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The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

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Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#111

Post by mindslight »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #76
froh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

media == tech these days. twitter, Instagram, TikTok, FB, they are media, YouTube is media.

When it comes to the business of telling you what the nature of the world is and how to think, it's really impossible for me to conjure up something more authoritative than the New York times. Sure there's people on social media saying things, but the stuff that's an echo of the NYT sounds right and true, the stuff that's against it sounds low-brow and coarse.

The New York Times (et al) set the official narratives. Faceboot and its ilk shape the many counter reactions to it. Despite being comprised of multiple journalists, everyone basically thinks of NYT as a singular entity with its own reputation. On Faceboot, memes carry the social proof of your own personal relationships. And the most worrisome is that people know NYT's narratives are not their own thoughts, whereas people think the narratives they got from Faceboot are.

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#112

Post by seydor »

> I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.

indeed it is the other way around, Twitter derived a lot of prestige by essentially pursuing "endorsements" by having their checkmarks accepted by prominent journalists with big audience. Twitter does not control the narrative, except from very fringe issues in which they go with the flow of journalists to keep them on their side. The MSM still controls the narrative and of course they dont depend on checkmarks

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#113

Post by pencilguin »

Aerroon wrote: post #85
AlexandrB wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech industry needs more investigative coverage, not less. The reason disasters like Theranos or Nikola were able to waste as much time and money as they did is because most of the tech press is focused on regurgitating press releases and hyping up the next big thing.

I don't see how investigative journalism would fix the situation though. Theranos scammed wealthy investors. Wealthy investors should be able to do at least a little bit of due diligence. If they had done that then they would've known their idea was not feasible. It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.

Add NRGV ("Energy Vault", once well over $2B, now $0.4B and still badly overvalued) to the Theranos pile. And all but one of the fusion startups. (Maybe them too.)

Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups.

BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#114

Post by [deleted] »

doomlaser wrote: post #25
dralley wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile Bezos owns the Washington Post, and while he doesn't seem to have messed with it too much, Amazon has absolutely been messing with the neutrality of IMDB where it comes into conflict with Amazon's media IPs.

https://letterboxd.com is the best source for scoping out a movie now. The ratings histogram for each film is incredibly informative about quality. It also happens to be my favorite social network right now since it's so focused.

[deleted]

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#115

Post by dan-robertson »

dan-robertson wrote: post #104
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s saying that the only stories that go through must be critical or uncovering various hidden harms or issues Speaking outside my circle of competence. But I don't think it's that direct. When a topic is put under an investigative lens, it's assigned investigative journalists. These aren't folks who write fluff. They don't resonate with baseless optimism. They're men and women of hard facts. So they sniff, sniff,…

I think we have different views about what ‘investigative journalism’ is and different expectations for the competencies of journalists. I also assign a lot of importance to editorial decisions: they are a lot of the selection that leads to selection bias in everyone else. Perhaps you assign less importance to those decisions. An example totally unrelated to tech is that if some politician spaffs tens of millions of…

(I don’t want to suggest that journalists are incompetent, just that they aren’t super competent in the way you describe and that motivated reasoning is pretty easy for any human to do, eg a lot of comments on this submission feel a lot like they’re motivated by disliking big tech and not really thinking about journalism at all).

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#116

Post by majjgepolja »

_zgx0 wrote: post #2

>Instead of covering the [tech] industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair. ... >Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits. The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to inv…

Not so sure about that, with a certain clickbait coverage of solarwinds story creating bad PR for Jetbrains, (perhaps among the least controversial tech companies).

That's what happens when liberal arts people think they're too delicate to understand anything more nuanced than US political thing of the day.

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#117

Post by AbrahamParangi »

swooni wrote: post #105
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue. That's because he's being very charitable to what is happening. In fact, under the guise of aggressively investigative coverage, the media is constantly propagating false memes about the industry. Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech…

> Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants. Those are two related but also completely different things. Just because immigrants work at these companies doesn't mean they have a large impact on the overall culture, especially not the outward facing culture, and they certainly aren't dom…

I don't understand how you can say this when many of the largest tech companies have first immigrant CEOs. Of the top 10 tech companies globally, 4 (Meta, Apple, Tesla and Amazon) have CEOs of European descent.

Is the position of CEO not "culturally influential"?

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#118

Post by colinmhayes »

_zgx0 wrote: post #2

>Instead of covering the [tech] industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair. ... >Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits. The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to inv…

>> highly oppositional at all times

> tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

I don't see how you can read his quote and come up with yours. Absolute strawman

Re: The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

#119

Post by vietthan »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #117
swooni wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants. Those are two related but also completely different things. Just because immigrants work at these companies doesn't mean they have a large impact on the overall culture, especially not the outward facing culture, and they certainly aren't dom…

I don't understand how you can say this when many of the largest tech companies have first immigrant CEOs. Of the top 10 tech companies globally, 4 (Meta, Apple, Tesla and Amazon) have CEOs of European descent. Is the position of CEO not "culturally influential"?

We would need to look at the ethnicity statistics across C-level executives. Rishi Sunak is the British PM but I can say "UK politics and government is still dominated by Whites" and the British Parliament would agree with me [1]

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

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