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Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

A trend that's been growing for quite a (long!) while now is exemplified by this article: "Tesla did not respond to Ars’ request for comment on Sunday."

Who in their right minds realistically expects any organisation to respond to some random journalistic enquiry on a Sunday?

The other major variant of this shyster tactic is along the lines of, "Company X failed to respond immediately when asked for comment." No company is able to respond immediately, particularly not on an issue that's likely contentious. Any response would need to be run by their PR and legal people at the very least.

It's a cheap and nasty way to make companies look/feel uncaring about the issue being reported, but imho it does nothing but reflect poorly on the reporter and publication using these smelly tactics, and leaves me wondering what other agendas they may have running.

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> Who in their right minds realistically expects any organisation to respond to some random journalistic enquiry on a Sunday?

My company did it. Heck, we did it when it was just me and my cofounder answering email. I've worked for multiple companies that had folks who specifically had weekend comms duty, actually. When you reach a certain size this is as normal as having an operations expert on call.

It's... Weird to suggest that it's abnormal to be responsive to press within 24 hours for a company as big as Tesla.

>It's... Weird to suggest that it's abnormal to be responsive to press within 24 hours for a company as big as Tesla.

Exactly. It's laughable to suggest that the entire Tesla communications department doesn't check email on Sundays, let alone on Monday, another day in which they also had to draft a response.

> Who in their right minds realistically expects any organisation to respond to some random journalistic enquiry on a Sunday?

Jeez. Considering the story was posted today, what this probably means is that they requested commentary on Sunday, waited for the entirety of Monday, and didn't hear back until today, when they decided to post it.

In my experience, legit journalistic sources are also open to delaying a story to include commentary if the commentary source asks for some reasonable additional time to respond.

Psht, delaying a story is so 2010.

Far more likely is that it was written on Sunday, didn't get a response by Monday morning, was put into the publishing pipeline/queue right then and there, and cleared the queue and hit the site today.

I don’t think it’s done intentionally to make companies look bad. It’s just the inevitable result of two conflicting goals: to reach out for comment from the subject of the article, and to publish as quickly as possible.

ArsTechnica also does this routinely and they often post substantial updates (e.g. updating the title, bumping it back up on the homepage) once they get a response, so I’m really skeptical of claims that this is anything other than the balance you described.

Who's going to read the article in two days time when it's been corrected based on "new information" to say that all the claims are complete fabrications?

Everyone who looks at their front page, apparently.

Only if you are in the habit of rereading articles. Nothing on the front page suggests the article has been updated.

Damage done, Ars moves on to the next clickbait.

Wouldn’t the updated title suggest that?

Nothing on the front page suggests that anything has been updated. Title is still “Ex-SolarCity employees: We were fired after reporting millions in fake sales.”

That headline is still a literal statement of fact even if that triggers the emotional reaction which inspired you to donate your PR skills pro bono. The article clearly explained that these were claims made in a lawsuit brought by former employees and anyone who passed a civics class knows that someone can claim anything but you should wait to see what’s upheld in court.

How do I know that the story has been updated since I read it? Am I supposed to read every story every day to make sure that I see future updates?

Did Tesla get back to them, and did the story change?

How do I know that a story I read yesterday has changed? Am I supposed to go back and read stories like this every day for some indefinite period?

That "reaching out" habit out of instinct should be curbed. I realize it's the game of journalism -- "we should report it first!" But just because the journalist's business model requires to "publish as quickly as possible", they shouldn't pressure companies, who already have to deal with mountains of crap.

(Not that I'm the "fondness for large, opaque corporations" kind; just trying to think fairly where it deserves to be.)

On the flip side, why do we need a comment from the company anyway? Assuming the journalist has sources for what they are writing, the 'official company PR response' is next to worthless. At this point I think journalists only bother contacting the company as a formality to try and defend against claims of bias.

I think you're adding an emotional component that might not be there. Journalism is always a race to break stories first and in our new world of web journalism that means immediately and not just when you have to send the paper to print. It also means they can do the normal "this story has been updated with XYZ's generic PR response."

The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday. Tesla was asked for comment about the lawsuit on Sunday. That's at least two full working days to have prepared a canned response to anyone who comes asking about the lawsuit. The story itself wasn't published until Tuesday morning, which is another full working day to respond to the request.

> It's a cheap and nasty way to make companies look/feel uncaring about the issue being reported, but imho it does nothing but reflect poorly on the reporter and publication using these smelly tactics, and leaves me wondering what other agendas they may have running.

You believe journalists include those statements as a form of attack?

It is pretty common for technical employees to be on call, why should PR be any different? In a Twitter-style world, I am surprised if a large corporation does not have someone available 24x7 to speak on behalf of the company.

And in any case, how often do companies actually have a comment for a journalist? If I were writing a news story, I am not sure I would be willing to wait all that long for a response that I knew was 99% unlikely to ever come.

> In a Twitter-style world, I am surprised if a large corporation does not have someone available 24x7 to speak on behalf of the company.

Even when they do, commenting on a pending lawsuit almost unequivocally requires conference with Legal to assess whether it's sane for them to make any statement at all.

Corporate counsel is most certainly not sitting around on Sunday waiting for opportunities to consult on press releases about tort claims.

Tesla's PR team is pretty responsive to journalists requesting comment, unless it's something like this where it's up to Musk himself to decide how to respond. He's probably resisting the urge to launch a personal vendetta against the whistleblowers (or saboteurs) right now, if past behavior, and the consequences of past behavior are any indicator.

"Who in their right minds realistically expects any organisation to respond to some random journalistic enquiry on a Sunday?"

Everyone. This is an on-demand world, where news is happening constantly. To not have someone available for comment at all times is borderline incompetence.

Do you always think of the media as an adversary?

No. Far from it. But this "if I don't get an instant response" trick seems to me a cheap and shabby form of journalistic laziness. At the very least, if they don't get a response "instantly", "on Sunday", the very least they could do is follow up with a phone call on Monday and print an amendment, or better, a more balanced rewrite representing all sides fairly when they do receive a response in a more reasonable timespan. I've seldom seen any.

This story came out Tuesday, "shabby form of journalistic laziness" is really a stretch.

Today is Tuesday. That's not exactly "instant."

Besides, the court cases exist in isolation of Tesla's opinion about them. It's more a courtesy to give them time to respond than an actual requirement. Tesla's position on these cases might be interesting, but it's not required to understand them.

"Both sides" is the journalistically lazy approach, by the way. It's actually pretty rare that you get an "unbiased" view of the situation by simply quoting both sides, as we've seen in lots of other tech and science journalism.

It's interesting to me that you're more outraged about the lack of a documented timeline of callbacks to Tesla than the consistent allegations of abusive environments within Tesla. This is not the first time we've heard about this.

Dark patterns are everywhere.

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