Pulitzer Prize Winners Moving to PR: What Does That Say About Future Journalism? | Hacker News Reader

Pulitzer Prize Winners Moving to PR: What Does That Say About Future Journalism?

insidesources.com

93 pointsmudil63 comments

Work in politics for a better world during a few years and then use your network relations to sell contracts to governments and make money

Work as a security researcher for a few years and then sell your skills to bad governments for money

Work in journalism a few years and then use your network for PR and make money

https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

Edit: some professional bodies have conversations about unethical uses of their skills and networks (security researchers). Some others are already lost (incestuous relationship between politicians and the companies that sell government contracts). Journalists? We will see but it may be the right time to pay for subscriptions and get journalists pay raises.

> but it may be the right time to pay for subscriptions and get journalists pay raises.

Lol. And you post this on Hacker News where every paywall article has some variation of “how can I get around the paywall?”

We have a significant number of people on here that think it’s perfectly ok to steal movies, music, books, bypass paywalls yet, somehow lament the loss of “good journalism” while complaining about being tracked, i.e. “being the product,” all while devising ways to steal content, use stuff for “free” or otherwise do everything possible to avoid giving a single cent to a content creator.

The HN community is just a tiny slice of humanity, but damnit, you/we are supposed to be the vanguard, yet we actually allow “how do I bypass the paywall” to be allowed. Now imagine the rest of the world bypassing the paywalls. And here we are.

If we had comments asking people “how can I more easily shoplift video game consoles?” — would we allow that?

/rant

Well, paywalls are just an insanely bad concept when coupled with a site such as HN.

I will not start a subscription on a random site because it was linked on HN. I'm most certainly not even part of their target group. And even if I was, reading 1 article a month on 100 different sites is equally insane. (that said, I don't bypass the paywall, I just don't read it)

Personally I'm also not fond of the idea to pay money so that they can track me better, but I know I'm in minority there.

We need better ways to pay for content. Preferably one which rewards good content. Today everything is clickbait and the idea to pay for clickbait is extremely off putting to me.

> We need better ways to pay for content. Preferably one which rewards good content. Today everything is clickbait and the idea to pay for clickbait is extremely off putting to me.

That's garbage. The NYT isn't clickbait. Neither is WaPo, BBC, NPR, Reuters, AFP and many others. If you want more tech focused content there is The Information, Stratechery, Pando Daily.

For nearly all of those there is an easy way to pay, or someone else is paying on your behalf.

When I wrote that I mostly had in mind sites in my country (Sweden). Sure, a foreign subscription is a good idea for world news but you still need ones that specifically covers local issues.

> That's garbage.

This breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Could you please (re-)read and follow them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment would be fine without that bit.

“Everything is clickbait” only proves that the concept has lost all meaning, not that journalism has somehow changed for the worse.

Look how much of the conversation is driven by traditional media outlets. If people really believe we can lose all that and still have a functioning civil society with an informed citizenry, I fear for the future.

It most certainly has changed for the worse.

Because with everything clickbait there is no reason to focus on content since articles without it "sell" just as well. And since good content doesn't bring money anymore why bother?

As a user it becomes much harder to find good content, which reduces the usefulness and desire to read and continue the subscription.

I disagree strongly. Shocking headings were already common in the 1800s. If anything the quality and diversity has gone up in the last years.

Sure, front page headlines has always been subject to this.

But with the internet everything is the front page, and stories only get promoted based on how clickbaity they are. I can look past the top headline, this is several orders of magnitude worse.

Paywalls made this much worse, now every single link has to sell you a subscription. Which is bad enough if you don't pay for a subscription but absolutely devastating if you actually paid for content that only serves as bait for people that don't.

Thanks to the internet.

> If we had comments asking people “how can I more easily shoplift video game consoles?” — would we allow that?

Well.. Let's play devil's advocate and see how far we can go. You're asking a question that could be deconstructed into a few different challenges:

  * psychology and ways to subvert (or bias) human observation
  * ways to avoid automatic surveillance (read: CCTV, facial recognition, etc.)
  * logistics
  * hitting large, faceless corporations where it hurts: on the bottom line

As to their application to Hacker News frequents' interests?

Subverting or cheating human observation skills: stage magicians.

Avoiding automatic surveillance: very much in tune with HN. Hacker culture at its core.

Logistics: again, in tune with HN. (Flexport, anyone?)

Hitting faceless corporations in their bottom line?

And underneath that all, there is the common curiosity. This is a technical challenge. How do I win?

I’d agree you could deconstruct the comment in such a way, but that doesn’t speak to its merit.

Couldn’t your own comment also be deconstructed? Every valid irony or hypocrisy has an underlying mechanism by which it operates yet implies something no less ironic or hypocritical?

To be fair, workarounds for paywalls are usually provided by the site to maintain their SEO, so nothing is being "stolen" in that case.

I'm being charged for downloading a TV series. I'm shy of proposing the counter offer to watch ten minutes of selected commercials as settlement.

Really? By who?

By lawyers of the rights owner.

I might be misrepresenting the claim, which is for offering distribution via torrent, but that is equally nonsense, as a sharing ratio below 1.0 actually impedes the system.

Wait, people emailed Moxie to ask for tips into breaking into WhatsApp?

Pulitzer Prize winners are rare. The fact that two recent winners had left their jobs in journalism between the date they did their prize-winning work, and the date the prize was awarded, is telling. This flight of reporters from journalism to PR is widespread. It is caused by the decline of the print business, as well as the decline in ad revenues. Those two problems are linked but not synonymous. (Print circulation is declining as print subscribers age and younger readers stay online. Ad revenues are declining because platforms like Google and Facebook now consume the bulk of the money that once went to the media that held local monopolies or oligopolies on the distribution of information.) Most of the HN community is part of system of free content distributed by online ad platforms that is slowly killing local, regional and many national publications. Not responsible for it, but part of it. And the death of those publications harms the communities that once learned about themselves through those media. It also harms the health of the political system governing those communities, since leaders are held less accountable wherever information fails to circulate. Even more pernicious than reporters leaving journalism for PR, though, is the slow corruption of journalistic organizations into instruments of propaganda. This isn't necessarily linked to the move online, since good examples of it include Sinclair Broadcast Networks and Fox News.

Perhaps I missed something, but this article didn’t say two Pulitzer winners went into PR. It spoke of a photographer who got a non-journalism job, a journalist who found “greener pastures,” and a third journalist who got a job for the Shoah Foundation. That last one comes closest, I guess, though doing PR for a non-profit holocaust education organization isn’t the propaganda bs I think the title meant to suggest.

Again, I’m open to being corrected if I misread, but I don’t see anything in this article supporting a flight from journalism to PR except for the comparison of the median salaries.

You are missing something, but it's not your fault. I'm referring to information outside the article.

Natalie Caula Hauff, one of the journalists cited, says on her LI page that she works in PR. https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-caula-hauff-243b3a10/

I would qualify any job that "raises awareness" about something as a PR job, as in the case of the reporter who now raises awareness about the Shoah. Reasonable people can disagree about how to define PR. If you're dealing with external communications, how to raise awareness with the public, that is often PR, even if you work in-house rather than for an agency.

In the case of Ryan Kelly, the photographer, he did not exit to PR. Newsweek says he got a digital marketing job in a Brewery. Which for a photographer probably makes more sense.

http://www.newsweek.com/pulitzer-prize-ryan-kelly-charlottes...

I wonder how similar our current situation is to the 1890's, specifically yellow journalism with Pulitzer and Hearst.

There's no relationship between the two? There was no Internet in the 1890s, or even telephones, and journalism was completely different?

Or is this another 'all news is fake' talking point?

You really believe that journalism was fundamentally different back then? You never heard that famous John Swinton quote before? I find that a bit hard to believe, actually.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary ... yes?

I hadn't heard it before, here it is:

"There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton

A quote is not evidence, and Swinton died in 1901 according to that page. It tells us one person's perspective (in one moment) of journalism then, and tells us nothing about it now. Do we look at catchy quotes from professors in 1901 to learn what academia is like in 2018?

I find his quote believable, it jives with Noam Chomskys writings and talks on media consolidation and propaganda.

For what it's worth, looking at those catchy quotes from the past tells us how we got to today and why we are in the place we are. It's a very American conceit to dismiss the past as irrelevant.

Here's another good quote, this one from A.J. Liebling:

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

We're definitely living that. One of the great lessons of 2016 for me was how much power is held by those who set the editorial policy of the most-read websites. The people who own the press...

A lot of journalism is basically PR. I forget who, but someone did a study showing that a large percentage of journalism source material is basically press releases.

Edit: typo fix

Yeah but using a press release as a source doesn’t mean the article is basically pr. You can get info from a press release and write a completely negative article about the topic for example.

There's a difference between journalists first learning about things through a press release, and the journalism actually just being PR, i.e. parroting PR rather than challenging or extrapolating upon it.

The Knife Media usually does analysis about how much spin different newspapers add to current news stories:

https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/pompeo-kim-jong-un-...

The article never explains what “PR” stands for, and only incidentally uses the phrase “public relations” about halfway into the article. It seems to be an article written for journalists, not for the general public.

I thought they were moving to Puerto Rico, and wondered why they would pick now to do that

That's actually what I thought as well.

We all have different words that we are unfamiliar with of course but “PR” is most accurately categorized as an economics / marketing term IMO, and I think the meaning of the word “PR” is widely known so I don’t agree that the article is written for journalists based on that alone. I generally agree that abbreviations should be explained on first use but personally I would not bother to have explained what PR stood for because I (perhaps incorrectly) would have expected that word to be so widely known that no explanation would be necessary.

Making a broad claim based off the career actions of 2 individuals...

Terrible Clickbait Articles: What Does That Say About Future Journalism?

It says maybe you should pay for your journalism if you give a shit.

To be honest, and this is HN, where everyone values intellectual honesty (right?), I will only say this:

I would pay for porn on the Internet, definitely, but not for journalism. They can all go die in a fire already..

I would pay for journalism but not for news

Con artists in disguise right... Including Pulitzer himself.

I do pay for my preferred news. "Inside sources" is not my (or anyone's) preferred news site....

In my experience, the only time it is appropriate to refer to a reporter as a "journalist" is if they are either unemployed, or dead. Reporters report, writers write, where "journalists" occupy a kind of vague institutional gatekeeper profession that is (rightly) being usurped by people taking up the former trades using tech and social media.

I have strong opinions about this.

Writing press releases, ad copy or doing PR work is only offensive to a small cadre of journalists who try to cleanse themselves of the "taint of trade" as to somehow differentiate their role from people who are judged by the quality of their work, and not their approval by an institution, credentials, or perceived political legitimacy.

A reporter is an artist taking risks in a trade with real public value. The modern journalist is a kind of official court jester, selectively using the cover of speech protection to carefully trade favors for "access."

If as a society we want better reporting, reporters need money and autonomy. Viewed this way, the availability of gigs in PR to support the art, especially at the expense of the preciousness of journalism, is of net benefit to all.

I really dislike the recent flood of random news on HN. I'm not ready for this September. Is there a new haven ready yet?

I also think the content has become haphazard and mostly uninteresting. Is it because tech culture is stabilizing around a new normal? Smart phones are stabilized. Several next big things are growing slower than we hoped. Even JS frameworks are less dynamic than before.

Or is it all just as dynamic and we just became more jaded?

I think it's still a dynamic and interesting field, and there are still good tech articles on HN's front page every day. I firmly believe that we are still in the wild-west of programming as a profession, and anyone who says they know what the next twenty years will look like is delusional.

The problem here is simply dilution. Every niche social site that grows large will eventually face the Eternal September, when the userbase grows too large for moderation, and the content drifts dramatically. At that point you simply have to move on and find somewhere that still has a focus on the topic you originally were looking for.

I don't think it's accurate to describe HN as too focused. The mods and algorithms discourage controversial content for example.

Let’s celebrate the corporate manufacturing of consent, in all forms. is what it says. )’:

tl;dr - There's no real money in it, so hey.

Anybody else wonder why writers were moving to Puerto Rico?

No.

EDIT: Sorry - that was brusque of me. Having read the article, which the rules at this place assume you have done, you might assume that P.R. does not equate to Puerto Rico. It turns out, that there are other acronyms that apply to this story.

I think it’s reasonable to read the title before the article.

Something I found:

"Pulitzer Prize-winning piece peddled fake news"

http://www.manilatimes.net/pulitzer-prize-winning-piece-pedd...

The Philippine press is not free. Duterte has made his "fake news" nonsense a key part of his project to crush opposition media. It's no surprise that the Manila Times has gone out of its way to avoid stepping on his toes, although the overheated stuff about 'communist propaganda' is maybe a little too obvious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/world/asia/philippines-du...

Or maybe you can read these instead?

"Responsible journalism also means complying with the law," said NPC President Paul Gutierrez in a statement released Tuesday. "To say that the fate of one media entity found to have run afoul with the law translates to media repression in the country is stretching the argument a bit too much."

"The SEC finding is quite clear: that Rappler Inc., has indeed violated the law when it allowed the entry of foreign investors and also allowed, specifically, Omidyar Network Fund LLC, to have control on 'corporate matters' of Rappler based on its own submissions to the SEC"

http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2018/01/18/NPC-on-SEC-ruling-...

http://opinion.inquirer.net/110628/rappler-stop-misleading-e...

http://www.manilatimes.net/rappler-stop-misleading-everyone/...

Yes, it's unsurprising that the pro-government press supports the government's campaign against their rivals.

Or maybe there's really no need to politicize everything?

If you are a local you should know that CNN is a liberal press and but they are also trying to be neutral (which we appreciate). Inquirer is notoriously anti-government and manilatimes is neutral.

The point is that journalists should report facts and not be partisan. The quality of Pulitzer Prize winners were put into question when the story that they wrote were not backed up by evidence as to what the manilatimes article pointed out. A couple of police sources doesn't make up the entire police force.

And about Rappler, our consitution says that media should be 100% Filipino owned. Rappler received funding from a foreign company, Omidyar Network, and allowed them to have control of corporate matters. This is a red flag that is why SEC did an investigation. It is really that simple. No need to politicize it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com