Comments on: BLAME

By: Danny

Danny — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:04:10 +0000

IMHO the night true journalism died on network TV was Ted Koppel's last night on Nightline, which has now become a tabloid 'news' show.

Investigative journalism on TV is dead. The networks run one 'murder mystery' after another.

Pitiful.

By: Ecks

Ecks — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:46:28 +0000

The incentives aren't to be accurate, they are to build a stable of readers to whom you cater. To the extent you can find readers who are primarily motivated in finding accurate, high quality info, and who are discriminating enough to be able to detect which kind is which, then you can be… I don't know, there has to be a place like that.

To the extent that lots of people just want their biases catered to, you can happily be Fox news, or Red State or similar (or HuffPost or Kos???) and have people coming back again and again for more. to the extent that people want intelligent and reasoned debate, you can be a niche blog. But probably just a niche.

By: Marla

Marla — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:19:31 +0000

I'm following you up until that last sentence about financial interest. Besides the obvious megawad of crap on the internet, the most significant weakness is online media's ability to gauge public interest in a story IMMEDIATELY, by click-throughs and such. They don't even have to guess which stories might be useful, newsworthy, important, etc., they can publish only what is POPULAR (e.g., celebrities) and see direct results in site statistics, with which to entice advertisers. Online media have even less reason to report objectively or report responsibly than print media and more ability to report for profit. There will soon be no ratio at all in the signal-to-noise equation.

By: skyskier

skyskier — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:35:34 +0000

"A cogent argument (to me at least) in favor of traditional news is that professional journalists have vested interests in getting the story right, unlike internet bloggers."

The incentives are already in place. We already see bloggers getting the story right BECAUSE they want to get it right and develop a following for being so. The reverse is also true in print where we have the Kristol's and Douthat's of the world, wrong about everything but could not care less.
I understand how this could be seen as a possible argument but in the real world it already has been settled.

By: j

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:48:07 +0000

Well-written post, Dr. Ed! All good comments, too, esp. Desargues.

A cogent argument (to me at least) in favor of traditional news is that professional journalists have vested interests in getting the story right, unlike internet bloggers. You apparently think that the large numbers of bloggers will circumvent this problem, since the magic of hyperlinking will allow real information to outcompete misinformation. An apt analogy is how native wildflowers will eventually outcompete weeds during prarie restoration. My question is, do you think there needs to be any incentivization for news-making? How should this be accomplished?

By: Parrotlover77

Parrotlover77 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:38:25 +0000

Ed – Where do you watch football? I'm guessing it's a sports bar that serves some sort of special mushrooms as an appetizer.

By: Pan Sapiens

Pan Sapiens — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:24:33 +0000

If there is any question about the future of news media, it can be answered by looking carefully at the pie-chart located here

By: Aaron Schroeder

Aaron Schroeder — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:07:01 +0000

If the internet replaces traditional media, we do run into the problem of how high-input cost news gathering will get done. That kind of news pretty obviously includes the international variety, but less obviously, it includes the kind of news that comes from dumping resources into 24-hour news gathering. As an example, do Woodward and Bernstein break the Watergate story without the Washington Post having had the resources to have reporters waiting to be in the right place at the right time? Without having spent years developing relationships with politicians and other officials? I mean, it is strange to think that Deepthroat-2020 would shoot a quick text over to Drudge (although, maybe not that strange).

Either way, without institutions likes the New York Times, and the NBC/GE/COMCAST corporate machine, one suspects that those high-input media responsibilities might have to be met in much the same way that the Brits meet theirs. NPR, anyone?

By: Desargues

Desargues — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:00:06 +0000

The Economist does not seem to be losing readership. I wonder if it's got anything to do with them trying to do a good job by, you know, making some actual arguments in their articles. Or using some evidence. Or trying to look at issues with some dispassion (at least sometimes; when they cover Obama, they sound a bit like mindless Republican Lite hacks).

The NYT could be saving itself a lot of money by getting rid of its sinecured op-ed writers. A lot of them provide a product that's sub-par and exorbitantly expensive — in a market in which there's vast amounts of better stuff free of charge, on blogs.

Plus, some journalists have been making too much money anyway. Journalism wasn't supposed to be a cushy middle-class job; it corrupts the newsman, and makes him all too sympathetic to the ideology of those he's supposed to regard with suspicion. The Broderites have become such cretinous cheerleaders for the Establishment not least because they like being invited back for wiener and champagne at the parties of Washington potentates. Fuck'em. A real journalist is hungry, uncertain about his future, and has reason to hate the motherfuckers he's been assigned to cover.