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As we struggle through this point in our history of what news is, we must remember that journalism ebbs and flows on its integrity. Look back to the 1880's wher
by Agustus 12y ago
As we struggle through this point in our history of what news is, we must remember that journalism ebbs and flows on its integrity. Look back to the 1880's where yellow journalism was rampant (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Puck112188c.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Puck11218...) and could be faulted for the Spanish-American war.
Journalist and the newspapers they work for must find a way to get you the reader to part with your money to fund their enterprises. The online sites do this through link baiting, local newspapers do this through circulars/coupons and piggybacking onto the latest outrage (classifieds died when craigslist was created), and the TV stations rely on murders, perceived and actual racism (George Zimmerman's audio recording being doctored to appear racist) and missing children to get viewers.
The amount of time that it takes to properly source, investigate, corroborate, and expose a story is nothing compared to the piggybacking approach. Example 1 is the University of Virgina fraternity rape story: A single reporter writes up a fantastic expose on a UVA fraternity hazing procedure that includes an alleged gang rape, friends pleading to rape victim not to go to police, and a university system appearing not to care. The correct approach would be to interview the victim, the alleged perpetrators, the university, and the friends to get an idea. Each of these individuals must be contacted, a source found, agree to be a source and then be on record, this all takes time; if you estimate a week per source (very generous) and there are 15 must contact sources (those involved with the alleged gang rape and those friends), that is 15 weeks worth of just putting together information. Then write up the story, anywhere from one to two weeks. Get the editor and the ombudsman to sign off on the sources and information, one week. You have almost 20 weeks invested into a single article, for Rolling Stones that is 5 magazines before getting a single article. And then, at any point the story could turn out to be suspicious to bogus.
Now, be any of the TV shows / newspapers and you simply pull a Puffington Host and extract parts of the story and refer to them in snippets and viola, you save yourself 20 weeks of time and money. That is why the Ryan Holiday stuff is not too surprising.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sharkweek 12y agoExactly - Look at the Serial podcast, I'd consider this one of the better pieces of journalism in the past few years. But it took her six months (maybe more?) and countless hours of research, investigation and interviews to produce. At the end of the day, this piece will do pretty well, but in those six months, The Huffington Post's on the internet have put out tens of thousands of articles garnering billions of ad impressions. Fortunately we're left with an extremely interesting story in Serial, but imagine if 2-3 months into all that hard work the whole thing fell apart? All that work for nothing? Not worth the risk for major publications. No idea what the solution is here, very difficult problem.
- j2kun 12y agoTo be fair, your two examples fill very different roles (daily news versus long-form nonfiction). Serial strikes me as closer to fiction or memoir than daily news.
- sharkweek 12y agoYeah, sorry wasn't clear in my original point that it's extremely tough to produce high quality investigative journalism when there's a far easier and more profitable model out there.
- sswaner 12y agoBut truth is fleeting. Despite all Sarah's work on Serial, there is a possibility that some contradicting detail will emerge as some point in the future. Even the infamous Best Buy phones waver between fact and fiction. To this point, it may be impossible to fully fact check an article to the point of certainty, but New York magazine could have at least done better.
- drgath 12y agoIn 1835, the New York Sun (a serious newspaper [0], 1833-1855) published some articles [1] describing alien civilizations on the moon that can be seen through a new telescope in South Africa. From Wired, > The Sun, ever the champion of the public good, claimed, no joke, that it was actually all a public service… to get the nation to stop worrying so much for a second about that whole slavery thing. So, there are good journalists, bad journalists, "journalists" who aren't even journalists, and they've all existed since the birth of the printing press. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_%28New_York%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_%28New_York%29 [1] http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thomas-dick/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thomas-dick...