Comment by tptacek
2 days ago
I'm not making a value judgement. There are analysts and opinion writers I enjoy reading and get a lot of value from. But hosting a podcast interview with someone is basically the opposite of shoe-leather reporting. I guess if you did "stitch incoming" every couple minutes and cut to Fridman calling someone else to have conversations with other sources about whatever claim his primary guest just made, you'd be getting closer.
My point is: some of the prevailing take on HN about journalism probably comes from the fact that we tend to pay much more attention to the Fridmans and much less to shoe-leather reporters.
That's all!
Much later: a funny thing I could point out here is that the same thing I'm saying about Fridman also applies to Ezra Klein, Thompson's "Abundance" co-author --- I like Klein a lot!
I think there's journalistic value to showing a raw conversation on a podcast. It's closer to the primary source than calling them on the phone and writing down parts of the conversation.
If the interviewer is a bit credulous, then we can take that into account.
I don't need other opinions to be inserted in the same show, because it's not the only show I watch. I get different viewpoints from others. (And Klein's show happens to be a primary example of that)
Journalism is about presenting a topic, not about presenting a person. I don’t care about Elon Musk as a person. I don’t care about his opinions on lawn care or cooking eggs. But in a story about self driving car technology I want to hear his input and the input of Ford and GM and Waymo and Uber and suppliers and academics and regulators and users. Compiling all those sources and presenting a narrative on the topic of self driving cars is journalism.
Giving one person an uncritical platform for three hours isn’t journalism. For that to resemble journalism you would have to squint so hard your eyes would be shut.
This is a great point and well made.
I would take it a step further and argue that it's not so much a topic as facts. Like objectively measurable things about the real world.
There's always going to be some limit to what we can actually measure and how much time we have to do it, but there's no reason not to try to get close to what we we're capable of doing.
I would argue that there are very few people who are actually authorities on a subject worth uncritically transcribing for 3 hours on a subject. Elon Musk is an easy target, the only thing he's an expert on is being Elon Musk, which isn't a very interesting topic.
What he has to say on any given subject does sometimes matter, because some people believe what he says, so it's useful for me to know some of it, but it's more useful to know what the actual facts are.
I don't want reporters who write an article that says "well I talked to one side and they said it's raining and I talked to the other side and they said it was hailing", I want a reporter who goes out and checks what the weather actually is.
1 reply →
I never said there was "no journalistic value" to anything.
You are touting "call up the authorities" and shitting sitting down and talking face to face with authorities, which reads like a value judgement.
> sitting down and talking face to face with authorities
I think the issue is the number of authorities. One isn’t enough.
Not the authorities. The sources.