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"Editors and producers pursued stories that interested them, without much concern for how readers or viewers might react to the journalism that resulted. Member

"Editors and producers pursued stories that interested them, without much concern for how readers or viewers might react to the journalism that resulted. Members of this tribe of journalists shared a sense of what “the news” was. The most influential of them were the editors and reporters on the best newspapers, whose decisions were systematically embraced and echoed by other editors and writers, as well as by the producers of television news. As many have noted now that their power has declined, these news executives were gatekeepers of a kind, deciding which stories got the most attention. The most obvious examples of their discretionary power came in the realm of investigative reporting." Should I really bemoan the loss of a system in which a handful of individuals picked the news which was deemed worthy of publication or air-time?

hackuser 11y ago
> Should I really bemoan the loss of a system in which a handful of individuals picked the news which was deemed worthy of publication or air-time? What is a better alternative? I'm not sure I know an answer. Crowd-sourcing editorial decisions doesn't seem useful. The crowd lacks expertise to judge what is important, at least in many fields. Also, they (well, we) censor what is unpopular or uncomfortable. Also, outside algorithmic aggregators like Google News, editors still make the decisions. Consider tech news. Would the general public do a good job of which tech stories are significant? (Hacker News readers are a specialized subset, and still I don't agree with most editorial decisions.) It's the same in economics, domestic policy, foreign policy, etc.
untog 11y ago
Do you think that Reddit has the best list of news stories every day? Or Hacker News? At the end of the day, someone has to decide. And I'm yet to see an algorithm or crowdsource method that does it well.

hackuser 11y ago

> Should I really bemoan the loss of a system in which a handful of individuals picked the news which was deemed worthy of publication or air-time? What is a better alternative? I'm not sure I know an answer. Crowd-sourcing editorial decisions doesn't seem useful. The crowd lacks expertise to judge what is important, at least in many fields. Also, they (well, we) censor what is unpopular or uncomfortable. Also, outside algorithmic aggregators like Google News, editors still make the decisions. Consider tech news. Would the general public do a good job of which tech stories are significant? (Hacker News readers are a specialized subset, and still I don't agree with most editorial decisions.) It's the same in economics, domestic policy, foreign policy, etc.

untog 11y ago

Do you think that Reddit has the best list of news stories every day? Or Hacker News? At the end of the day, someone has to decide. And I'm yet to see an algorithm or crowdsource method that does it well.