Comment by camillomiller
6 years ago
As a journalist who's a CS dropout, then later a BoA, and who works as a web dev on the side: I agree. BUT:
1) The journalist's work is sometime a soul-crushing effort to turn complex things that can't really be made simple into a readable summary. I cover Quantum tech as someone who has at least a grasp of physics: it's insanely difficult.
2) Journalists that behave like the ones you describe, are bad for the whole profession. What you describe is a systemic problem in journalism, which I think it's especially bad in the big newsrooms of big newspapers that are struggling to survive or have still to figure out a proper business model for their future.
That said, I think there are a lot journalist who, like yours truly, tend to stick to what they've studied and know. I would never write about medicine, but I know I'm able to write about tech avoiding the complete lack of knowledge some colleagues show. The real problem: this works for me as a freelancer. Staff writers are considered fungible, and they have to adapt to whatever needs to be written.
Sorry for the sparse thoughts, I have to much in my mind about this, but not enough time to put it down properly right now. I still wanted to chime in, though. :)
P.s. Journalism schools are also part of the problem. They form a cohort of people who think they can do exactly that: write about anything. It's bullshit, and it does not work well for the category. The best colleagues I know all come from very different study fields, and they sort of fell into journalism by chance.
> Journalism schools are also part of the problem. They form a cohort of people who think they can do exactly that: write about anything. It's bullshit, and it does not work well for the category.
This.
100% this.
(I spent about a decade in the trenches as first a part-time then full-time tech journalist -- wrote a column for the UK Computer Shopper for several years -- and the reason CS's feature quality stayed high was because the editors recruited techies who could write and trained them in the basics of journalism, rather than hiring generalist journalists and expecting them to pick up a CS degree by osmosis.)
Ah, yes, it's the 90% of bad journalists that give the rest a poor reputation.
> tend to stick to what they've studied and know.
Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.
While what you're suggesting seems common sense and is indeed better than current situation, I think it could be even better if rather than having one journalist writing one piece, every piece was a joint effort by several journalists, some expert on the subject and some not.
> Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.
All journalists are biased. Pretending they can be unbiased is silly.
Beyond that, a journalist specialized in CS writing about the ecological impact of technology is no longer "sticking to what they've studied and know" any more than a sportswriter would be writing about the ecological impact of a new stadium.
Just like in academia, interdisciplinary research is best served not by a single polymath, but by a collaboration between domain experts. In this case, the proper (money-is-no-object) approach for an editor to take, would be to attach both an ecology-expert journalist and a tech-expert journalist on the piece, likely with the tech-expert driving doing the research and the ecology-expert writing the piece.
One could argue that in your situation a journalist trained in CS is simply not the educated party that should be writing a piece anyway. Knowing CS doesn't mean you understand the ecological impact of technology, you'd want someone with an ecology degree.
Sure, but then that journalist doesn't know about technology and is biased toward ecology :)
Although, I guess that rather than having experts and non-experts co-writing the article, it would even be better to have experts on all identified topics. So here, it would be both the journalist with a technological background and the one with an ecological background.
It seems a bit unrealistic to have experts on all subjects at hand, though, so I guess mixing non experts could at least be a minimum effort.
What is a BoA?
Maybe Bachelor of Arts aka BA or AB? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Arts
Bachelor of Arts I guess.
It is not a journalist's job to be an expert in the subject they are covering. That's why journalists interview experts, and why journalists don't use themselves as sources.
If you are writing from your own knowledge rather than attributing your information to others, I would argue that you aren't really practicing journalism. (There's nothing wrong with that, I just think it's something else.)
Unless a journalist is merely acting as a typist "not using themselves as sources" is not enough.
Journalists gather, assemble and interpret information, and sometimes they build the dreaded 'narrative' for the reader. In this case they must not only _source_ knowledge but consume and comprehend it - at which point they _are_ operating in the specific domain of the information they gathered.
Different knowledge requires differing degrees of investment to comprehend, and for non-trivial subjects being an SME that covers most of the domains involved is going to allow you to validate interpretations made on assembled knowledge i.e the stuff you are operating on rather than merely regurgitating.
I am open to the idea that a journalist could separately have good investigative skills and other journalistic things I am not aware of while not being an SME in much of anything - but in which case they should always work with one or more SMEs, much like the sibling comment's suggestion from 'cousin_it'.
Some topics are simpler than others. For example, a lot of stories on "science" tend to focus on people instead. They tell the narrative of the research team, and their success, and usually pick out a single individual to tell a human story about. Often this takes a moralistic or political angle. "A [politically fashionable identity group member] has [destroyed boundaries / revolutionized topic / other post-modern language]." This is not necessarily a bad story to tell, but it's clearly about people and groups of people, rather than a story about science.
By contrast, if journalists were solely focusing on the science, the article would simply be a reprint (or summary) of a research paper. Now, to be fair, some news outlets do a very nice job of this, while others turn everything into a human story, or at least, focus on a part of the story the journalist can understand.
I think this is partially due to the limitations being described. The journalist likely can't understand the science in a meaningful way, but can understand the people, and how they talk about their research, and how the public perceives that. Helpfully, this will also likely be the story that will appeal to more readers. And so, the incentives are aligned in a few directions against the "better" (read: more precise, and requiring more expertise) story.
I could bring as examples innumerable “Experts“ who give bad and highly opinionated comments that journalist can skew and apply to their own narrative. If you are versed in what you write about it’s easier to separate fluff and worthless commentary from actual information.
There's a great Twain story about this: http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/18515/how-i-edit...
Would it be too much to ask that, when a journalist writes on a topic they don't understand, they should ask an expert "hey can you sanity check this" before publishing?
It's not necessarily malice. Experts rarely have time to review some bullshit for free and the tight timelines don't help.
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In Germany we have this organisation:
https://www.sciencemediacenter.de/en/
for journalists to quickly find an expert to ask.
The problem here is that it's easy to find an expert to mirror the point of view of the journalist, and thus make any point of view seem objective.