All her talk of integrity, and yet HuffPo writes articles on Uber while she sits on their board. Where are the amazing journalists of our day? Where is the modern day Murrow or Cronkite?
On another note does anyone know any good Indian journalists? Or is the term an oxymoron :P ?
A friend recommended this. I went to their website and there was an article on guns (it was just after one of our horrific gun violence incidents) and their solution: arm everyone. That was really the conclusion from the op-ed, make sure everyone has a gun.
It's an aggregator mostly. (Re) prints from many sides.
Definitely a case where it is a far better reading experience in physical magazine form than electronic. You can peek ahead to see where the opposing view or alternative view is going. The format is good for short attention people like myself
The Week is fine but it's mostly short attention span recaps of what's been reported elsewhere. The question in this thread is where are the journalists who are doing investigative stories that take months (e.g. Spotlight) and the answer is that they exist but there are a lot fewer than there used to be.
I like reading the investigative stories at Talking Points Memo's Longform section (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/longform), and I'm also a fan a lot of the original work at Pando (https://pando.com/). I tend to follow the source links on a lot of the more popular sites and see if the original is worth a RSS subscription.
I'm not sure I'd consider Pando real journalism (maybe they've changed since they're behind a pay wall). Funded by VCs and they write about the tech industry.
The world is much better off because newspapers matter less? I disagree.
From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Edward Snowden to the current water crisis in Flint, newspapers have broken stories that've benefitted the public. If any of you watch the news, a majority of stories are recycled from original newspaper reporting. While papers' circulations are dwindling, they are still making a difference online.
If no one is keeping our elected officials accountable, who will? Surely not Dave and Kelly of News Channel whatever.
That's a nice thought but the majority of what "anybody" posts is mindless nonsense with the added benefit of not even pretending they're trying to be informative.
It's like how cell phones put a camera in everyone's pocket so now when we have natural disasters or a 10 car pileup we get photos, but about 3/4 are idiotic selfies.
I wonder if we will ever grow out of that, now that cameras are everywhere. The sense we have to capture news.
I grew up wanting to be the next (accidental) Abraham Zapruder.(0) to be the source, the Deep Throat so to speak, of something so important -to be validated by the news.
Newspapers are far from being a distribution channel, and to think of them that way is as reductive as thinking of social networks as address books.
Newspapers are organizations that are first and foremost investigative, backed up by quality control, editorial, and research organizations. If you replace this with a smartphone and shift the delivery model out from a newspaper, then the role of being a fact-checker, editor, researcher, and expert falls on the reader. This is a bad idea, not only because it creates more work for the reader, but also because it increase the extent to which personal bias of the readership can increase the incorrect interpretation of facts.
Obviously, no newspaper is a perfect example of this ideal, but they are a great deal further along the curve than almost any individual. As a result, they act as a force against filter bubbles by promoting a whole set of stories and ideas that force people to participate more broadly with real world events and ideas. The mere fact that we worry so much about editorial bias in newspapers is a symptom of the importance that they play in guiding their consumers. The solution is not self-guidance and self-filtering and self research in order to wade through a sea of unqualified, unedited BS.
Furthermore, by being a news seeker, you are admitting that you are still seeking to know what is out there? Is there a particular reason you do not want to consume news through a qualified source? If you want to read the panama papers by yourself then you will likely do that to exclusion of all other reading for a period of days to weeks, and you will need to spend twice that doing research to understand what it means. If you go through a newspaper, they do that work for you.
Newspapers are not broken in any fundamental way. The only reason that this discussion is even happening is that news was traditionally funded by advertising, and that advertising is a shifting business, dragging news along with it. Discussions that center on the decline of newspapers without acknowledging that the shift in advertising revenue is really the problem ignores something very important: that the business of generating news is not at fault, the business of paying for it is. That is the real discussion worth having.
Beautifully said!! wish I wasn't working to comment more.
Newspapers aren't just about news. I may choose to consume one investigative report every quarter, say, and am grateful there's a qualified source . Weather travel planning, for sale, advertisements, and government notifications I no longer need a newspaper to get.
We used to buy the Sunday Times just for the Travel section to look at advertisements. We're better off now that we have the internet to find deals
My feelings about the newspaper industry goes back way further than John Oliver's journalism segment last week, which, if anyone hasn't watched it, is shockingly accurate on the industry today.
> Our world is so much better because newspapers matter less
Disagree. Just last week John Oliver showed David Simon talking about a golden age of corruption when journalists stop going to town hall meetings and local political events.
If you go back and actually listen to some of Murrow's broadcasts (especially radio ones), you can see he took value judgements frequently. The era of unbiased broadcasting never existed.
Back when I was very young, my dad told me of honest journalists who had been tortured by India Gandhi's regime during the emergency while some did really well. So its not fair to judge all of the Indian journalists as equally inept. Instead of casually dismissing their contribution, look within yourself and ask yourself why you are not able to find a single Indian journalist worth knowing.
You've misunderstood my comment, I'm asking for some good examples because I believe they exist and I haven't seen them. I don't follow regional and local language news, but I'm sure they have some good journalists.
And please don't give me this self-introspection crap.
And Murrow or Cronkit weren't? My point was that the most popular and most trusted American newsmen aren't on network news shows any more. They are on variety shows doing comedy about the news.
And yet they were often less comically biased than the "real" news that they were lampooning. If nothing more, they provide a worthwhile service in poking at the absurdities of network news.
> On another note does anyone know any good Indian journalists?
These days only Arnab Goswami comes to mind. In the past there were a lot of upstanding journalists like Arun Shourie, Kuldip Nayar, Lala Jagat Narayan etc.
That's how I feel about the New Yorker after I found out that they pinned a glowing review of "how great gawker was" written by none other than Adrian Chen. (He's a piece of work)
Adrian obviously acknowledged his bias. Do you have an issue with anyone writing about things they're involved in? What legitimate criticism is there on this scenario you're describing?
ViolentAcres. He went after a guy who was a moderator on an unpopular, but legal subreddit. (Distasteful, I'll agree with you) The person who was the moderator, from my understanding did not contribute to the sub. He turned a very private individual into a very public individual and caused many bad things for the person.
Even worse, he made sure to punish and taunt the individual. As a result the individual had a lot of rather stressful life events, was humiliated on CNN, etc. For all of this: Adrian Chen claimed a moral victory.
-----
From my understanding, this was SOP at Gawker, and that is what lead them to have some very powerful enemies.
"And then there’s Michael Huffington, the Texas tycoon who moved to Santa Barbara in the early ’90s so he could run for Congress. Huffington ingratiated himself with S.B. movers and shakers by writing $10,000 checks to all their favorite charities. But he and his famous wife, Arianna, who has since morphed into a famous left-wing media mogulista, were so late paying their bills that many of Santa Barbara’s high-end foodie establishments cut off credit to the high-octane couple. As he would later — when news stories broke that he’d hired an illegal immigrant to care for his children — Huffington blamed his wife."
I'm beginning to think that "corporate and consumer well-being and productivity" might be the next big thing, and it's already here. There are incredible opportunities in this space, like biohacking, supplements, self-testing (blood, brain function, etc), computer-assisted learning and meditation, diets and just plain old food a level beyond "organic" (i.e. known origin, local, glyphosate free soil, "grass fed" etc).
The biggest question is always: Who pays? It's in a company's interest to pay for a sleep coach for any worker with sleep difficulties. But sadly health is not yet seen as part of operations/productivity, even in the most modern companies. That's changing, and with incentives from Obamacare, but we're looking at a complete re-thinking of benefits and human resources. I'm excited in this thread because Huffington is exactly the person to help.
In my experience, having worked in corporate "Wellness" related business objectives, I think there are two mentalities to approaching improving well-being and productivity, 1) The Carrot, and 2) The Stick.
In scenario 1) the company provides resources (time, opportunities for exercise, dietary advantages like coupons) and hopes for a good outcome. They offer incentives.
In scenario 2) the company jacks up everybody's rates and offers "Discounts" to people who willingly submit to having their biological markers reviewed and stored in a database, and to be "under the thumb" of "Coaches" who call to "check in" on progress. The only incentive is fiscal, and the company gets to off-load a bit more of its financial obligation...and, in the US where wages are stagnant, it punishes working class folks.
There's a lot of feel-good talk about option 1) but in my experience Top-Down leadership highly prefers option 2) and that bothers me. Mostly because BMI is often bullshit and sharing PHI is also bullshit to get around some HIPAA protections.
Now with lots of cancer survivors on the books, insurance companies want to recoup the actuarial risk by increasing premiums on the corporate employer, and the corporate employer wants to find ways to kick the cost downward so, you know, shareholders will be happy. I do sincerely believe this is the way it works in the US. I do not like it.
"Corporate well-being and productivity" is the kind of thing that can very easily turn into a zero-privacy dystopia where the employer demands continuous access to a mandatory FitBit as a condition of employment. It would make occasional random drug testing look positively genteel.
It also potentially turns into an environment where you have to "perform wellness" to keep your job. As soon as there are hints of unhappiness or dissent your job is at risk. Not only do you have to turn up at the office when you have minor flu-like symptoms, you have to try your best to hide them.
You forgot the /s somewhere in your sentence /s . In the age of bloggers AS journalists because paying real ones is what online media doesn't do (the Huffpo doesn't pay its contributors, nor its interns) , there is very little journalism left on the internet which is a paradox, considered we are drowned with "news" .
I'm fairly certain HuffPost does pay its interns. Bloggers are unpaid, but there's a fairly large newsroom on staff that produces much of the most viewed content.
Kappa is actually quite an interesting phenomenon - the fluid state of meme-emoticons and the ebb and flow of their popularity in relation to seemingly unconnected events is a nuanced topic in its own right.
Huffington post if far from serious newspaper/media.They are yellow journalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
They exaggerates news in order to grab eyeballs. And their "liberal" attributes biased their stances a lot too.
I think the parent means that the vast majority of published material is disguised native content such as "submarine" PR pieces, product placement, unmodified press releases etc. Since the overall standards have sunk so low, yellow journalism starts to look good by comparison.
I remember Matt Lauer asking Bernie Sanders why people were responding to his campaign. Sanders answered that it was because he was talking about things that the media doesn't cover - inequality, lack of healthcare, lack of education, the rich rigging the economy. Then he asked Matt how many times he had covered those topics. Matt just stared back - like a deer in the headlights. They quickly cut to commercial.
Is it Yellow Journalism or just an open medium for anyone to rant on whatever they want? I consider it barely above a Blog. (Not knocking blogs, just saying it's not even Journalism)
So called 'objective' journalists are just a bit more circumspect about their biases. You know where the Huffington Post is coming from when you read their articles. Who knows what the agenda of a random CNN reporter is. Even a bare recitation of facts is going to include some bias through their choices of which facts to include or exclude.
I find partisan media on all sides valuable to read because the people writing it have different motivations than your typical mainstream journalists. You have to use your judgement and read everything with a grain of salt, obviously, but viewing the news from a variety of perspectives is valuable.
I'm sure she feels like she's done enough to destroy discourse on the internet and she has her sights set on destroying some other vital pillar of our civilization to increase her personal fortune further.
I was an engineer at HuffPost. I believe the departure of Arianna is going to have a huge impact on the organization. Whether that's net positive or negative, only time will tell.
Many of the company's significant initiatives seemed to come out in unpredictable bursts from the brain trust that formed Arianna's staff. The nominal product and engineering leadership was charged with implementing these initiatives, but subject to rapidly changing priorities. A lot of work was launched under time pressure and then scrapped shortly afterward.
To be fair, a lot of the instincts behind those priorities were pretty ambitious and forward-thinking. But totally disconnected from the work of implementation. There's an opportunity to retain the positive aspects that kept HuffPost on the cutting edge (at least in some ways) and reform the churn and top-down approach. Or maybe the road is clear for the company to be fully assimilated into the Verizonscape.
76 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadOn another note does anyone know any good Indian journalists? Or is the term an oxymoron :P ?
Google harder.
All over. The trick is to find them.
Our world is so much better because newspapers matter less and so much worse because cable matters more.
I seem to have difficulty finding them
No thanks.
Definitely a case where it is a far better reading experience in physical magazine form than electronic. You can peek ahead to see where the opposing view or alternative view is going. The format is good for short attention people like myself
From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Edward Snowden to the current water crisis in Flint, newspapers have broken stories that've benefitted the public. If any of you watch the news, a majority of stories are recycled from original newspaper reporting. While papers' circulations are dwindling, they are still making a difference online.
If no one is keeping our elected officials accountable, who will? Surely not Dave and Kelly of News Channel whatever.
We do not have to rely on the newspaper to be the 1st ordinal of "news"
I can be a news seeker much easier now
Newspapers are important just less so than in 1976, say
It's like how cell phones put a camera in everyone's pocket so now when we have natural disasters or a 10 car pileup we get photos, but about 3/4 are idiotic selfies.
I grew up wanting to be the next (accidental) Abraham Zapruder.(0) to be the source, the Deep Throat so to speak, of something so important -to be validated by the news.
(0) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kq1PbgeBoQ4
Newspapers are far from being a distribution channel, and to think of them that way is as reductive as thinking of social networks as address books.
Newspapers are organizations that are first and foremost investigative, backed up by quality control, editorial, and research organizations. If you replace this with a smartphone and shift the delivery model out from a newspaper, then the role of being a fact-checker, editor, researcher, and expert falls on the reader. This is a bad idea, not only because it creates more work for the reader, but also because it increase the extent to which personal bias of the readership can increase the incorrect interpretation of facts.
Obviously, no newspaper is a perfect example of this ideal, but they are a great deal further along the curve than almost any individual. As a result, they act as a force against filter bubbles by promoting a whole set of stories and ideas that force people to participate more broadly with real world events and ideas. The mere fact that we worry so much about editorial bias in newspapers is a symptom of the importance that they play in guiding their consumers. The solution is not self-guidance and self-filtering and self research in order to wade through a sea of unqualified, unedited BS.
Furthermore, by being a news seeker, you are admitting that you are still seeking to know what is out there? Is there a particular reason you do not want to consume news through a qualified source? If you want to read the panama papers by yourself then you will likely do that to exclusion of all other reading for a period of days to weeks, and you will need to spend twice that doing research to understand what it means. If you go through a newspaper, they do that work for you.
Newspapers are not broken in any fundamental way. The only reason that this discussion is even happening is that news was traditionally funded by advertising, and that advertising is a shifting business, dragging news along with it. Discussions that center on the decline of newspapers without acknowledging that the shift in advertising revenue is really the problem ignores something very important: that the business of generating news is not at fault, the business of paying for it is. That is the real discussion worth having.
Newspapers aren't just about news. I may choose to consume one investigative report every quarter, say, and am grateful there's a qualified source . Weather travel planning, for sale, advertisements, and government notifications I no longer need a newspaper to get.
We used to buy the Sunday Times just for the Travel section to look at advertisements. We're better off now that we have the internet to find deals
Disagree. Just last week John Oliver showed David Simon talking about a golden age of corruption when journalists stop going to town hall meetings and local political events.
The internet archive has many recordings: https://archive.org/search.php?query=edward%20r%20murrow
edit : typos
And please don't give me this self-introspection crap.
They are on 'fake news' shows doing comedy.
These days only Arnab Goswami comes to mind. In the past there were a lot of upstanding journalists like Arun Shourie, Kuldip Nayar, Lala Jagat Narayan etc.
Even worse, he made sure to punish and taunt the individual. As a result the individual had a lot of rather stressful life events, was humiliated on CNN, etc. For all of this: Adrian Chen claimed a moral victory.
-----
From my understanding, this was SOP at Gawker, and that is what lead them to have some very powerful enemies.
"And then there’s Michael Huffington, the Texas tycoon who moved to Santa Barbara in the early ’90s so he could run for Congress. Huffington ingratiated himself with S.B. movers and shakers by writing $10,000 checks to all their favorite charities. But he and his famous wife, Arianna, who has since morphed into a famous left-wing media mogulista, were so late paying their bills that many of Santa Barbara’s high-end foodie establishments cut off credit to the high-octane couple. As he would later — when news stories broke that he’d hired an illegal immigrant to care for his children — Huffington blamed his wife."
It's a blog ...
In scenario 1) the company provides resources (time, opportunities for exercise, dietary advantages like coupons) and hopes for a good outcome. They offer incentives.
In scenario 2) the company jacks up everybody's rates and offers "Discounts" to people who willingly submit to having their biological markers reviewed and stored in a database, and to be "under the thumb" of "Coaches" who call to "check in" on progress. The only incentive is fiscal, and the company gets to off-load a bit more of its financial obligation...and, in the US where wages are stagnant, it punishes working class folks.
There's a lot of feel-good talk about option 1) but in my experience Top-Down leadership highly prefers option 2) and that bothers me. Mostly because BMI is often bullshit and sharing PHI is also bullshit to get around some HIPAA protections.
Now with lots of cancer survivors on the books, insurance companies want to recoup the actuarial risk by increasing premiums on the corporate employer, and the corporate employer wants to find ways to kick the cost downward so, you know, shareholders will be happy. I do sincerely believe this is the way it works in the US. I do not like it.
It also potentially turns into an environment where you have to "perform wellness" to keep your job. As soon as there are hints of unhappiness or dissent your job is at risk. Not only do you have to turn up at the office when you have minor flu-like symptoms, you have to try your best to hide them.
:^) indicates that a joke is being made. It's quite similar to TwitchTV's Kappa, if you know about that.
Nothing to do with huffpost tho. Kappa
This might sound profound but it doesn't actually make any sense.
I find partisan media on all sides valuable to read because the people writing it have different motivations than your typical mainstream journalists. You have to use your judgement and read everything with a grain of salt, obviously, but viewing the news from a variety of perspectives is valuable.
Many of the company's significant initiatives seemed to come out in unpredictable bursts from the brain trust that formed Arianna's staff. The nominal product and engineering leadership was charged with implementing these initiatives, but subject to rapidly changing priorities. A lot of work was launched under time pressure and then scrapped shortly afterward.
To be fair, a lot of the instincts behind those priorities were pretty ambitious and forward-thinking. But totally disconnected from the work of implementation. There's an opportunity to retain the positive aspects that kept HuffPost on the cutting edge (at least in some ways) and reform the churn and top-down approach. Or maybe the road is clear for the company to be fully assimilated into the Verizonscape.