7 ms·

Subtitle: reporter tries and tries to remain mean in the face of the Watsis, but finds he just can't do it. Reading this article was like watching someone try

by pg 13y ago

Subtitle: reporter tries and tries to remain mean in the face of the Watsis, but finds he just can't do it. Reading this article was like watching someone try to break into a really secure system. The reporter tried every trick in the book, and none worked. I went back and counted the number of different avenues along which he tried to attack, and there were no less than 11: Watsi's office, Chase's language, neocolonialism, race, the focus on patient care, Silicon Valley, California idealism, Watsi's investors, how real the connection is between donor and patient, why they don't fund patients in the US, and the realism of Chase's dreams. The dude is like a cynicism machine. What's interesting about this guy though is that he's not unique in this respect. He merely represents the default/lazy reporter m.o. taken to such an extreme that it becomes a caricature. Controversy generates page views, and it's really easy to create. In his case I'm sure this is not an act, but an instance of someone's personality being naturally well suited to the work he's doing. But those of you who might one day have to deal with the press might want to keep this article in mind as an example.

mcphilip 13y ago
I read the article having never heard of Watsi. To me it read as proactively addressing concerns I may encounter when considering participation. I came away with a very positive view of Watsi and have visited the website and started doing more research. Who knows, this is just one person's take, but I found the article beneficial.
- loganfrederick 13y ago
  I see both mcphilip and pg's sides. I did not think the article was written to make a negative point. Like PG said, the author seems to like Chase and Watsi, but had to present some counterarguments people could make against such a company. PG's comment is more applicable to journalism in general. What's lamentable is that it's the job of journalists to present sides which are wrong or uninformed.
  - rsingel 13y ago
    Who says it the job of journalists to "present sides that are wrong or misinformed?" What you meant was that journalist shouldn't have a worldview different from mine. He didn't have to present those views -- those were his concerns or ones he considered valid.
- pg 13y ago
  Yeah, I agree that the end result is beneficial for Watsi, and I regret hijacking this thread with meta discussion about journalism when it could have been about Watsi instead.
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    I agree, some of it was a little off-putting, but Andrew Leonard is one of the better writers at Salon and I thought he was just trying to address the stereotype about "Silly Con" valley and speak against it. He wrote: "Watsi must also bear the misfortune of coming of age during a simmering backlash against Silicon Valley" and then goes on to hold Watsi up as a counter example. I'm not aware of this simmering backlash against Silicon Valley, but it must exist somewhere for him to write about it this way.
- Margaret12 13y ago
  my buddy's mother-in-law makes $75 every hour on the internet. She has been without a job for seven months but last month her check was $17516 just working on the internet for a few hours. useful source... http://xurl.es/w2x2a http://xurl.es/w2x2a
doktrin 13y ago
> Subtitle: reporter tries and tries to remain mean in the face of the Watsis, but finds he just can't do it. That's meaningful to me. This journalists praise at the tail end of a diligent fault finding effort carries more weight than something closer to a "fluff" piece, IMHO.
wildermuthn 13y ago
For me, however, his main criticism sticks: band-aid solutions may make first-worlders feel good about saving 10-year-olds in Nepal, but they remain band-aid solutions — necessary, but not sufficient.
- option_greek 13y ago
  And what would the alternative be ? The health problems of these patients seem to be so varied that I don't think a one shot fix it all solution is possible. And what's more, the ratio of suffering eased to amount raised is probably much higher than Cancer or other high profile diseases faced by first world.
  - wildermuthn 13y ago
    Universal health care for every person on Earth?
    - ph0rque 13y ago
      That's their long-term vision: Watsi’s model could lead the way to some kind of cross-border universal medical care system
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- tlb 13y ago
  No one project is ever going to save the world all by itself, so be careful not to extend that argument to rationalize never giving at all. I just now donated to re-setting a rice farmer's broken arm so she can keep farming and feed her family. That feels like more than a band-aid to me, and presumably to her.
  - wildermuthn 13y ago
    True. But sometimes the opposite occurs: charity replaces justice, band-aid solutions replace systematic change. Having satisfied one's psychological need to feel like a do-gooder, the urgent desire for real change evaporates.
jacquesm 13y ago
Or, conversely, he's become accustomed to there being a catch with non-profits that accept donations from the general public and Watsi is (fortunately) a unicorn. There are so many examples of scams operating as a charity that to find a genuine charity could easily be a surprise to a died-in-the-wool reporter.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Are you really comfortable casually indicting the whole enterprise of charity? Was that an uncertainty that really needed to be sown here? You don't think the world would be a better place if people had fewer qualms about parting with tiny amounts of cash now and then?
  - clicks 13y ago
    Well to be fair, the scam charity industry is pretty big. My dad actually considers all calls he gets from firemen association, cancer charity foundations, etc. soliciting donations to be scams... and I think that's a good move on his part. Because he's been had before by a scam that was claiming to be a charity fund for 9/11 victims. Just the other day he asked me about an e-mail he had gotten... about this guy who's wanting a business partner. I saw in the sentbox a heartfelt reply to help him out... and that bothered me very much, that my dad is wasting time on that shit (something that was clearly a scam). I'd rather that he just stop worrying about this, I've told him point-blank to just never donate anything to any entity -- he's old, there are lots of fraudsters out there, and he doesn't have the ability to check which ones are legitimate. I'll do the donating for him with my money. You're a security professional, you have a very highly developed and sophisticated ability to discern scams from non-scams. Normal people are not like this, scam charities are actually a big problem that they have to watch out for. That is just the sad reality.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Sure, but there's a line between optimizing donations and excuse-making or concern-trolling. I know Jacques isn't a concern troll! I'm just saying, not every "accurate" objection is productive. If the end result is that you're suppressing donation, the world is probably better off with you donating indiscriminately.
pcl 13y ago
My read of it was that Leonard was playing devil's advocate. Clearly, he has (or was representing) a dim view of Silicon Valley in general¹, but all the issue he brought up about Watsi are things I could imagine a skeptical reader wondering about. And, as you pointed out, the article either debunks or at least presents a counter-argument to each of those points. To me, the article came across as a generally-positive piece about Watsi, using some lazy appeals to populist memes about Silicon Valley to help make them stand out from the rest of the herd. ¹ A view that, incidentally, I mostly disagree with. But the article wasn't about Silicon Valley; it was about Watsi.
justinsteele 13y ago
When reading about services like Watsi I often enjoy cynicism from reporters, so long as it does not prevent them from telling the entire story truthfully.
applecore 13y ago
> Reading this article was like watching someone try to break into a really secure system. Isn't this what good critical journalism is about? There's nothing "default" or "lazy" about digging out uncomfortable facts and telling them. It's difficult to do well.
- tptacek 13y ago
  It is. But it does not follow that any kind of noisy door-rattling indicates serious investigation. Just like how in reality most breakin attempts come from bored teenagers posturing to IRC channels, this article basically namechecks controversies without really reporting on them. The article is full of little drive-bys, like "what about that neocolonialism?" What neocolonialism? Whose premise are they accepting? How does that premise, applied uniformly to all enterprise, implicate all of western civilization? Are we litigating modern capitalism through the lens of a tiny SF tech healthcare charity? Oh, wait, this is Salon; of course that's what we're doing. Or, "recently controversial investor [Paul Graham]" --- here Salon has literally synthesized a narrative from TechCrunch and Valleywag stories its reporter does not actually understand. Not only that, but it does so pointlessly; Graham's nonexistent controversy isn't relevant to the story even as written. If this was a Wikipedia article, half of the text in the article would have little blue superscripts; "weasel words", "citation needed", "who?".
  - pg 13y ago
    Wow, you put that better than I did. I didn't know the term "namecheck" but that is the perfect name for it.
  - jka 13y ago
    I've no evidence for it existing as a concept in reality, but I've been thinking of something I'd term 'defensive PR' - ensuring that when your business is mentioned in the press, all of the known attacks that would typically come up over a brief lunch/dinner conversation have associated defences, which would also likely then appear in the same conversation. I know very little about Watsi, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on it in particular, but there are so many new businesses cropping up, and people are so prone to being critical in the startup world, that it would seem to make sense to try to get your defences out along with your initial publicity.
kyro 13y ago
Hah, yeah. Fully realized what he was trying to do when he mentioned "brown" people.
kmfrk 13y ago
It's still a taxonomically better article than the press-release regurgitation from TechCrunch, and I seriously hope you agree that it is important that companies, especially those concerned with charity, are subjected to scrutiny. Ideally, Skepticism >>> Concern >>> Regurgitation, and at least the article places itself in the middle category. It's a decent article by normal standards, and a great article by standards of tech writing.
rsingel 13y ago
Paul, as a mostly former journalist, I'm going to say I think you are mostly reacting to the grafs about funding/Silicon Valley greed machine, and being referred to as "recently controversial." A real write-up of a start-up ought to probe at larger issues, and something more than a facile "but can $X prevail against $insertbigcompanyname here. Being skeptical of feel-good choose-a-person donation models brought out that all get funded. Andrew is decidely skeptical of the current zeitgeist in Silicon Valley and that's needed. It's a far different environment from when you started YC. And if Watsis can win over Leonard, it's surely going to do well, press-coverage wise.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Alright, Ryan. Pick a "controversy", purported criticism, or complication of Watsi's model or tactics that the Salon article raised and actually defend it. Find one trenchant observation this article made that is made about Watsi (in an article that is about Watsi). Do it, and I'll donate $500 to the charity of your choice. However valuable your time is, it isn't worth more than the $500 I'll be attributing to what should take less than 5 minutes, if Andrew's skepticism was "needed" in this case. Sincerely, Not-A-Fan-Of-Silicon-Valley-By-The-Way
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    You know, I actually tried. I wanted to help get that $500 into some kind of charity, so I spent a bunch of time enumerating all of the article's arguments and tried to craft some supporting rhetoric. But there's not a single concern that holds water. They're probably valid questions -- newcomers to Watsi probably think them up on their own as they try to decide whether they want to donate -- but a legitimate concern? An actual, bona-fide "Watsi needs to address X or their trajectory will be at risk" concern? Or "we should be worried, because Watsi's success would have negative consequences for X other group" concern? Nope. There simply aren't any. So either I'm just not clever enough, or there aren't any arguments that can be made against Watsi which don't simultaneously make the inquisitor sound like a complete douchenozzle. As far as I can tell, Watsi is the perfect example of (a) technology uplifting quality of life, (b) Silicon Valley making it possible (would Watsi have been possible without SV?), and (c) that it's possible to live life without being forced to be motivated by greed or glory (the Watsi founders just want to help people). Man, I can't wait for the Watsi API to roll out.
yid 13y ago
I just wanted to say that you shouldn't necessarily see his cynicism as a bad thing (he's probably just confused good journalistic skepticism with the cynicism that mediocre journalists think will make them "hard-hitting"). IMO, he comes across as so cynical that he actually loses the reader, which just builds a more sympathetic case for Watsi. If you were hoping to win over idealists with this interview, that I'd say you might even be better off with this article rather than one that is overly fawning.
freerobby 13y ago
Well-said, and very similar to what John Gruber refers to as "Bending over Backwards": http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/bending_over_backwards http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/bending_over_backwards > The whole thing is a crock, an example of trying to be fair/balanced/objective by bending over backwards to find negative things to say about the [subject of article].
mherdeg 13y ago
Did Andrew Leonard get in touch with you while reporting this article? I don't see you quoted in his story.
enraged_camel 13y ago
The cynicism starts on the second word, when he puts conference table in quotes to imply that it wasn't a legitimate conference room.

by pg 13y ago

mcphilip 13y ago

I read the article having never heard of Watsi. To me it read as proactively addressing concerns I may encounter when considering participation. I came away with a very positive view of Watsi and have visited the website and started doing more research. Who knows, this is just one person's take, but I found the article beneficial.

loganfrederick 13y ago
I see both mcphilip and pg's sides. I did not think the article was written to make a negative point. Like PG said, the author seems to like Chase and Watsi, but had to present some counterarguments people could make against such a company. PG's comment is more applicable to journalism in general. What's lamentable is that it's the job of journalists to present sides which are wrong or uninformed.
- rsingel 13y ago
  Who says it the job of journalists to "present sides that are wrong or misinformed?" What you meant was that journalist shouldn't have a worldview different from mine. He didn't have to present those views -- those were his concerns or ones he considered valid.
pg 13y ago
Yeah, I agree that the end result is beneficial for Watsi, and I regret hijacking this thread with meta discussion about journalism when it could have been about Watsi instead.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  I agree, some of it was a little off-putting, but Andrew Leonard is one of the better writers at Salon and I thought he was just trying to address the stereotype about "Silly Con" valley and speak against it. He wrote: "Watsi must also bear the misfortune of coming of age during a simmering backlash against Silicon Valley" and then goes on to hold Watsi up as a counter example. I'm not aware of this simmering backlash against Silicon Valley, but it must exist somewhere for him to write about it this way.
Margaret12 13y ago
my buddy's mother-in-law makes $75 every hour on the internet. She has been without a job for seven months but last month her check was $17516 just working on the internet for a few hours. useful source... http://xurl.es/w2x2a http://xurl.es/w2x2a

doktrin 13y ago

> Subtitle: reporter tries and tries to remain mean in the face of the Watsis, but finds he just can't do it. That's meaningful to me. This journalists praise at the tail end of a diligent fault finding effort carries more weight than something closer to a "fluff" piece, IMHO.

wildermuthn 13y ago

For me, however, his main criticism sticks: band-aid solutions may make first-worlders feel good about saving 10-year-olds in Nepal, but they remain band-aid solutions — necessary, but not sufficient.

option_greek 13y ago
And what would the alternative be ? The health problems of these patients seem to be so varied that I don't think a one shot fix it all solution is possible. And what's more, the ratio of suffering eased to amount raised is probably much higher than Cancer or other high profile diseases faced by first world.
- wildermuthn 13y ago
  Universal health care for every person on Earth?
  - ph0rque 13y ago
    That's their long-term vision: Watsi’s model could lead the way to some kind of cross-border universal medical care system
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
tlb 13y ago
No one project is ever going to save the world all by itself, so be careful not to extend that argument to rationalize never giving at all. I just now donated to re-setting a rice farmer's broken arm so she can keep farming and feed her family. That feels like more than a band-aid to me, and presumably to her.
- wildermuthn 13y ago
  True. But sometimes the opposite occurs: charity replaces justice, band-aid solutions replace systematic change. Having satisfied one's psychological need to feel like a do-gooder, the urgent desire for real change evaporates.

jacquesm 13y ago

Or, conversely, he's become accustomed to there being a catch with non-profits that accept donations from the general public and Watsi is (fortunately) a unicorn. There are so many examples of scams operating as a charity that to find a genuine charity could easily be a surprise to a died-in-the-wool reporter.

tptacek 13y ago
Are you really comfortable casually indicting the whole enterprise of charity? Was that an uncertainty that really needed to be sown here? You don't think the world would be a better place if people had fewer qualms about parting with tiny amounts of cash now and then?
- clicks 13y ago
  Well to be fair, the scam charity industry is pretty big. My dad actually considers all calls he gets from firemen association, cancer charity foundations, etc. soliciting donations to be scams... and I think that's a good move on his part. Because he's been had before by a scam that was claiming to be a charity fund for 9/11 victims. Just the other day he asked me about an e-mail he had gotten... about this guy who's wanting a business partner. I saw in the sentbox a heartfelt reply to help him out... and that bothered me very much, that my dad is wasting time on that shit (something that was clearly a scam). I'd rather that he just stop worrying about this, I've told him point-blank to just never donate anything to any entity -- he's old, there are lots of fraudsters out there, and he doesn't have the ability to check which ones are legitimate. I'll do the donating for him with my money. You're a security professional, you have a very highly developed and sophisticated ability to discern scams from non-scams. Normal people are not like this, scam charities are actually a big problem that they have to watch out for. That is just the sad reality.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Sure, but there's a line between optimizing donations and excuse-making or concern-trolling. I know Jacques isn't a concern troll! I'm just saying, not every "accurate" objection is productive. If the end result is that you're suppressing donation, the world is probably better off with you donating indiscriminately.

pcl 13y ago

My read of it was that Leonard was playing devil's advocate. Clearly, he has (or was representing) a dim view of Silicon Valley in general¹, but all the issue he brought up about Watsi are things I could imagine a skeptical reader wondering about. And, as you pointed out, the article either debunks or at least presents a counter-argument to each of those points. To me, the article came across as a generally-positive piece about Watsi, using some lazy appeals to populist memes about Silicon Valley to help make them stand out from the rest of the herd. ¹ A view that, incidentally, I mostly disagree with. But the article wasn't about Silicon Valley; it was about Watsi.

justinsteele 13y ago

When reading about services like Watsi I often enjoy cynicism from reporters, so long as it does not prevent them from telling the entire story truthfully.

applecore 13y ago

> Reading this article was like watching someone try to break into a really secure system. Isn't this what good critical journalism is about? There's nothing "default" or "lazy" about digging out uncomfortable facts and telling them. It's difficult to do well.

tptacek 13y ago
It is. But it does not follow that any kind of noisy door-rattling indicates serious investigation. Just like how in reality most breakin attempts come from bored teenagers posturing to IRC channels, this article basically namechecks controversies without really reporting on them. The article is full of little drive-bys, like "what about that neocolonialism?" What neocolonialism? Whose premise are they accepting? How does that premise, applied uniformly to all enterprise, implicate all of western civilization? Are we litigating modern capitalism through the lens of a tiny SF tech healthcare charity? Oh, wait, this is Salon; of course that's what we're doing. Or, "recently controversial investor [Paul Graham]" --- here Salon has literally synthesized a narrative from TechCrunch and Valleywag stories its reporter does not actually understand. Not only that, but it does so pointlessly; Graham's nonexistent controversy isn't relevant to the story even as written. If this was a Wikipedia article, half of the text in the article would have little blue superscripts; "weasel words", "citation needed", "who?".
- pg 13y ago
  Wow, you put that better than I did. I didn't know the term "namecheck" but that is the perfect name for it.
- jka 13y ago
  I've no evidence for it existing as a concept in reality, but I've been thinking of something I'd term 'defensive PR' - ensuring that when your business is mentioned in the press, all of the known attacks that would typically come up over a brief lunch/dinner conversation have associated defences, which would also likely then appear in the same conversation. I know very little about Watsi, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on it in particular, but there are so many new businesses cropping up, and people are so prone to being critical in the startup world, that it would seem to make sense to try to get your defences out along with your initial publicity.

kyro 13y ago

Hah, yeah. Fully realized what he was trying to do when he mentioned "brown" people.

kmfrk 13y ago

It's still a taxonomically better article than the press-release regurgitation from TechCrunch, and I seriously hope you agree that it is important that companies, especially those concerned with charity, are subjected to scrutiny. Ideally, Skepticism >>> Concern >>> Regurgitation, and at least the article places itself in the middle category. It's a decent article by normal standards, and a great article by standards of tech writing.

rsingel 13y ago

Paul, as a mostly former journalist, I'm going to say I think you are mostly reacting to the grafs about funding/Silicon Valley greed machine, and being referred to as "recently controversial." A real write-up of a start-up ought to probe at larger issues, and something more than a facile "but can $X prevail against $insertbigcompanyname here. Being skeptical of feel-good choose-a-person donation models brought out that all get funded. Andrew is decidely skeptical of the current zeitgeist in Silicon Valley and that's needed. It's a far different environment from when you started YC. And if Watsis can win over Leonard, it's surely going to do well, press-coverage wise.

tptacek 13y ago
Alright, Ryan. Pick a "controversy", purported criticism, or complication of Watsi's model or tactics that the Salon article raised and actually defend it. Find one trenchant observation this article made that is made about Watsi (in an article that is about Watsi). Do it, and I'll donate $500 to the charity of your choice. However valuable your time is, it isn't worth more than the $500 I'll be attributing to what should take less than 5 minutes, if Andrew's skepticism was "needed" in this case. Sincerely, Not-A-Fan-Of-Silicon-Valley-By-The-Way
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  You know, I actually tried. I wanted to help get that $500 into some kind of charity, so I spent a bunch of time enumerating all of the article's arguments and tried to craft some supporting rhetoric. But there's not a single concern that holds water. They're probably valid questions -- newcomers to Watsi probably think them up on their own as they try to decide whether they want to donate -- but a legitimate concern? An actual, bona-fide "Watsi needs to address X or their trajectory will be at risk" concern? Or "we should be worried, because Watsi's success would have negative consequences for X other group" concern? Nope. There simply aren't any. So either I'm just not clever enough, or there aren't any arguments that can be made against Watsi which don't simultaneously make the inquisitor sound like a complete douchenozzle. As far as I can tell, Watsi is the perfect example of (a) technology uplifting quality of life, (b) Silicon Valley making it possible (would Watsi have been possible without SV?), and (c) that it's possible to live life without being forced to be motivated by greed or glory (the Watsi founders just want to help people). Man, I can't wait for the Watsi API to roll out.

yid 13y ago

I just wanted to say that you shouldn't necessarily see his cynicism as a bad thing (he's probably just confused good journalistic skepticism with the cynicism that mediocre journalists think will make them "hard-hitting"). IMO, he comes across as so cynical that he actually loses the reader, which just builds a more sympathetic case for Watsi. If you were hoping to win over idealists with this interview, that I'd say you might even be better off with this article rather than one that is overly fawning.

freerobby 13y ago

Well-said, and very similar to what John Gruber refers to as "Bending over Backwards": http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/bending_over_backwards http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/bending_over_backwards > The whole thing is a crock, an example of trying to be fair/balanced/objective by bending over backwards to find negative things to say about the [subject of article].

mherdeg 13y ago

Did Andrew Leonard get in touch with you while reporting this article? I don't see you quoted in his story.

enraged_camel 13y ago

The cynicism starts on the second word, when he puts conference table in quotes to imply that it wasn't a legitimate conference room.