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Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

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Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#141

Post by Knulp »

majos wrote: post #123
Knulp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then... I want to adress one final fact which is that it's easier to say it's the "journalists" fault if information has gotten so bad. Journalists for sure hold responsability in this but the public that doesnt value the work, isn't willing to pay for it and will click on whatever is coming up without caring about sourcing... Well, that crowd also has its share in how bad the situation has gotten. I don't think you…

Thanks for the posts, they’re good context. I am similar to other people in this thread in that I am not a journalist and I fed journalism Twitter...disappointing. But your posts made me think a little more. One question, you touched on this earlier, but do you think there is an oversupply of journalists? There seem to be many blue checkmarks on Twitter who write “analysis” for weird websites I’ve never heard of. I d…

I don't know but I think so. It's not that we don't need journalists but that economically speaking people are apparently not willing to pay for news anymore. It's a simple calculation : if medias are only supported by subscriptions and not ads, there is less budget and thus need for less employees.

The blue ticks are totally over rated. You can have them if you're not a proper journalist and not have it if you are ^^

Yeah Pro Publica does really good stuff. That's the thing actually. A few medias have managed to get a community around them that's willing to pay and then you can do good journalism. That's great.

Problem stands more for old medias that needed to adapt and mostly none took the risk of going for internet subscription. So they still have to pay their hundreds of employees with a news model that won't last.

Management in medias is one of the main problems. Like in many industries, medias had a hard time taking internet seriously, then didn't think their strategy through, then started going on Facebook etc without a sound strategy as well... You see there exactly what happened first in music, then tv, and basically every industry. I dont know if the Spotify / Netflix model would works for medias. Open question there ^^

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#142

Post by Knulp »

luckylion wrote: post #139
majos wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first analogy might make more sense if people loved to acquire free bad houses and then complained that good houses cost money.

I don't believe that it's a conscious decision when people fall for low-quality clickbait. It's the media-equivalent of adding chemicals to tobacco to make it more addictive, where we also shouldn't blame smokers for getting addicted. It's also not that there's a lot of alternatives. If you don't want lazy, manipulative, clickbait journalism, your best bet is to not read any papers or media websites.

I think it's a fair point but I agree the comparaison is wrong originally because here one of the main issue is that people are not willing to pay for information anymore.

Thing is also that houses that have crumbled have crumbled and there's nothing left. You can't quantify what happened so easily. Articles stay online. Actually that's something that might be good to think about : for a magazine or a journal that decided to make things better and do more responsable journalism, should they delete the content that doesnt fit that bill anymore ? Kind of like the YouTube Kurzgesagt channel when they were confronted with a few of their faults and decided to eradicate the content that was problematic ? It's pretty radical but it sends a message. Not sure how that would be doable economically though.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#143

Post by luckylion »

Knulp wrote: post #142
luckylion wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that it's a conscious decision when people fall for low-quality clickbait. It's the media-equivalent of adding chemicals to tobacco to make it more addictive, where we also shouldn't blame smokers for getting addicted. It's also not that there's a lot of alternatives. If you don't want lazy, manipulative, clickbait journalism, your best bet is to not read any papers or media websites.

I think it's a fair point but I agree the comparaison is wrong originally because here one of the main issue is that people are not willing to pay for information anymore. Thing is also that houses that have crumbled have crumbled and there's nothing left. You can't quantify what happened so easily. Articles stay online. Actually that's something that might be good to think about : for a magazine or a journal that de…

I don't believe that people are not willing to pay for information, but they might not be willing to pay as much for the information they are presented. If there's a lot of falsehood, propaganda and celeb-news to fill in the blanks between the ads, why should any reasonable person be willing to pay? They aren't the customer, they are the product being sold to advertisers, PR agencies and anybody who wants to influence public opinion.

Would they be willing to pay? That probably depends on the audience. Some certainly would. Others use news as entertainment, they probably won't, because there are better forms of entertainment commercially available.

Regarding corrections: I don't like deleting stuff outright, but afaik you can't change the video on YouTube, so that's a harder problem. For their own site, a company could (and should) still leave them online, but clearly mark them as retracted (and say why they retracted it; and possibly set noindex on them so search engines drop them from the results). This would achieve transparency and keep unknowing readers safe. Doing secret edits that change the meaning of sentences is the worst that can happen.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#144

Post by Knulp »

buboard wrote: post #104
40acres wrote: post #92

For me, Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to journalism. There are a lot of downsides to strong institutions and gatekeeping, but when it comes to journalism I always felt like I was reading The New York Times or The Washington Post and not an individual reporter. The shroud of not getting an up close an personal look put the institution at the forefront. With social media, Twitter specifically, the journali…

> unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human Can you point to an example of any recent article in any US paper that even tries to be objective? Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.

Thing is objectivity can't be reached and Lehrer's says it : the only thing yyou can do is try and be fair. It's a big misconception that medias were objective before. Newspapers have always had political leanings (clear and revendicated as the identity of the magazine) and that just never stopped. To say a media isn't objective with their political coverage is actually the norm and what should be expected. Now if a media trumps a fact in favor of an argument in a paper that explain science, that's wrong. But actually I don't think any media does that (never on purpose. And mistakes usually are corrected).

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#145

Post by jariel »

luckylion wrote: post #138
jariel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd rather seem that Jefferson really didn't have the answer either. His 'solution' probably wasn't a solution, and would probably drive said paper out of business.

Yes, and I don't believe there is a definite answer. I like his description of the problem, and the fact that it works very well to describe the problem today is noteworthy as well: it's not a new problem, but each generation has to deal with it, and maybe the magnitude changes from time to time.

The answer is either private organizations have to act with integrity to promote and coordinate 'proper news' - or there has to be social intervention. The former kind of holds true for network news wherein there is institutional control over distribution. But not so much in print, and definitely not on the net. In Canada, there's the CBC and they are considering subsidies for other news outlets.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#146

Post by einpoklum »

kevingadd wrote: post #119
einpoklum wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if your boss asks you to do something completely stupid, you can either say no, lose that job... Or you roll with it You can, and should, unionize. And then you can say no and keep your job. The fact that you see the employment-at-will mentality as legitimate is a failing of professional journalistic ethos IMHO.

Unionization is not an absolute defense. Modern internet-era newsrooms have been unionizing recently and in at least a couple recent cases the response to unionization has been a large-scale gutting of the newsroom in order to replace them with non-union labor. Gizmodo, Gawker Media and VICE's news wings have all unionized recently as far as I know and that has not stopped ownership from making questionable decisions…

It's true that unionization is not a solution to every problem; but what you describe is not the situation the GP post was describing: Pressure on an individual journalist to bend his/her professional integrity. With a union - at least, an independent and non-corrupt union (which is not a trivial condition by the way) - the employer would need to "go nuclear" in order to have his way; and the individual employee would not have to deal with it alone.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#147

Post by Knulp »

luckylion wrote: post #143
Knulp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fair point but I agree the comparaison is wrong originally because here one of the main issue is that people are not willing to pay for information anymore. Thing is also that houses that have crumbled have crumbled and there's nothing left. You can't quantify what happened so easily. Articles stay online. Actually that's something that might be good to think about : for a magazine or a journal that de…

I don't believe that people are not willing to pay for information, but they might not be willing to pay as much for the information they are presented. If there's a lot of falsehood, propaganda and celeb-news to fill in the blanks between the ads, why should any reasonable person be willing to pay? They aren't the customer, they are the product being sold to advertisers, PR agencies and anybody who wants to influenc…

Does that mean all traditionnel outlets are just bound to... Die? Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so. In the meantime they have to maintain the flow of content, content, content so ads will continue supporting them in the meantime. If you add to that most of them are still paper magazines which are going down in sales and require it's own workforce...

Someone made a point in another discussion that traditional news outlets are no longer trustworthy and would have to rebuild somewhere else to get a new sort of trust. Maybe that's the way...

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#148

Post by Knulp »

einpoklum wrote: post #146
kevingadd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unionization is not an absolute defense. Modern internet-era newsrooms have been unionizing recently and in at least a couple recent cases the response to unionization has been a large-scale gutting of the newsroom in order to replace them with non-union labor. Gizmodo, Gawker Media and VICE's news wings have all unionized recently as far as I know and that has not stopped ownership from making questionable decisions…

It's true that unionization is not a solution to every problem; but what you describe is not the situation the GP post was describing: Pressure on an individual journalist to bend his/her professional integrity. With a union - at least, an independent and non-corrupt union (which is not a trivial condition by the way) - the employer would need to "go nuclear" in order to have his way; and the individual employee woul…

That's true. Problem I think is that with the way organisations work (high turnover with short term contacts) it's hard to get a feel for this. There's also the problem that, once something is online... It's hard to have it disappear, independently of the media's will.

I can only speak for France but unions have been coming up. But they are reeaally recent. (last year maybe). The unions that were already in place were more adapted to paper journalism and didn't take well into account the online issues. So it's starting but the fact it's arriving so late also explains the current situation that people often feel like they have to do everything to keep their job. Because there's nothing that can protect them.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#149

Post by luckylion »

Knulp wrote: post #147
luckylion wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that people are not willing to pay for information, but they might not be willing to pay as much for the information they are presented. If there's a lot of falsehood, propaganda and celeb-news to fill in the blanks between the ads, why should any reasonable person be willing to pay? They aren't the customer, they are the product being sold to advertisers, PR agencies and anybody who wants to influenc…

Does that mean all traditionnel outlets are just bound to... Die? Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so. In the meantime they have to maintain the flow of content, content, content so ads will continue supporting them in the meantime. If you add to that most of them are still paper magazines which are going down in sales and require it's own…

> Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so.

Chicken and egg? Virtually nobody has paying customers before they start and create their product. Especially for the large media conglomerates, I don't believe it would be a venture where they'd have to risk their company. For individual journalists or small groups that might be different. I don't know how successful the crowdfunded experiments of the last few years were.

I do believe that it's hard to transition from the current form to an alternative system by making lots of small changes over a long time. On the other hand: there's a chance to build trust with each new generation. It's much easier to start with a clean slate than win back those you've lost, I suppose.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#150

Post by Knulp »

luckylion wrote: post #149
Knulp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean all traditionnel outlets are just bound to... Die? Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so. In the meantime they have to maintain the flow of content, content, content so ads will continue supporting them in the meantime. If you add to that most of them are still paper magazines which are going down in sales and require it's own…

> Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so. Chicken and egg? Virtually nobody has paying customers before they start and create their product. Especially for the large media conglomerates, I don't believe it would be a venture where they'd have to risk their company. For individual journalists or small groups that might be different. I don't kno…

True. And they for sure took the wrong direction to build a new trust so it will probably take quite a while.

There's been a big the wave of new medias but not many survived more than a few month or a year. Not sure about crowdfunding. I'll look it up actually, that would be interesting to compare.

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