It constantly frustrates me how news articles never cite research articles, they always just mention "a study" and the author, leaving me to fumble around for 10 minutes to find the actual study. Does anyone know why this is SOP?
You can wish it weren't so, or call it cynical, but that IS the reason they don't add a link to the source in the article. God help us all if people clicked away from the site, learned more about the topic than the reporter, or had the piece go over their head.
I find your comment disheartening because I was kind of hoping that I was guessing wrong. Can I still hope that things are not quite as bad at the NY Times as at local weeklies?
http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe...
Where he talks about encouraging outgoing traffic.
But one of the more interesting links in that post has gone "evil-dark" (expired, taken by squatters, endless unclosable javascript "your iOS app is inf1ected!!1one! Call us to fix it! Have your credit card ready!"
So by your newspaper linking only to itself, it could be that they actually hope to avoid this dead link behavior. (Although it would be better that it was a self link that went to a vetted link repository.)
I'm really not a web guy, so I'm surprised that this problem hasn't been solved for most content management systems.
The actual reason links to studies are often left off articles (particularly in cases like this with sharp deadline pressure to publish fast before the competition) is that the software powering the editing and publishing workflow really badly needs improvement. An incredible amount of work and knowledge goes into a story like this.
Versioning rich text through many different software tools designed for writing/editing and publishing across many platforms is hard. Sometimes people copy/paste by hand and in doing so a link can go missing. The news industry needs more technologists to work on these problems. We're hiring for people to do that, by the way: http://developers.nytimes.com/careers/
(Also, the link to the study is now in.)
"I don't like [thing]" "I work at [thing], come help me fix it"
(Not claiming that NY Times is perfect. Of course. There are other good sources, too. But NYTimes isn't like the media I grew up with. At 20 I realized that all their coverage of subjects which I knew beyond the surface was garbage, at best. My specific example is DN, the largest Swedish morning paper, but could be most of the media.)
I'd be happy to be corrected of course.
I'm skeptical of this "software" explanation. Software can of course make citation management much easier, but I see lots of articles that don't even bother to mention the lead author of a cited publication; and how did the software get that way in the first place? The software reflects the priorities of the corrupt organization that produced it.
Somebody could probably sit down with the journalists for few weeks and come up with a software package that would fit their needs perfectly - if the development consisted of direct communication between the developers and journalists/editorial staff, without any management middlemen in between. Alas, that's not how software is procured in large organizations.
But I'm also skeptical. It could explain NYT's problems, but it doesn't explain the even worse problems every other news outlet has.
NOTE: Study "Effects of X on Y given XYZ" by Researcher N. Here, http://address-to-paper.org
(not the placeholder, the actual data) should help. I don't see such a line getting lost, and even if they happen to publish it by accident instead of incorporating into the text (as sometimes happens, things slip through), it would still reach the same goal anyway.
Now I don't want it to sound dismissive or personal in any way, but tell me - if say, few of great software devs now drop everything they do and come to NYT to help, sit down for months and develop the most awesome software package the world of press has ever seen, will it actually solve the quality issues articles have? And more importantly, if sold to other papers, will it suddenly solve their problems?
Will it make journalism honest and trustworthy instead of lies and clickbait bullshit?
I'm not sure how much blame to put on broken publishing workflow, a lot of this seems really to be about broken incentives - "deadline pressure to publish fast before the competition" that leads to the "many articles, as sensationalist as possible, truth be damned" mentality, especially in the management layer.
But you did give me a pause here. Only recently I had a chance to peek at internals of a tiny part of manufacturing industry, and oh boy how much money they waste on badly designed software, which is badly designed because of deadline pressure and top management pressuring to iterate over a broken software package (and then messing with the process) instead of scrapping it altogether and doing it right. Maybe software is more to blame than I thought.
This actually happened and that's how we got d3.js. It didn't fix journalism though.
You get what you pay for, which online tends toward nothing.
Still, it's better than them getting paid to tell you what someone else wants you to hear.
My objection is with the editorials. I've all but stopped reading "the news" (NYT, WSJ, Economist, my local paper, etc) as a result.
Sounds like the problem lies here and not on the technical side of writing, editing and publishing text.
I wonder what part of this decadence is imputable to ad revenu. If I were very naive, I would say all of it.
Media outlets want viewership more than anything else and the way to get and keep viewership is to tell people what they want to hear. It's why media outlets always have a consistent "slant"; MSNBC people watch MSNBC because it aligns more directly with their worldview than Fox News, and vice-versa. There is minimal tolerance within the audience for a host or pundit that appears to disagree on important factors.
You'll never see Bill 'O Reilly and Rachel Maddow on the same network, because that network would not have any viewers; conservatives want their conservative beliefs reinforced, liberals want their liberal beliefs reinforced, and both will only consume media that performs that function. Most people are not open to having their beliefs challenged even slightly.
All that said, I do find such articles often do state the university and/or the professors that were involved in the study or studies. Some of it may just be convention established before hyperlinks existed, though in many cases, the actual study is not publicly accessible.
"Morning Joe" is a different type of program than the primetime "rage pundits" and Scarborough is one of MSNBC's more moderate hosts, but he still spends his day pandering to MSNBC's core audience. Bias goes much deeper than the words that do or don't come out of a host's mouth; the networks sets the agenda, frames the debate, and procures the guests that will cater to their primary viewership target, and Scarborough passively rides the gravy train. Anchors are performers more than anything, putting on the show that the network has paid them to put on.
What politician is going to turn down the opportunity to have his face in front of tens of thousands of viewers for 2 hours every day, even if it means he has to play nice with the other side?
If there were plenty of people who wanted a "diversity of viewpoints", you'd see this in the marketplace. Could you point out one place where this is actually true? Even NPR, which has a much smaller profit motive and thus should be less concerned with viewership and more concerned with integrity, panders constantly to its audience and refrains from creating a "diversity of viewpoints".
How often do you hear a fair story on NPR about what the conservatives perceive as problems with abortion or same-sex marriage (meaning, a story that doesn't reduce these, either the beliefs and or the believers, to a gross caricature)? Never, because it would make NPR's listener base really mad, because they don't agree that there are problems with those things.
Very few, if any, news outlets are neutral. They pander to their audience's beliefs and they set the dialogue by choosing the stories to give airtime and feed to the base.
Even the "neutral stories" are framed to push a specific viewpoint. They usually go like this: open up with a brief, slanted statement of events. Call someone who supports your POV and ask for their comment. Spend 2 minutes making their argument and bringing it in. About 75% through, put on a 1 or 2 sentence clip from the other side that basically amounts to "we disagree because bad reason x" (bad reason provided either by editing the clip or selecting a bad rep of opposite viewpoint), and then follow it up with another comment from the first person, the person whose argument and authority you spent the first 74% of the story establishing, that says "Well, bad reason x is just ridiculous". Then sign off.
I guarantee you 90% of TV and radio news stories that discuss a news event in a supposedly "neutral" way approximate that pattern. They do it because they're trying to reinforce the beliefs that they believe will make them more money.
Borrowing material from the library is a "thing" as far as I know.
I don't think you have to own a copy of something to write about it. That would be insane.
It's that the reporter is getting access without having ever paid for it. (Pirating, reading from another article, etc)
Setting aside the fact that it is a non-issue, in any case many news agencies have various DB subscriptions, most public libraries have DB access, most universities have 'reader' accounts which grant access to these DBs for like $100 a year, etc.
Any reporter who wants to access an article legitimately can easily do so. Else, they really do not belong in the profession of journalism, which relies on practitioners being resourceful and researching things in order to convey accurate information to others.
The Times needs to get with the times.
Scientific research articles are very often behind a paywall. So citing them wouldn't really give the reader much more information.