Mission Motors didn't close because of Apple

This is exactly right. I had detailed knowledge of an acquisition and all media articles about it were so completely wrong that it was offensive.

In the good old days, there were just a few news operations. Each had the resources and time to do thorough vetting and deep reporting of each story.

Today, there has been an explosion of news outlets, but each one has little time or resources to do deep reporting. But because there are so many, they are highly incentivized to attack each other's stories, to gain traffic.

I'm not sure that one way is worse than the other, from the audience perspective. Today's news cycle is in some ways more transparent--the first take goes public, then the fact check goes public, then the second take goes public, then the second fact check, etc. And it's all discussed in detail between anyone who's interested--like here on HN, or on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Let's call it a transition from a monolithic "wait until correct" model to a distributed "eventually correct" model.

That said, it may be corrosive to the reputation of news operations in general, because they are so frequently publicly challenged and wrong.

> Almost every time I read a piece in the mainstream media about something I understand really well I'm baffled at how badly the press machine we've set up (and inexplicably trust) can butcher it. Then I think about that experience the next time I read about something I don't know much about.

This is how I feel about press, movies, TV, etc.

However only Fox News, Breitbart, Telegraph and especially Daily Mail with other news outlets I hate is guilty of this and their readers are idiots for reading that junk.

But it's pretty obvious what you brought up doesn't apply to Guardian, Huffington Post Arabic, Vox and Salon which is quality stuff that I like.

It's flawed because we let it be flawed from personal bias. I think it was Spiegler that has around 80 fact checkers all around. What's your take on that?

But yeah, boo Daily Mail, yay Salon because I am smart enough to tell quality from tabloids.

When I came across Gell-Mann Amnesia I thought, "Wow I needed that concept."

>Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

Almost every great company has been in a position where losing just a few key employees would have killed it before it became large enough to sustain itself.

I have a theory that a lot of companies become great because of the output of those absolutely superb (but not necessarily self-promoting) employees who create 95%+ of the intellectual output of the startup, while all the the credit goes to those who promote themselves.

Snag those great employees, kill the company.

Now that the cost of publishing has gone to nothing, you trust that someone who knows what they're talking about (e.g. Asphalt & Rubber) will eventually see a popular but incorrect story and write a correction.

https://stratechery.com/2015/in-defense-of-the-new-york-time...

You should do some critical thinking and trust yourself.

The article author qualifies himself pretty well - he has broken multiple stories about Mission and was the first journalist to ever ride their prototype.

I am pretty sure we have better access to information now than before.

Thermonuclear War!!

This article is saying that was not the case. The company was failing already and so understandably the top talent went elsewhere, such as Apple.

Probably nothing nice. But I am not obligated to share Steve Jobs' ethics when judging Apple's actions here, and I really don't like the notion that an employee "belongs" to a company that isn't covered in that employee's contract (and even some contracts I think overstep what's legally permissable, not to mention "right.") If you want to keep an employee, you do it by valuing that employee properly, not by shaming competing offers for that employee.

Wouldn't that have been in the days of the 'no-poaching' regime?