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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that independent journalists are not journalists. Journalism requires being held to a body of professional standards upheld by a common organization of other trained journalists. A lot of the problem with our current media landscape is that someone's speculative opinion piece on JoeBlowKnows.com is held in the same esteem as a fact checked, multiple source article from the New York Times. Ethical independent 'journalists' can surely exist, but lets call them what they are: bloggers.

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I respectfully disagree completely. I'm an attorney, and my profession is completely beholden to this kind of credentialism, where you can't possibly do the work if you aren't a member of the club.

I happen to believe that the work is the work, and it's done well or poorly regardless of your membership in an organization or an association. And at least for attorneys, most of the work isn't nearly as difficult as we like to pretend. It's just more lucrative for the profession to be scandalized at the idea that people who aren't trained professionals could do many of the things we do.

Journalism does require standards, but I'd say as long as the standards are adhered to, journalism is happening.

I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. The point isn't that journalists need a more rigorous passage into a professional association or credentialling. Its more that journalism is a team effort, where writers, line editors, fact checkers, designers, data folks and others work together to produce an accurate and complete work.

You wouldn't take on a big case of national impact entirely solo and expect, and journalists can't produce a trustworthy product in isolation, not in the long run at least.

> Its more that journalism is a team effort, where writers, line editors, fact checkers, designers, data folks and others work together to produce an accurate and complete work.

And yet it produces so unbelievably large and frequent issues with the accuracy and completeness that this either does not help, is not the goal, or journalists not working for large publishers must get this wrong all the time, all over the place. I don't think that's the case, and I do think that the belief that it somehow helps is specifically why there are so many giant issues with the current media products.

Or possibly standards in journalism have fallen and this is the next step.

I would say most of what passes for journalism, is no longer journalism.

Journalism is about passing on the who-what-when-where-why. Factual information to the public. You see very little of that these days. Too many opinion in basic article.

People are always mentioning Gell-Mann amnesia as well. I think this is one area that independent writers, especially ones who have a lot of experience in a particular industry, can add a lot. They can write about events, technology, and scholarship, from the perspective of an expert. They can be better at passing on the who-what-when-where-why because they know enough to not just have to take anyone's word for it, and if they're good, they're confident enough in their position that they don't have to signal any sort of ideological credentials to have their facts accepted, so they don't signal. Obviously this is an ideal, but I think it's a very plausible one.

This is so naive and unrealistic it's practically a counterfactual.

Investigative journalism is a small and relatively poorly supported subset of journalism as a whole. It does happen - see for example McCrum's takedown of Wirecard in the FT - but elsewhere in journalism basic fact-checking is considered an irrelevance at best.

All of the most popular newspapers in the UK are regularly sued for libel, and they regularly lose, because - to be blunt - they make shit up to promote a party line, and their only interest in the facts is where they can be used for political leverage.

Some of the former editors and high-level editorial staff literally spent time in jail for phone hacking and other forms of privacy abuse - not because they were interested in disinterestedly championing the truth, but because they wanted salacious gossip about celebrities, minor royals who needed to be kept in place, and politicians whose private lives might embarrass them in a politically useful way.

I know of one case where a journalist from one of those outlets was involved in handing out heroin to street-level contacts for similar information.

And then you only need to consider the woefully poor quality of most scientific and financial reporting to understand how low standards are.

So no - I would rather read and pay for the views of an independent blogger over those of a nominally credentialed paid propagandist and bottom feeder.

Don't confuse the few outlets that are willing to pay for investigative journalism with the profession as a whole.

That's exactly right. The dynamic here is that of fan service. Write what you want for us or we will unsubscribe, and if you write what we want we'll defend you against all onslaughts.

Patreon actually chose the perfect name, because the business model is exactly what the name suggests, medieval patronage. The creator is intimately beholden to the financier.

One of the significant steps forwards in modern media was a separation of finance from content and investigative work, the newsroom having a degree of autonomy from both readers and funding. Independent journalism is the ultimate personalisation of news.

This perspective seems almost exactly wrong, considering what's been happening with the NYT lately.

Nothing much has been happening with the New York Times lately. Most of the conflict around the New York Times is actually exactly said fringe groups being offended because the NYT pisses them off in one way or the other. Liberals complain about the Cotton piece, someone complains about Scott Alexander being doxxed, and someone on the right probably thinks the NYT has been overrun by communists.

Which actually proves that the New York Times still works perfectly fine. That's not the sort of conflict an independent journalist would even have, because they would never even dare to publish something that would anger their likely homogenous readerbase and thus threaten their paycheck.

It's actually precisely because the NYT still works like a reasonably diverse newspaper that they constantly end up in one shitstorm or the other, not despite of it.

Wasn't someone forced to resign over the Cotton piece?

And for what it's worth, I read several people online who I'd be happy to pay and I respect them enough intellectually that when they hold opinions I disagree with, I end up changing my mind as often as not. I may be a weirdo, but I don't think it's unheard for people to seek out online writers precisely because of their independent-mindedness rather than their dogmatic adherence to a party line. In my experience, it seems to be traditional media that has drawn up along party lines.

I admire the NYT as an institution, but I certainly don't think it has anything like a monopoly on journalistic integrity.

you can still find some good investigative journalism at nytimes here and there, but most of the daily news pieces are full of opinion and partisanship. the editorializing over corona/covid, blm, and the election provide the most obvious examples, but you can see it across world news, cultural pieces, and everything in-between.

the cotton piece was published exactly to generate outrage and partisanship, not to be informative, and it backfired--a lack of editorial integrity, not an issue with the offensive content itself.

Liberals complain about the cotton piece and the editor resigns 4 days later. Scott Alexander deletes his blog and NYT has pretended nothing happened.

The editor resigned after tweeting that the article was carefully vetted, then admitting that he hadn't actually read the piece himself.

That is basically dereliction of duty considering that the piece is from a sitting US senator advocating for military intervention against American citizens. Should he have stayed on in that job?

It shouldn't come as a surprise that that topic would cause more public consternation than doxxing the author of a semi-popular blog that the majority of Americans have no stake in.

Do you think that he wouldn't have resigned if he had read the piece beforehand? Would that have changed their decision to publish? They also demoted the editor who did the actual editing. It doesn't seem like it's obviously journalistic malpractice to publish bad and wrong opinions that come from US Senators, even if the opinions are very bad and wrong. The objection to the piece was to its contents, something the editor has finite control over if they're going to publish at all.

Certainly it's debatable whether that piece should have been published, but the stories about failures of professionalism sound like reasons they came up with after they published something that plenty of other major newspapers would have published, and discovered that their readership and employees really didn't like it.

To be clear, I think it's totally fine that the organization runs that way, but I think it's wrong to put them on a pedestal.

It's generous to assume that our news organisations actually do follow that kind of rigor on all non-opinion pieces all the time when there is a conflict of interest, be that political affiliation or in the presence of financial incentives.

There are countless examples of bad journalism from the NYT to Vice all the way to the links of Breitbart.

Look at the Scott Alexander case in recent days or looking further back the scandal around Johann Hari.

I think this would be a good thing and at the very worst not worse than what we have now.

I would argue pretty much the exact opposite, writers on substack are a step above journalism. NYT especially is an advertising company that realized people also pay to have their own views confirmed. (And when opinion columnists occasionally don't do that, lots of people comment that they're going to unsubscribe! Further proving it to them. The product isn't what's true, its whatever makes number go up.) This is obvious in all the little lies they tell that conform with how they think that their audience views the world. I can give some examples:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students...

> Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants

After reading this article, do you think colleges overall are seeing a significant drop in international applicants, a significant increase, or it stayed about the same?

What actually happened: "39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers."

source: https://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/default-document-...

Or this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/upshot/free-market-for-ed...

After reading this article, what do you think about the general views of economists on school vouchers? Note how they couch this:

> But economists are far less optimistic about what an unfettered market can achieve in education. Only a third of economists on the Chicago panel agreed that students would be better off if they all had access to vouchers to use at any private (or public) school of their choice.

They want you to think that economist are on-net against vouchers. Now read the source: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/education/

36% agree, 37% uncertain, 18% disagree. It's not "only a third", its really that twice as many economists agree with vouchers than disagree, plus a wide amount of uncertainty.

NYT is full of this stuff. It's terrible. They constantly editorialize even factual sources to confirm the views of their anticipated readers.

Broadly speaking if the people with megaphones tell you that people with megaphones are good, and are more important than ever, and intimate that the truth is their domain, consider for a moment that it might not be. Just because someone has a megaphone does not mean they are a light-bearer, no matter what motto they put on their masthead.

yes, you've just done better investigative journalism than most major news reporters these days, who hew so closely to the party line regardless of merit. i can hardly read nytimes (or listen to npr) anymore because of it. alas, they've traded away their fragile reputations for soulless clicks and cash.

When I was hunting for a paper to read, WSJ seemed like one of the only ones that felt like it actually tried doing journalism. They definitely have their own lean, but it's one of the few papers that doesn't make me go "blah, this is pointless/uninformative" or want to hurl.

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