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I Am Deleting the Blog

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Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#421

Post by dunkelheit »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #301
mrweasel wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first heard this explained by John C. Dvorak and it has terrified me ever since. Originally I just believe that journalist just had a terrible understanding of IT, but when you think about it, there's no reason why it's just IT. Why would journalist have a better understanding of medicine, politics, climate, finance or any other topic covered. Basically you're left it a situation where you can only trust highly spe…

> This raises the question: Are journalists actually required? Depends. The alternative is bloggers. This situation is ugly. All sorts of motives are being tossed at the journalist, here, but it may be as simple as they think they have a “scoop,” which is pure gold, for journalists (especially young ones). That said, there are standards that journalists are supposed to meet; usually about things like the number of in…

Yeah, the current situation is that because mainstream journalism are supposed to have 'standards', you get the product with predictable quality, but this quality is slowly but surely getting shittier. Blogs and twitter by contrast have no constraints, which means that variance in quality is much higher and while there are great blogs (such as, well, Slate Star Codex), trusting a random blog is an even worse idea that trusting a random journalist.

Looks like an opening for a new model of journalism begins to appear - something that captures the grassroots spirit of blogs, but filters out biased, disingenious and clickbait stuff, traces provenance of information and allows for fact-checking from multiple angles. Of course, the problem is genuinely hard because any startup that attempts this without new ideas about how the thing will be financed will fall prey to the same incentives as the conventional media and fail to make a difference.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#422

Post by journo12345 »

Uhrheber wrote: post #75

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…

I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway:

I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.

I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.

1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.

(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)

2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.

3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.

That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#423

Post by jka »

zozbot234 wrote: post #420
jka wrote: post #416

There's quite a lot of scope for interpretation of this statement: > Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. It's not clear from the post whether there was any conversation with the journalist about this aspect of the planned article, and/or whether there were any requests not to include the person's full name. I think most of us agree that staying well…

> It's not clear from the post whether there was any conversation with the journalist about this aspect of the planned article, and/or whether there were any requests not to include the person's full name. There were; this has been made clear elsewhere. The reporter was also made aware that the blog would be shut down if it came to that, and still refused to redact OP's real name from their article. (Allegedly, it se…

Thank you - could you provide a link about those requests and discussion? I'd like to update my understanding (and comment) based on those.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#424

Post by cmeacham98 »

jka wrote: post #416

There's quite a lot of scope for interpretation of this statement: > Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. It's not clear from the post whether there was any conversation with the journalist about this aspect of the planned article, and/or whether there were any requests not to include the person's full name. I think most of us agree that staying well…

From the blog post:

> When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that.

What more details are needed?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#425

Post by shinigami »

artsyca wrote: post #418
gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

I'd say this forum is exactly this. How often have I self censored because I just don't want the downvotes?

Exactly, downvotes hurt so much!

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#427

Post by syshum »

johan_larson wrote: post #237

I'm sorry Scott has decided to shut down his blog. He posted many interesting things over the years, and the community of commenters that clustered in the blog's open threads was usually a joy to deal with. I was part of that for years. I'm sorry to see it go. That said, this decision to shut down the blog looks like an overreaction to me. Scott seems to think that he should be able to be both a prominent online pund…

One of the biggest problems in modern society is the lack of respect for privacy and anonymous speech. anonymous speech has been a cornerstone of the advancement of civilization many times through out history including playing a critical role in the formation of the United States as well as the US Constitution

Your belief that a person should be disallowed anonymity simply because they created a popular blog is crazy to me. Further there are a few celebrities today that operate under pseudonyms in their public life and every few people know them by their true legal name so it is factually inaccurate to say it is not "realistic" to have a public life and remain somewhat anonymous.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#428

Post by cousin_it »

gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

I've seen moral fashions. What's happening now is bigger, rarer and worse. It's known as a "purity spiral" (Haynes), "mass movement" (Hoffer), "political religion" (Voegelin).

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#429

Post by totalperspectiv »

syshum wrote: post #405
luckylion wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-out-of-context-quote-hit-piece-insurance that Sam Harris went to in his recent podcast on police violence etc was insane. I fully understand why, he's been burned by the Twitter mob before, but it's eye-opening to the media-induced reasonable paranoia some "public" people will go through when there's basically three paragraphs of "I'm not saying this is the one and only truth, I believe in equality, justice.…

it has the feel of the religious witch hunt because that is exactly what is has become. Many of these groups no longer look at data or science or any empirical evidence for the basis of their positions or policy, it is pure emotional dogma at this point. They are non-theistic religions

Political groups have replaced religious groups as providing a sense of meaning and purpose in modern times.

Politics is the new religion. Combine that with destabilizing effects of instant communication and social media and you get what we have now. Essentially divergent realities created by our narrow casted views (news feeds) that create a modern day tower of Babel moment where we literally can't understand each other.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#430

Post by projektfu »

shinigami wrote: post #425
artsyca wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this forum is exactly this. How often have I self censored because I just don't want the downvotes?

Exactly, downvotes hurt so much!

Honestly, I once got a gentle slap from dang, and it made me reevaluate my comment. Downvoting is easily ignored.
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