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NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

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Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#151

Post by throwoutway »

tayo42 wrote: post #6

I don't get why this seems like a big deal or a negative thing. Why wouldn't you want reporters to be critical? Isn't that like the whole point. That's even why we have freedom of press in the 1st amendment, so journalists can be critical.

> Why wouldn't you want reporters to be critical?

I wish more journalists would be critical, especially where it counts (e.g. interviewing politicians). But for a top-down directive to be negative, regardless of the truth, no - that's unacceptable.

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#152

Post by nr2x »

AlbertCory wrote: post #115
nr2x wrote: post #101

The NYT basically IS a tech company at this point. They have gripes with the competition.

By the same token, some tech companies, especially Twitter, basically ARE media companies. I tried to analyze News Corp's annual report to find their R&D spending, the same way I did for six tech companies ( https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-... ) Unfortunately, their accounting treatments of software are different, so a direct comparison was quite difficult. NYT sells ads and also subscript…

Exactly, aside from journalists the skill set of their employees broadly overlaps.

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#153

Post by MichaelCollins »

Cupertino95014 wrote: post #146
MichaelCollins wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads often mention the price of the product. The article goes on and on about the supposed benefits of giving your kid a smart watch, specifically the Apple brand of smart watch, contrasting it favorably to buying them a phone instead. At the very least, it's not negative coverage of Apple. Even if you think it neutral coverage (I don't), it's a counter-example to the supposed directive that all tech coverage have a n…

OK, $279 is actually a negative for a lot of parents, but I guess not for you.

The article is promoting this product as a better alternative than buying a smartphone for your kids. $279 is cheaper than most smartphones. And it's not too hard to find overt Apple ads that list much higher prices. Listing the price of a product in an article singing praises of that product does not constitute the article being critical of Apple.

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#154

Post by nr2x »

jiscariot wrote: post #145
nr2x wrote: post #101

The NYT basically IS a tech company at this point. They have gripes with the competition.

Exactly. They've got great investigative journalism when focused on direct competitors, who they assure us are all peddlers of misinformation. It's also laughable to watch them do the daily Meta hit piece, pretending they're the good guys and were never advertiser funded. A gate-keeping, deeply-embedded mono-culture of an institution funded by 5M well-off subscribers, going after a platform that 2.9B people use on a…

To be fair, they did publish an op ed to that effect:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/data-privacy-trac...

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#155

Post by Cupertino95014 »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #153
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, $279 is actually a negative for a lot of parents, but I guess not for you.

The article is promoting this product as a better alternative than buying a smartphone for your kids. $279 is cheaper than most smartphones. And it's not too hard to find overt Apple ads that list much higher prices. Listing the price of a product in an article singing praises of that product does not constitute the article being critical of Apple.

Perhaps we've exhausted this topic. I view it as mildly positive and very weak journalism, not balanced. Your view is more drastic.

A balanced article would have found some parents who all said, "Hell, no, I'm not buying that for him. He'll lose it inside of a month." There are probably a lot of such parents.

As for "singing praises of that product" -- I think that is totally legitimate. It IS a product that does a lot of stuff and some people might like it for that. Do you expect them to invent some faults with it?

I'd also expect a real journalist to get some numbers on their sales, not just find one user who likes it.

(On the other hand, Walt Mossberg would have tried it for a week and given it a grade, idk what.)

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#156

Post by Bukhmanizer »

tayo42 wrote: post #39
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really get how people keep misunderstanding the point that it’s not that journalists are being critical, it’s that they’re being selectively critical to propagate their own interests. The absurdity of the NYT crying over big tech for practices the NYT uses all the time ( dark patterns, user tracking, algorithmic curation, etc. ) should not go unnoticed.

For me, this is one of the complaints > Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential. Why does it need to be in awe? that seems like an extreme in an unproductive direction. > it’s that they’re being selectively critical to propagate their own interests. where in the thread is the support for this?

> Why does it need to be in awe? that seems like an extreme in an unproductive direction.

There’s a major difference between banning awe and making it mandatory. The claim is that they did the former, yet you imply the latter.

> where in the thread is the support for this?

The bleeding obvious point in all of this is that tech and news organizations have been competing for the same eyeballs for years now.

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#158

Post by bryan_w »

trs8080 wrote: post #140
elpool2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the difference between a movie critic who carefully critiques movies honestly and one that decides to write a negative review before even seeing the movie. Both of them are being "critical", but in very different ways. I think the NYT probably wanted to be the former but drifted into becoming the latter.

> decides to write a negative review before even seeing the movie Nobody claimed this was happening. Just because the NYT says "we're only doing investigative pieces on tech," doesn't mean that they start fabricating lies. It just means they don't do fluff pieces. This is the preferred approach - for example, I don't want coverage of the cuddly PR that the oil industry puts out, I want investigative pieces that uncov…

You may have mis-parsed what the poster was saying. Imagine going to review the Ghostbusters reboot, but even before stepping into the theater, you decide you are going to write a negative review. That doesn't require fabricating lies, but most would say its an unfair/dishonest way to do movie reviews.

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#159

Post by tomjen3 »

trs8080 wrote: post #109
bhauer wrote: post #55

This should not be a surprise to anyone who has been reading the New York Times' technology journalism for the past several years. In fact, I'd argue that even before any such "directive" was made, the bias in high-profile papers was already predominantly anti-tech, except in rare circumstances where praising a technology sector or tech company served the overarching political narrative of the moment (e.g., then-nasc…

> the bias in high-profile papers was already predominantly anti-tech As opposed to what? Publishing tech companies' press releases verbatim? Advertisements for apps? Journalism exists to speak truth to power - you say "anti-tech" but the reality is that tech companies have been trying to convince us for years that what they're doing is some exercise in advancing humanity, "disrupting" industries (read: breaking laws…

Journalism exists to tell what is going on and why. They are not part of some post-modern maxism class struggle.

Except as part of interviews, they should not be speaking to power at all, they should be explaining things to their readers, so they can make an informed decision. Sometimes that means telling them what the powers that be are planing to do and explain it better than they can, sometimes it means digging through expenses and reveal that power corrupts.

Re: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

#160

Post by int_19h »

undoware wrote: post #31

It's wild that HN, forum that seems disproportionately in favor of unregulated speech should feel uncomfortable when a newspaper chooses a critical editorial stance. You agree that, by your own lights , editorial stances of newspapers are none of your business, yes? Free speech, yes? Everyone says 'both sides' but that's not actually the case, is it? Shoe, meet other foot. [EDIT]: typos removed

If the NYT editorial board forces its journalists not to say certain things, that's their right, but I would expect that to be disclosed upfront in the stories on that subject.
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