or will prices rise, or will a pipeline be constructed in time that we can keep using our factory in Texas" vs. "what is latest on Tom Cruise and his wife?". Unfortunately, since voting is relatively ineffective, information on political/social/etc. issues, even if it fully determines how you vote, is closer in value to entertainment than intelligence.
  - btilly 14y ago
    The problem is more complex than that. If you want information that is actionable and of interest to very few, you're going to pay a premium. But if you want information that many want to hear, you can spread the cost out and it can be individually cheap. But it matters how people pay. The problem is that we've moved from paying for a subscription to implicitly on ad impressions per click. With a subscription, poor quality hurt the publisher because subscriptions got canceled. On per click models, it is basically a war for the best headline. And the quality of news is essentially irrelevant. By the time you realize that you've been fooled into clicking on useless blogspam again, they've booked the ad impressions. You can't maintain quality on a per click revenue model. And you can't generate subscription revenue when people are not dissatisfied enough with the free blogspam. Nobody seems to have figured out good solutions to this yet.
crusso 14y ago
Most media outlets are thick with this kind of skewed reporting. The only difference in this case is they did it in such a way that catching them at it was straightforward. Meanwhile, the political stories in the NYT are just as bad; but not so easily refuted.

jcdavis 14y ago

Maybe I'm being too nice, but I'm willing to give the NYT a little benefit of the doubt that this might just have been a single journalist embellishing a story for publicity, as has been known to happen both there and at so many other publications many times over.

richardjordan 14y ago
I came to the US in 1999, and understood the NYT to be the "newspaper of record". Then witnessed their atrocious coverage of WMDs and the drumbeat to the Iraq invasion. There was Jayson Blair. There was Rick Bragg. Just off the top of my head. They're always "isolated incidents" ...until it becomes a pattern of behavior. Just my 2c YMMV
- ics 14y ago
  Americans can see the same effect just from being out of the country for a while. A few years, months, or weeks of not being subjected to the psychological burden of following 'the news' and its gradual narrative, whether that's NYT or otherwise, can have quite effective results on how ably you judge things in the future.
Ygg2 14y ago
If I didn't live next to a journalist, I'd say it was a single journalist. But job of journalist is not to discuss the truth, inform the public, but to garner eyeballs. "Enhanching" the truth is their standard MO.
ghshephard 14y ago
This wasn't "embellishment" - no reasonable person can look at those charging logs and not believe that this "reporter" deliberately set out to discharge a battery and then write a story about it. I do blame Tesla, somewhat, for not having the good sense to realize that this guy was going to do a hatchet job. Perhaps they'll learn from this and deal with actual journalists in the future.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
userulluipeste 14y ago
You do understand that NYT made previously a statement for unconditionally supporting their journalist, although Tesla promised contradicting evidences?

btilly 14y ago

The problems that the New York Times complains about are not at all incompatible with the self-inflicted wounds. When your budget is being decimated, it is hard to attract and support the quality employees who can deliver the product that you want. It gets worse with the way that new media is turning into a more virulent rehash of the old "yellow press", thereby lowering journalistic standards among the companies that the New York Times has to compete with. This means that people you try to hire are unlikely to come from a culture that cares about facts - which accelerates the downward spiral. I do not personally believe that it will get better until it has gotten so clearly bad that the public hungers for high quality news enough to pay a premium to subscribe to it. (Which is how institutions like The New York Times got started in the first place.)

rdl 14y ago
I assume people are willing to pay for actionable intelligence on things that matter to them. Or to be entertained. But you pay an entirely different amount of money to find out an answer to "should I build a factory using natural gas in the midwest, or will prices rise, or will a pipeline be constructed in time that we can keep using our factory in Texas" vs. "what is latest on Tom Cruise and his wife?". Unfortunately, since voting is relatively ineffective, information on political/social/etc. issues, even if it fully determines how you vote, is closer in value to entertainment than intelligence.
- btilly 14y ago
  The problem is more complex than that. If you want information that is actionable and of interest to very few, you're going to pay a premium. But if you want information that many want to hear, you can spread the cost out and it can be individually cheap. But it matters how people pay. The problem is that we've moved from paying for a subscription to implicitly on ad impressions per click. With a subscription, poor quality hurt the publisher because subscriptions got canceled. On per click models, it is basically a war for the best headline. And the quality of news is essentially irrelevant. By the time you realize that you've been fooled into clicking on useless blogspam again, they've booked the ad impressions. You can't maintain quality on a per click revenue model. And you can't generate subscription revenue when people are not dissatisfied enough with the free blogspam. Nobody seems to have figured out good solutions to this yet.

crusso 14y ago

Most media outlets are thick with this kind of skewed reporting. The only difference in this case is they did it in such a way that catching them at it was straightforward. Meanwhile, the political stories in the NYT are just as bad; but not so easily refuted.