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Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

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Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#51

Post by richk449 »

cnnsucks wrote: post #40
paulpauper wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vox was launched in early 2014 and has seen blistering traffic growth since. Given that they were able to grow so rapidly in an already saturated news media environment dominated by Washington Post, Time, CNN, WSJ, and New York Times, suggests they are doing something right.

Indeed they are; Vox has improved the Q factor of the left wing echo chamber like nothing since the rise of huffpo.

Well put. Has the idea of a quality factor (Q) for a political "echo-chamber" been defined? Seems like an opportunity to inject some rigor into some commonly used terms.

One could measure the decay time of conspiracy theories through number of articles/posts published to determine the Q.

Or one could try to determine the bandwidth, as the allowed deviation from orthodoxy - a high Q chamber would have everyone parroting the exact same thing, whereas a low Q chamber would admit significant variability. Seems harder to quantify this measure though.

Also no reason to assume those two measures would be consistent. Needs a more rigorous approach to ensure self-consistency.

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#52

Post by richk449 »

cmdrfred wrote: post #45
pkill17 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was another example in this very article of them writing a glowing defense of Comcast, which they neglected to put a disclaimer on until a large outcry caught up with them. Where are you getting your opinion that they "usually do a good job of disclosing things"?

I think the problem is a lot of people go "I agree with essentially everything this newspaper puts out, thus this is great journalism!" when really good journalism would likely have you disagreeing with it as much as you agree.

Of course, since most people don't want to read things that they disagree with, the result is that most people don't want to read good journalism.

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#53

Post by forgottenpass »

_mhyx wrote: post #7

Does anyone else deeply distrust Vox? The quality varies a LOT, they frequently present opinions as facts, etc. The weird thing is they have moments of brilliance like the "Liberal Smugness" piece - but search "Vox News article" and it looks like even the left really hates them. They seem more interested in telling me how to feel than the facts, I guess. I wish the rest of the world had the same pride in journalism a…

Does anyone else deeply distrust Vox?

There was never any reason to trust them. I had hopes that the new thing from the Wonkbook dude would be interesting if not also quite useful. Imagine my disappointment to find Ezra just decided just to cash in and spin up yet another hollow, low rent, news blog crafted to target the American left.

Scott Alexander's "Reverse Voxsplaining" articles and The Federalist's occasional trouncing of Vox should be more than enough to kill any lingering notion the Vox brand is interested in journalism.

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#54

Post by smsm42 »

I find the headline a little misleading. Reading it, I was thinking "ok, Vox runs an ad for Comcast - what's wrong, all the press runs ads, that's how they make the money, and why would they refuse to run an ad for Comcast?". Reading further, the allegation seems to be much more serious - that Vox run an article, purporting to be an editorial content, but in fact being, by its content, very close to an ad. Wasn't clear from the headline at all.

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#55

Post by adventured »

paulpauper wrote: post #36
_mhyx wrote: post #7

Does anyone else deeply distrust Vox? The quality varies a LOT, they frequently present opinions as facts, etc. The weird thing is they have moments of brilliance like the "Liberal Smugness" piece - but search "Vox News article" and it looks like even the left really hates them. They seem more interested in telling me how to feel than the facts, I guess. I wish the rest of the world had the same pride in journalism a…

Vox was launched in early 2014 and has seen blistering traffic growth since. Given that they were able to grow so rapidly in an already saturated news media environment dominated by Washington Post, Time, CNN, WSJ, and New York Times, suggests they are doing something right.

They have not seen blistering growth since. They haven't grown much at all in two years, since the initial burst of growth early into their existence. The clock is ticking on Vox, they either have to generate substantial growth soon, or they're guaranteed to go under (these new media sites are universally red ink machines, betting on continual capital investment to try to get a lot larger, then the growth stops but the red ink continues and they go under, same business concept failure repeating over and over again).

Their traffic is directly measured:

https://www.quantcast.com/vox.com

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#56

Post by dannypgh »

uncletaco wrote: post #48
BadassFractal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberalism or leftism? A lot of the modern trends you see from the left actually feel very illiberal.

Leftist ideology is not mutually inclusive of liberalism (in the philosophical sense) but that's true of most ideologies. Heck, mix nationalism (extreme patriotism) with socialism (illiberal leftist ideology) and you can get national socialism (far-right Nazism).

The claim that nationalism socialism is a type of socialism is dubious. Names are tricky like that. http://www.politicususa.com/2012/09/12/hitler-explains-gop-w...

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#57

Post by smsm42 »

richk449 wrote: post #52
cmdrfred wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is a lot of people go "I agree with essentially everything this newspaper puts out, thus this is great journalism!" when really good journalism would likely have you disagreeing with it as much as you agree.

Of course, since most people don't want to read things that they disagree with, the result is that most people don't want to read good journalism.

I think you oversimplify. Most peopke are more tolerant to bad journalism if it confirms their prejudices. And doing good journalism is harder than doing bad one. Thus it is easy to get away with bad one if you only care about click and/or only care for one ideological niche. But that doesn't mean there's no demand for high quality journalism - it's just harder to do it, so less people bother to. In nonpolitical topics, where prejudices are less strong, there is plenty of quality content. And if we stop supporting crappy content in political topics, it will happen there too.

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#58

Post by [deleted] »

richk449 wrote: post #52
cmdrfred wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is a lot of people go "I agree with essentially everything this newspaper puts out, thus this is great journalism!" when really good journalism would likely have you disagreeing with it as much as you agree.

Of course, since most people don't want to read things that they disagree with, the result is that most people don't want to read good journalism.

[deleted]

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#59

Post by Waterluvian »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #14
_mhyx wrote: post #7

Does anyone else deeply distrust Vox? The quality varies a LOT, they frequently present opinions as facts, etc. The weird thing is they have moments of brilliance like the "Liberal Smugness" piece - but search "Vox News article" and it looks like even the left really hates them. They seem more interested in telling me how to feel than the facts, I guess. I wish the rest of the world had the same pride in journalism a…

Vox and all its sibling outlets (Polygon, the Verge, etc.) have devolved into poison. They've surpassed Mother Jones as the Internet's premiere outraged bleeding liberal rag. Their headlines are physically painful to read. They are unabashed smug coastal liberalism. Their videos are consistently high quality though. I'll go there probably once a month and watch a handful.

I only recently got into polygon. What can be toxic about video game coverage? Ie. What am I looking for?

Re: Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment

#60

Post by binarybits »

iaw wrote: post #28
dstaley wrote: post #19

I totally think that when a Vox Media publication writes about Comcast that they should disclose the fact that Comcast Ventures owns a minority stake in Vox Media. However, I think it's a bit ridiculous to expect them to disclose this every time they cover one of their investor's portfolio companies. According to Crunchbase [1], there are 1,124 companies that share at least one investor with Vox Media. That's a prett…

I think the challenge arises in ascertaining whether or not there is an adverse incentive driving their reporting on a given story. In the case of Snap it seems safe to conclude that someone asked them to write positive stories. The need to disclose all potential conflicts arise because we cannot trust the authors of these sponsored stories to honestly disclose that that is what they are.

"It seems safe to conclude that someone asked them to write positive stories." As the author of the article in question, I can tell you that this is false.
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