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Comment by nchelluri | Hacker News Reader

I think modern journalism is like application development at a startup, except with even less QA. "Get it out!!! Get it out!!!" And since people will forget about the article in a few days anyway, as long as nobody who knows better and knows how to make the right noise about it and has enough energy, time, and incentive to actually do so reads it and starts the correction ball rolling, it's just, kinda... there. Archived to be read by no one but Google and someone doing a long tail search some years to come, hopefully with no more important purpose than writing a paper for school that again, will be disposed of, this time more thoroughly.

We just create so much crap for consumption. Even public broadcasting is full of the 24-72hr news cycle. I've written code that I was employed for where I was like, why are we doing this. I assume journalists are the same.

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It is a race to the bottom as long as we value speed over quality. It is a shame too because I think consumers would really prefer quality over speed for software and news, I know I would. But consumption of these things isn't a rational deliberation by the consumer, but a reflex click or don't click. Hence the proliferation of click bait headlines and bs startup promises.

I think the key is reputation and branding. When all news sources are crappy, I will stick to whatever is free and at the top of my feed. Maybe this is why pay walls are a failing strategy, none of the pay walled papers have a good enough reputation for quality to justify the expense in both money and convenience.

For example Apple used to have such a reputation for quality that the apple tax was something people gladly paid. They still do, but around 2007 this was even more obvious. Remember cut and paste on the iPhone, Apple's reputation for quality was such that millions of customers happily waited for basic functionality. Any other company would have had to rush out cut and paste, but Apple could take their time and get it right.

I don't think there is anything similar in journalism. No one says to themselves "That looks like a good story, but I'll just wait a few days and read about it in the New York Times." We can blame the consumer's impatience, but I think we should blame journalists for not cultivating such a reputation for quality.

It would be really hard and probably lose money for years, but I want to see a paper try that approach. Have an explicit and well know strategy of ,"we aren't going to be first with any stories, but everything you read here is well researched almost certainly true". It would take some time but just imagine what a paper with that kind of reputation could accomplish and the sort of loyalty it could have from customers.

Agreed. Savvy consumers prefer quality, but many just prefer entertainment. And entertainment drives clicks/views, bringing more revenue.

Is capitalism supposed to provide some sort of self-correction?

>It is a race to the bottom as long as we value speed over quality. It is a shame too because I think consumers would really prefer quality over speed for software and news

They do but quality is expensive to produce and consumers can't always recognize it consistently.

Yeah, one of the problems here is that speed is easier to measure than quality, and there's a natural bias to optimize for what you can measure.

I agree that none of the pay walled papers are good enough to justify the expense. But this was happening pre-internet as well. I used to buy newspapers occasionally when dining out alone. At best, they were somewhat cumbersome to read and provided possibly half a meal's worth of reading mildly interesting stories (to put it mildly. Newspaper subscriptions were never worth it - and this feeling hasn't changed since they went online. The future of journalism worries me a bit since the current model seems to be failing. Folks need consistently reputable sources to get news about events without a monetary barrier to read it. Otherwise, we wind up with folks believing the "truth" in what seems no better than a supermarket tabloid.

> No one says to themselves "That looks like a good story, but I'll just wait a few days and read about it in the New York Times."

I absolutely do. NYT isn't perfect, but all my other feeds are so full of junk I do wait to see what the NYT will write about it. You don't even have to wait a few days. The NYT is very good at covering developing stories online with reasonable accuracy.

You're basically describing The Economist here. Go find their coverage of some topic you know well. It might be shallow, it might emphasize the wrong things, but it will very seldom be out and out wrong. I'm not aware of any non-specialist publication I can say that for.

And instead of just "Principle A said 'aaa', principle B said 'bbb'" coverage of foreign events they also provide a bit of historical context of who these people are and what they've been doing. Along with some editorial about who they think is write which I don't always agree with but which is usually understandable at least.

Newspapers used to have a robust QA mechanism: the profession of copy editing. Wasn't perfect, but they knew generally what they were doing. (My dad used to be one).

Guess who goes first in the layoffs.

Any discussion of the state of modern journalism has to acknowledge that newspapers are hemorrhaging cash and lashing out with desperate, short-term plays to try to keep breathing until next quarter.

In your software development analogy - they are perpetually out of runway and trying to cut the burn rate to make it just a little further before they have to send the rest of the staff home for the last time.

Look at what headcount at your local paper has done since the mid-90s. It's really not surprising QA has gone out the window.

It hasn't quite died yet. The sites cited aren't on my list sources and for a good reason. The places I go aren't perfect but they are a hell of a lot better than The Daily Mail.

I think it is more complicated than that, newspapers have the problem that they are hemorrhaging cash, but also that the format of a newspaper article is not well suited to convey information. It is just long enough to give the impression of information, but too short to actually establish an argument. And third, especially on QA, the best newspapers get beaten by the best blogs, it is just something fundamentally different if Bruce Schneier writes about crypto, or if someone who aced his math lecture during undergrad studies writes about crypto.

This might be true for highly technical topics but that is not close to most reporting.

Most of the real meat of reporting is on politics, institutions and how they are functioning (or dysfunctional), sociological trends, crime, analysis/commentary on those kinds of topics, and the occasional heartwarming fluff about some quirky local person or organization. We have yet to see professional, disinterested 3rd parties doing serious full-time work on this kind of stuff except when employed as journalists.

I know what you mean.

But I think in part it's just because things don't stay 'in focus' for very long any more. In the news world, one or two days is now all it takes for stuff to be seen as 'old hat', with the timing going down to maybe about two or three hours in the gaming world.

So for journalists, it's more profitable/attention grabbing to get anything out 'right now' that it is to do the research and delay the piece.

It might also be because the first news site to post about something interesting can often claim to be the 'source', even if they're really just writing about something that's already been posted elsewhere. Most journalists don't actually check for the original page or paper, they just reference the site they heard it discussed on.

So being quick can also get a bunch of equally rushed sites linking back to your work as if it was the original source. That can be awfully good for your page rank or whatever...

Either way, it's almost always better (for the journalist/news site/media source) to be the first to print something than to cover it most accurately. That's just how the increasingly quick news cycle works online.

The industry becomes debased as advertisement becomes its exclusive revenue source. In the old days, newspapers had income from a) subscription fees; b) classified sections; and c) commercial advertisers. This diversification allowed the papers to prioritize the interests of the subscribers, who were paying real money to the paper because they relied on it to have accurate and timely content.

In a world where commercial advertisers are the only source of income (because no one will pay subscription fees anymore, and classified sections are obsolete), it's all about viewership, all about eyeballs. You get eyeballs by making outrageous claims and exaggerations (and engaging in other methods to exploit the subconscious processes of the human mind). You can then return to your advertisers and say "Look, I got 20k pageviews for that article yesterday, and all 20k saw your ad. Keep paying and I can make it happen again tomorrow."

For this reason, highly-polarizing or controversial pieces are extremely common. The media outlets have profit incentive to get two or more large groups at each others' throats, because it means each party is watching their content more often and more intently, which means when a disaster primarily of their own making occurs, they can go back to advertisers and say "We had a record month in June!", excluding the further explanation "because so many people died in violent ways, occasionally because of the false information we reported to get more viewers".

We have to make it so that viewership stops being the most important thing. People are too easy to exploit and hijack for the most-viewed to be a good source. Most often, the most heavily viewed articles will be extremely controversial and will get tons of people who agree coming to bask in the glory of self-congratulation and tons who almost-violently disagree coming to pick apart the arguments and seek ammunition for counterpoints. Both sides see ads when they do this, which means more revenue for the publisher, which means more incentive to produce divisive content.

We need to find a way to fix the perverse incentives in media. As long as its eyeballs-first, it's going to be a circus, because circuses draw attention.

Block all ads and (try to) burn the whole fetid industry to the ground.

I specifically block ads on clickbait news sites. It would be great if somebody maintained a blocklist that awarded good reporting.

I agree. Marco's "Peace" would have been great for this I think. He didn't want to be an arbiter of what should and shouldn't be blocked, but I'm happy to have someone decide for me and to pay them to do it. If I disagree I can go elsewhere. I wish he had not canned it because it was exactly what I wanted.

Isn't that what Adblock Plus's whitelist for non-invasive advertisers is, more or less? I understand it's not specialized to reporting, but the idea is that it won't block ads that are good citizens.

Not an ad-lover or marketer here, but even in the pre-internet days, ads were how you found out about things you might be interested in buying, an information source, sure, to be taken with a grain of salt. But still I bet if you really trace a purchase, even if a friend told you, he most likely saw an ad or a product-based article for selling.

In some cases the ads have been put into the articles themselves, like all of the wooing over the latest Apple products release every 6 months or so. It is driven by the techno-lust for the product. It seems to be, since I have many colleagues who own two or more systems, not including phones and tablets, when one would do. Just look at some sigs in game or tech developer forums where people list their arsenal.

Yes but adverts then had a limited ability to make your life worse. Take something I found annoying then (full page magazine advert) and compare that to a full page auto play advert that sometimes even has extra adverts that are flashing down the sides. It is so hostile that I don't go to those places even with a blocker turned on because anyone who values their content that little doesn't have anything I want to see imho.

Not to mention targetted ads that try to exploit your psychological traits.

Ads have always been targeted; they're just more precise now, and fancier. Same tactics.

Think of the old 'sand-in-the-face' bodybuilding ads that were in comic books. Most comic book readers were young males going through puberty, myself included.

Disclosure: I went for the drawing school test ads, and solar ovens in 1976 ;)

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