Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
6 years ago
> This raises the question: Are journalists actually required?
Depends. The alternative is bloggers.
This situation is ugly. All sorts of motives are being tossed at the journalist, here, but it may be as simple as they think they have a “scoop,” which is pure gold, for journalists (especially young ones).
That said, there are standards that journalists are supposed to meet; usually about things like the number of independent sources they use, and whatnot. It’s fairly obvious that many journalists don’t meet those standards, but they are supposed to.
We’ve all seen what happens with bloggers. There’s good ones, which are basically the same as top-quality journalists, and there are bad ones, which are nightmares that make Joseph Goebbels smirk from his lava pool.
I have been getting downright despondent over the quality of the writing in today’s journalists. I see at least three typos in pretty much every publication I read, every day. Sometimes, terrible ones, in the headline.
I think it’s a shame that the first ones out the door were the editors.
Journalists can do great work, provided the incentives are lined up right. One of the only French newspaper that is consistently in the black is an investigative weekly paper called "le canard enchainé". It is read by pretty much anyone, young, old, poor, rich. It is owned by its journalists, accepts no advertising, has a paper subscription model, and nothing they print is put online.
Thing is, they make ministers and sometimes entire French governments fall when they uncover corruption scandals, they have an impeccable reputation for protecting their sources, and they publish scoop after scoop after scoop. The value they offer is unique, you won't be able to read the information they publish anywhere else, and I believe this is how they maintain their integrity and value to the public.
An interesting model, I wonder if there is anything comparable in Britain or America? Private Eye, maybe?
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/
In Holland we have "The Correspondent" which is independently funded too (AFAIK). While I do feel they play it a bit too 'safe' and try to straddle the line between doing 'regular' journalism and more daring stuff, they do some good work, and it's nice to know they're not chasing ad revenue.
And Le Canard has excellent puns, better than The Economist’s, and risqué spoonerisms too, just in French.
Maybe the willingness of journalists to priotize "scoops" over the actual consequences of their reporting is exactly the problem. On some level, they seem to be incapable of thinking of non-journalists as actual, real people who deserve to be treated with decency rather than things they can use in their Very Important Work which is Vital to Democracy and then toss aside - and as you hint at, this is probably structural rather than just a failing of particular reporters.
This is true. It's not a new problem. You can watch black-and-white movies, from the 1930s, where journalists cause huge problems by publishing "scoops."
The issue is that this would apply to bloggers; even more than journalists. Bloggers chase clicks. A quick shufti at the junk that populates Clickbait Row, in any site, will show what drivel people will publish, chasing clicks.
Yeah, the current situation is that because mainstream journalism are supposed to have 'standards', you get the product with predictable quality, but this quality is slowly but surely getting shittier. Blogs and twitter by contrast have no constraints, which means that variance in quality is much higher and while there are great blogs (such as, well, Slate Star Codex), trusting a random blog is an even worse idea that trusting a random journalist.
Looks like an opening for a new model of journalism begins to appear - something that captures the grassroots spirit of blogs, but filters out biased, disingenious and clickbait stuff, traces provenance of information and allows for fact-checking from multiple angles. Of course, the problem is genuinely hard because any startup that attempts this without new ideas about how the thing will be financed will fall prey to the same incentives as the conventional media and fail to make a difference.
It also helps that Slate Star Cortex isn't expected to be unbiased, so instead of pretending to be the diffuse gaze from nowhere, he can simply be up-front about what you should expect.