Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories
talkingbiznews.com
talkingbiznews.com
I have noticed that a lot of times with this kind of web media.
- You have a clickbait title like this: "How a normal guy managed to hack WallStreet with a simple pen"
- Then, you have one page of interesting introduction on the topic but without the reply to the title question.
"In november 2018, WallStreet was busy with the introduction of xxxx, and suddenly a problem happened, everything went black. To understand, wallstreet works with computers that are connected with a modern system... 300 words ... and on that cold night of the 23 nov 2020, one man John Crowford destroyed all of that."
- Then you have 10 pages of useless crap and fake intervews about the childhood of the guy and a lot of things that are not interesting, and not related to the subject.
"His mother was blond, she liked to eat fries. But despite that, John Crowford liked to eat popcorn. So much that his friend reported that, one time, he stayed at a movie theater for a whole day just to eat popcorns ... Studies at the yyy school were ok, but he followed them without passion until he met Carolinas Brocolis a hot night of summer 1992. Together they got 3 kids ... he was not supposed to live in New York as he was born in California, but he found a job there, ..."
- And then, you finally have the explanation that is, most of the time, short and straightforward.
"So, he was hired as a Janitor in Wall Street, and accidentally put his pen inside the holes of a power plug, resulting in a major power failure. THE END"
After reading such a story, either you did skip to the end directly, or you are very angry to have lost so much time reading useless things.
It's frustrating to try and read those articles. Even when they have an actual story to tell, but choose to interleave some sort of "B plot" all throughout the writing. I'm left guessing which pages I can skip and which ones are worth reading. Wishing they'd just put all the background info in a standalone section.
1100 words to answer the titular question, which really only needed a paragraph or two.
I read that article the other day - it was infuriating in it's poor signal to noise ratio.
1) reading the bullet list of TLDR points at the top and becz I'm sooo buzy with stuff to do, hit the back button.
2) reading the whole article trying to get past all the drivel to get to the 'good stuff'.
No.. I immediately skip at least 2-4 paragraphs and start doing a search for words that are in my just created inverted-index of the title. Yeah... I've turned into a mini-google borg subnode processing unit :/
Inevitable as others have pointed out, it's just one sentence that is what I'm looking for and I leave disappointed. sigh
I've personally seen a page go from #20 to #2 just by adding 1000 extra words of content.
It works from an SEO perspective but as a user, I really wish they'd do away with it.
It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship.
It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces.
I think Google and Facebook have a lot to atone for.
It's honestly sad. Google could have gone in such a different direction. They're sitting on a gold mine but they caved into investor pressure to keep on pumping more gold instead of being happy with just the billions they would have made anyway.
I've been doing this for quite a while now, and it's placed in stark relief how bad the problem is getting.
It used to be that a few results were AMP, usually news sites, but you could easily bypass it via the (i) icon.
Then it was that most results that were content focused (not dynamic sites or web apps) were were AMP, but you could easily bypass it.
Today, most results are AMP, even for sites which are dynamic (e.g. Reddit), and to make matters worse, the (i) links of many websites have now started linking to AMP pages themselves.
You might be thinking "ah, well those are their self-hosted copies. Shouldn't that be fine? The problem is Google's use of AMP, not the format itself, right?"
Funny thing that: those "self-hosted" AMP pages also won't load with the above two blacklist rules.
Also, many image search results are now somehow AMP (...how does that even make sense? It's just an image, so just serve me the image!). And for a while, you couldn't bypass it at all.
It isnt and it is. With how many employees they have, it wouldnt be that hard to come up with a "preferlist" that always outranks other content, and have that list constantly maintained, verified, and checked. Googler runs across a high quality site, it gets nominated for the preferlist. Preferred site descends into clickbait, they get removed.
The problem both Google and Facebook have is because of their attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality, that they refuse to just say "we decided these sites are just better" like they should. The whole reason I go to google is because they are supposed to return better results.
Isn't the problem worse than that, though? These 'SEO hacked' pages probably have google ads on them, and that seems like an even better reason for google to not lowering their ranking.
Now Google has something called Auto Ads where it automatically inserts ads in your pages. And at the default setting, it inserts a lot of ads. In my test page, there were 7 ads on the page, and not even small ones.
I've thought that the reason recipes are hell on the internet is to need to make space for display ads, e.g. putting the content in slideshows where some slides are ads.
1. Ingredients.
2. Instructions.
3. Notes/thoughts/musings/etc.
Sometimes section 3 is quite long, sometimes it's completely absent. It is *never" the first thing you see, ever. Why? Despite the fact that I'm one of the people who enjoys reading/writing that kind of stuff, most of the time when I'm looking at my blog I'm looking for ingredients ratios and instructions, so they are first.
I don't want to have to scroll through a bunch of noise when I'm trying to cook. Just like the reviews on sites like Amazon don't appear on the page before a picture of the product and its price/description, so are reflections on a recipe out of place before the recipe itself has been listed.
• an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume their regional growing conditions or food-product design carry over world-wide — so no "sticks" of butter, no "glugs" of oil (from what spout diameter?), no "drops" of flavorings, no "inches" of ginger, etc. Give me volumes! Weights! Molar concentrations! (Half-kidding on the last one.)
• put all references to an ingredient in the steps in bold, and always use the same name for an ingredient that the ingredients table itself uses.
• no implicit ingredients (yes, put the salt and water that the pasta gets boiled in, into the ingredients! Let me mise en place without reading the steps!) Also, don't say "200g sugar" if you mean "100g sugar for the cake sub-recipe; 100g sugar for the frosting sub-recipe." Break those out, so that the fact that those separate quantities should be kept separate is explicit, rather than something you must implicitly gather from the steps.
• or go further and make the ingredients table into its own kind of "pre-recipe" — a sequence of preparation steps. Not only "measuring things into bowls", but also steps such as: explicitly buying things day-of if they're best fresh; or defrosting, if the ingredient is often kept frozen (with defrosting times added to the total amount of time the recipe takes!); etc. Write down exactly what a chef would train their prep cooks to do for them in the preparation phase of this recipe.
• a print stylesheet that makes the webpage come out as a single compact printed page, with a big title, large text, a small picture of the finished product, and no dead space or colored backgrounds (or alternately, a link to a single-page pre-generated PDF with even-more exacting formatting.) I don't want my iPad (that keeps going to sleep and must be woken up with dirty fingers, and can get splattered by oil) in the kitchen; I want to print recipes and put them in transparent binder sleeves. Give me recipe pages I can both easily flip through, and easily find. Let me build a quality printed cookbook, one page at a time, out of my favourite selected recipes from your site.
• a universal "set serving size" client-side Javascript adjuster, which not only manipulates the ingredients but also the correct timings for steps that depend on weights (e.g. defrosting, searing.) None of this "until 165C internally" nonsense; I always buy the same cuts of meat, so calculate the time required for my food to come to temperature, and then tell it to me. Maybe also insert the adjusted amount of the ingredient being used into the text of the steps, so it actually says "add the milk (1tbsp)" rather than just "add the milk." (The ingredients list is for shopping/prep-phase; I should be able to cook without referring to it!)
• each ingredient name in the ingredients table should have a side-link to a page that talks about substitutes for that ingredient, and how to adjust recipes for that substitution. Ingredients with common substitutes should offer an adjustor select-box right there in the ingredients table, where tweaking it changes the recipe appropriately. (Which means the recipe can now include things that are highly-dependent, e.g. it can ask you what pasta you're using, and then embed in the steps the correct cooking time for that type of pasta; and since the recipe knows what kind of recipe it is, it can specify the al-dente time target if it's baked pasta, or the fully-cooked time target if it's a pasta salad.)
• When a recipe is actually just an arbitrary linearization of a few concurrent sub-recipes (e.g. a dish to cook, and a sauce you prepare and then pour over it right before serving), make this clear. Draw boxes around the sub-recipes' steps, and number those boxes. Then put a little boxes-and-arrows workflow diagram for how the numbered sub-recipes relate to each-other at the top of the steps. Represent each sub-recipe in the diagram as a box with a height proportional to how long its steps take—such that you can eyeball which sub-recipe you'll be done with first. Label the boxes with timers that should be set at the beginning of them (because almost always the end of a box is "take off heat" or "take out of oven.")
I'd bookmark a site like that directly, and use it religiously in preference to any other recipe provider.
1. Make entertaining videos of you making the food. These aren't recipes; they're essentially recipe reviews, allowing people to decide whether they want to make this.
2. Share those videos on other channels (Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, your own personal blog, etc.)
3. Link, from the video, and in those channels, to the clean-and-simple no-nonsense standalone recipe page.
(AllRecipes itself is actually somewhat good, by the criteria I listed. It's semi-structured, is sort of serving-size adjustable, and it prints acceptably. It could be a lot better, though. And, since it's user-generated content — a "social network for recipes" — and provides that free-form "description" field at the beginning of each recipe, recipes there can still fall victim to the same sort of long-winded pseudo-blogging content. Not everyone uses the website "for what it's for", i.e. the strategy described above.)
Because they'd likely run afoul of copyright laws. A recipe in and of itself doesn't generally qualify for copyright protection, but a recipe cushioned in prose can be a copyrighted literary work. So anyone ripping the recipe out of it would infringe on the copyright of the literary work itself. See "How do I protect my recipe?" on [1].
A site like the one I'm describing doesn't have to use the same words the original site uses. In fact, I'd really hope it wouldn't, since these sites almost never use a standardized vocabulary, and in fact try as hard as they can to make their recipes into interesting prose (i.e. using a different word in reference to something each time they reference it) at the expense of clarity.
The "boiled-down form" of these recipes, would look less like prose text, and more like an RDF graph linking ingredient-noun vertices together using action-verb edges.
In fact, now that I think about it, it could probably be stored in a format machine-readable enough to function equally well as machinima choreography for a "cooking simulator", i.e. an HTML5 canvas app with an engine approximating a cooking game (e.g. Cooking Mama) but without the "game" part.
Such a "timeline view" of the recipe could actually keep track of the collection of pots/pans/bowls/etc. required in the recipe, and then visually display the current state of what's in each of them at each step, as you scroll through each step in the recipe's timeline. Like a visual debugger, for food.
The textual representation of the recipe would just be generated from that same non-textual data format, via a simple structured NLP rule-set. (Yes, you could instead throw the sort of algorithms they're using to generate baseball news coverage[1] at the problem, but we want standardized text, not stylized text.) Bonus: i18n for free. The normalized recipe data isn't "in" any language, so it's equally easy to write a ruleset for generating recipe-step prose that is in any language.
The resultant text of such a generative process shouldn't be copyright-infringing, even if it matched some other recipe word-for-word by coincidence. When you "extract" only the bare facts from a work and discard the rest, you're not making a derivative work; a work of yours that employs those "extracted" facts is not a derivative of the source of those facts. (If it were, then every summary or review of a work, would be in violation of the copyright of the work it's summarizing or reviewing, since the bare facts referenced were gleaned from the original work.)
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/associated-press-expands-...
In this case it's true the derivative work (the recipe) wouldn't be copyrightable, but that doesn't absolve it from being considered a copyright violation of the original work.
If you can show you independently created that recipe, then you're protected from the above assertion that it was a derivative of that copyrighted work. But if you're compiling a database of normalized recipes via scraping recipe content online, it'd be pretty easy for a copyright holder to establish this argument doesn't hold water.
[1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
What I'm talking about here, is effectively "extracting the semantics of someone else's source code/recipe, in a way where humans are "firewalled off" from the particulars of the original prose of the code/recipe; and then using the described semantics to write your own code/recipe that has those same semantics."
This is explicitly something that's been decided as not copyright-infringing; which is why IP lawyers have to go after cases where there was literal plagiarism of source code, however small.
The big example of this is Google v. Oracle, where API header files used in Android were literally plagiarized from OpenJDK. Google argued that this was fair use, as there was essentially no other form these files could take while retaining Java compatibility. But this argument was shut down/never resolved in their favor.
All Google had to do, in the end, to avoid infringement, was to do a ground-up rewrite of those Android API header files (which ended up almost exactly the same as they were before the rewrite.) Note that they still rewrote them using an understanding of the bare facts that those header files contain, that could only have been gained by reading the original header files themselves. And yet the new derivative work, being "not literally plagiarism", was no longer considered an infringing derivative work.
[1] You can patent algorithms (sort of, as business processes), but that's a different thing. Nobody's ever going to sue a recipe website for patent infringement, even if they described Nestle's patented chocolate-enrobing technique, because a description of a patented process is not a use of that patent. Patents are inherently public information, and people can share and reprint the information in them around all they like. Instead, a patent owner would only sue other companies who used the patented technique for commercial gain, for not first acquiring a license for the patented technique. (Google never sued bloggers for describing the PageRank algorithm; but up until last year, Google did sue other search-engine companies for implementing PageRank without a license.)
Gradually beat in just enough milk to make frosting smooth and spreadable. If frosting is too thick, beat in more milk, a few drops at a time. If frosting becomes too thin, beat in a small amount of powdered sugar. Frosts 13x9-inch cake generously, or fills and frosts an 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake.
The only "algorithmic" component to that step is that you add milk. The fact that you do so gradually, use a beater during the process, how you identify when you've added enough, how to correct for deviations in viscosity of the mixture, etc are all part of the "source code" rather than the algorithm and wouldn't be something you could republish without being considered a derivative work.
The recipe without those contextual components may still be useful for those sufficiently familiar with baking, but for many people following a recipe, they'd likely need such contextual components to follow the recipe successfully.
[1] https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/vanilla-buttercream-fro...
I would disagree. Here's what I learned from your quoted paragraph, expressed in pseudo-Prolog:
- beatInto(FrostingMixInBowl, Milk, $BeaterSpeed) => increaseQty(FrostingMixInBowl, Milk).
- beatInto(FrostingMixInBowl, IcingSugar, $BeaterSpeed) => increaseQty(FrostingMixInBowl, IcingSugar).
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), absorbancyPerUnitTime(FrostingMixInBowl)).
- nonNewtownianViscosity(FrostingMixInBowl).
:. invProportional(absorbancy(FrostingMixInBowl), $BeaterSpeed). // implication from standard library
:. require(maxThreshold($BeaterSpeed)). // implication from standard library
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), AmbientHumidity).
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), AmbientTemperature).
- proportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), currentQty(FrostingMixInBowl, Milk)).
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), currentQty(FrostingMixInBowl, IcingSugar)).
- target(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), centiPoise(10000)). //see https://www.globalpumps.com.au/list-of-typical-viscosities
...and then some stuff about how much frosting we're making here, but without the context required to translate those figures into absolute extruded surface area.
Anyway, do you see what I'm getting at with this? We're describing a system of dynamic constraints. What you generate from this "knowledge base" is an action plan that routes you through the system of dynamic constraints to achieve the target (in this case, icing of a specified absolute viscosity.) The constraints are generative, where constraints asserted together produce further constraints, and those constraints can be translated into structured-text warnings like:
• "the icing is too thick to absorb milk at faster than N mL per second; if you introduce it faster than that, the milk will bounce off the surface of the icing rather than absorbing, and probably splatter you in the face."
• "beating the icing too fast shears/aerates it, increasing its viscosity, making it unable to absorb anything, meaning that anything introduced to the icing will bounce off the surface of the icing and splatter you in the face."
Such a system also allows the resolution of ambiguities, where instead of saying "if the icing is too thick", it can know the variables that affect viscosity, and so just ask you to set those variables (i.e. the ambient temperature and rH value for your kitchen) either in your user preferences or at the recipe header; and take that into account to compute initial quantities for ingredients that should produce a viscosity in no need of further adjustment. (But it could also generate the structured text explaining what actions it knows about for this step that increase and/or decrease viscosity — you know, just in case you messed up and didn't follow its perfect robot plan.)
Note that this isn't super out-there tech. People build models that do these computations all the time. Which people? The operational engineers in charge of the day-to-day operations of baked-good and candy factories.
I'm just suggesting, in essence, a generalized domain-specific abstract machine for modelling all such problems in an easy way (rather than rebuilding it half from scratch in spreadsheets each time), such that you could just as easily describe the dynamic-constraint system underlying a steak as one underlying a Mars bar.
...and then using all that just to emit recipe prose. :P
(But you could also use it as the "mental model" a multi-purpose robotic kitchen could use to generate action plans, of course.)
e.g. for chrome (I don't endorse this, just an example): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
A problem is that sometimes the bloggers will write modifications or amendments mixed into their prose, and not reference them in the actual recipe instructions (e.g. the recipe calls for 400g of flour, but somewhere in the autobiography, the author says "The recipe calls for 400g but I find 600g to produce a much better end result")
I think, ultimately, one should not google around for recipes from random bloggers, and instead only take recipes from actual cookbooks. When you find a random person's blog, you have no idea what their skill levels are, what their motivations are for writing(usually just to make $$$ via a blog). For example, I ran across a recipe which the end product had raw flour in it, and a commenter on the site said that they should put a warning for pregnant people to not do this, and the blogger came through and said that raw flour is not only not bad for pregnant women, but is actually good for pregnant women, which goes against all known advice from healthcare professionals.
[1] "How do I protect my recipe?" section of https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
It'd likely be hard to prove for isolated incidences or sufficiently generic recipes, but but if someone extracted and republished recipes en masse, you could establish that they're deriving those recipes from your works and violating your copyright.
Edit: See my comment here[1] for more details and an example of the issue you run into, particularly with the "steps" component.
[1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
> In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
This seems like a good summary of a relevant case and the relevant copyright law[1]. The gist of it is that even if a work is copyrightable, that doesn't extend to facts contained within it (such as the ingredients and process required to make a dish).
[1] https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...
Edit: correct phone autocorrect mistake
YES! I don't want your backstory. I don't want to be mean but I'm just not that interested in you Mr./Ms. random Internet poster. I would often just close the tab if I see these recipes. I didn't realize it was because of SEO. I thought it was some ego thing among the writers.
This site has recipes in exactly the format I want and it is to the point: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well.
This is old journalism 101.
I remember hearing about this years ago in civics class.
Newspapers put all the meat in the headline and first couple paragraphs. Old newspapers are a Google search away to verify. Lots of the same behavior as you see on sites like Huff Post.
It would be more accurate to say SEO borrowed a habit of shallow attention grabbing from news editors.
But humans have evolved into wanting depth in their ideas.
We’re into more detail all the way through now.
Look at popular media, sci fi and magical worlds, deep character connectivity. Look at Serial and anything Ken Burns.
Depth is cared about AND sells.
Bloomberg is relevant cause Bloomberg is rich. That Bloomberg is not capable of depth isn’t a surprise.
Yeah, I went down this rabbit hole a few weeks ago while I was trying to find the perfect pizza dough recipes.
On the other hand, I've had much better success getting right to the ingredient list and instructions using Pinterest and Instagram instead.
DuckDuckGo's Yummly-powered instant answers work fine (one click, no scrolling to ingredients, although there seem to be affiliate links to them involved).
Some hallmarks of this style include
- paragraphs are one sentence long
- there isnt so much an order or train of thought, just a vomit of quotes
- implying random quotes equate some kind of consensus or prevailing sentiment in group thought
- an article that isnt anything more than the bunch of embedded quotes
- a summary of the article at the beginning, that is really just four of the "paragraphs" below regurgitated up top. makes it really annoying, forcing you to read entire "paragraphs" twice.
- an almost nonsequituresque repetitiveness, where half way through an article it almost starts over with slightly different words. as if the author forgot they already mentioned things, or decided to copy the article again to both trick people who scroll half way down an article, and to meet a word count.
- extremely poor formatting, making it difficult to distinguish the article from the summary, the image quotes, ads for other articles.
- articles that assume the reader has absolutely no domain knowledge, and spend half their words defining basic things.
- and thats all with an ad blocker on, I imagine the experience is 10x worse without one.
Business insider has been a big offender, a place that was already clickbait, but has devolved into something even worse. It's as if BI decided the daily mail was the best exemplar to emulate. Its a strange mix of DailyMail, Buzzfeed, and Vox. Something that gives the illusion of being an explainer, a listicle, and reporting at the same time. I am honestly shocked they purposely employ people with this writing style, it makes me want to be the change I want to see in the world and drop everything and get a job writing better journalism, just to try and displace some of the cruft. Their "editors" are doing absolutely nothing to take quote vomit and shape it into something coherent.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trader-m...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wirecard-sto...
This article is a great example of a weird listical, where the quotes themselves are the h1 bold headline and the body of the paragraph is just a picture of the person that adds nothing to the story. But not consistently, by the last one, the header is just a header, and the quote is the body. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trading-...
(Should listicle/listical look like popsicle or nautical.)
"President Trump tweeted today that '...[full quote of tweet]...'" then inevitably followed by a screenshot (or two!) of the tweet, often together with a caption that repeats the whole tweet again.
Why does every news article about a tweet have to include a screenshot of the tweet, when you quoted the whole damn thing in the main story? These pictures don't paint a thousand words...
I think the best case solution is a server side service that archives the tweet and renders it directly into the html, not as an embed, that then gracefully overlays the embed over, so you can see accurate retweets and hearts, but will degrade back to just showing the content as text.
One thing I cant stand about the modern web is how screenshots of text have become a defacto standard, because they preserve formatting and are require no technical know-how.
Jerry Seinfeld
https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
It's like a fire chief coming out and saying I don't like the state of our neighbourhood after implementing firefighter pay per size of the fire.
Personally, I don't think paying journalists bonuses based on market moves a bad idea. Sure, there's sometimes misaligned incentives, but you could say the same about any compensation scheme.
This chief editor is basically telling his people to write what readers want to read. But there’s a difference between what readers always want to read and what may be necessary to read.
For example, if people only read what they wanted to read, how many people would really take interest in a possibly boring but important scandal? The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal comes to mind. It’s impact was global, but it’s not really related to domestic political battles or terrorism or whatever else really sells in the media these days.
The problem is worse now because news isn’t sold as a broadsheet anymore, where subscribers might not read everything in an issue, but eyes are on all of the stories. Is that the case when everyone gets to pick a la carte from a website, especially when management like this is telling reporters to focus on what gets the most clicks?
There's very little that is more attention grabbing than sex scandal. Except sex scandal involving children. Or one involving an large powerful institution around which political and culture war controversy (both internal and external to the institution) is constant, especially on sexual issues.
> It’s impact was global, but it’s not really related to domestic political battles
Yes, it was, especially because the Catholic Church is perpetually engaged in those battles on sexual issues, and because the scandal immediately intersected with the debate on those issues, as well as ongoing internal organizational debates in the institution such as the role of celibacy and homosexuals in the clergy that directly overlapped with the political and culture war issues the Church is regularly engaged in.
So, yeah, worst possible example, even if one grants that you might have a generally valid point.
I read @TheEconomist cover-to-cover because its content makes me think critically about the world. Its editors recently asked me a tough question: What is the one thing you'd do to create a more open world? See my answer below and share your answer here: https://b-gat.es/2LTs1WM
Jul 27, 2018
I used to read The Economist, then in the build up to 2008 when according to them all the growth was actual real growth, the system was fine, and banks knew what they were doing.
I no longer read it.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-...
The analysis from a journal that purports to be about economics should have come in the build up to the crisis, not when the first huge cracks appear in the damn, having spent the prior decade shouting "put more water in".
Also, just generally, they aren't particularly "neoliberal" (I am not quite sure what that means but okay). Since the editor switch, there has been a massive, massive change in style (I have been reading since the early 2000s...Mickelthwait, the guy in the OP, was actually the best...he is a legend).
A leftist would have the government build housing for the poor. A conservative would let the poor fend for themselves or rely on charity. A neo-liberal would tweak the rules so that market builds housing for the poor.
That (or in its older guise, free-trade principles) is literally a founding premise of the newspaper:
PROSPECTUS: of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called THE ECONOMIST, which will contain ... First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country....
Adam Smith, whom they model themselves after, was against rentier activity, The Economist is not.
The UK is presently embroiled in negotiating all kinds of trade agreements as part of Brexit, and none of the countries will be signing a reciprocal "free trade" agreement between the two, it's a pipe dream.
In addition, Smith would have been appalled at the UK running a huge deficit ad-infinitum, selling off land to pay for it, and generally making very little. The Economist has very little to do with classic liberals. What The Economist supports now is lunacy, and we've seen in the response to Covid in the UK and the USA that both countries are on their knees.
Again: I find it slavishly neo-liberal.
I agree, it holds rentier activity on par with wealth creation, which Adam Smith would never have done.
https://www.prosper.org.au/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-...
It is massively incompatible.
Whether or not neoliberalism is the One True Descendant of Adam Smith is a notion up for debate, though there's a fair argument to be made that neoliberal adherants position it as such.
I've my own views of what Smith actually advocated (based in large part on reading him). Though I would be pressed to find where he specifically inveighs against long-term national deficit spending. I would argue that monetary policy has evolved considerably since Smith.
My third paragraph though is decidedly secondary to my first.
It does not represent Adam Smith, who disliked rentiers:
> “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
They do not make their prospectus visible. If you do not subscribe you cannot even read their principals. In any case writing one thing down and doing another is very common. The Economist is obsessed with financialisation and cheer-led the utter mess the UK and USA are in for decades.
Obviously it's up to each person if they continue to read it. I dispute it's quality, I think it's neoliberal propaganda and nothing more.
Outside of foreign policy and politics I’ve found them to be pretty exemplary
They are also owned by a foundation so are less subject to the vicissitudes of the markets.
The Economist has its limitations, blind spots, specific ideology, and such as well. But it’s well worth the read; I have not missed an issue since early 1985
IIRC, weekly newsmagazines are pretty much the ideal compromise between timeliness and accuracy: they have far more time to fact-check than a daily paper (and have the luxury of letting things play out a bit more before publication), but aren't dated by (at least) a couple years like your typical book is at publication time.
Too bad they're a dying breed. Another good thing the internet economics killed.
> The Economist has its limitations, blind spots, specific ideology, and such as well.
This is a really fantastic article on those: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/liberalism-acc...
It isn't just the spin; sometimes you can guess whom they were talking to and whom they weren't by how wrong and they way they get something wrong.
Gell-Mann Amnesia, as Michael Crichton put it:
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
When the bad drives out the good, it's no surprise that no one wants to pay for the bad.
The fact is, nobody has offered me access to a news source that covers all topics of possible interest in a manner that's free from overt biases (or poorly-hidden ones) and intelligence-insulting "both sides" fallacies. Bloomberg certainly doesn't qualify.
If such a service is ever offered, I don't expect it to be cheap, much less free... but rest assured I'll listen to their pitch. I'm sure I'm not the only potential customer for a high-end premium news product that I can actually trust.
Also note that The Economist can well be the greatest paper in the world, despite being somewhat afflicted by Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Sorry to fall back on a stereotype, but they come off as Oxford students sitting in college, pontificating on the world they've read about.
Maybe I'm mostly thinking about their pseudo-opinion pieces. It just got to the point I didn't enjoy reading them, and no longer do.
Learned this in one of the articles in this thread:
Shortly after his return, he hired a new editor-in-chief -- John Micklethwait, of The Economist https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/07/bloomberg-fires...
The modern Bloomberg was an attempt to become The Economist.
You have to separate the wheat from the chaff with Bloomberg. When Mickelthwait came in, BBG's public stuff was utterly dire. They have improved significantly. Have they gone too Business Insider? Yes. But they have improved significantly from where they were.
The suspicious silent non-retraction raises a red flag for me, that there may have been some kind of intervention to stop their reporting on the topic.
This is a good explanation. This article is weird because it's paginated. Make sure to use the paginator below the body to read it fully.
There are many good arguments in that article but the simplest one is that there's simply no modern lithography methods to produce a chip of that size with processing power, signaling interfaces and networking, which are all required to create a trojan ship like the one described by Bloomberg. Additionally you need to provide power to this hypothetical nano-chip so you need more components like capacitors which of course is never mentioned in the Bloomberg article.
As for the size, there are no commercial lithography methods with that capability, perhaps. It'd be possible to put significant capacitance and logic in a very tiny package with advanced lithographic techniques, say like gates printed into layers of a small cap? Yeah I'm getting really out there, but to say there's nothing so interesting in the highly compartmentalized world of spy tech is to make a claim in ignorance, naturally. Unless you're in a position to say precisely what technology they have, in which case, please contact me privately, since I'm curious. ;)
I'm still waiting for a redaction and apology, bloomburg. What you did was reckless and irresponsible.
The key person to think about is the reader.
People generally read only one screen and SELDOM read more than two screens. (A screen typically is around 300 words.)
A long story on a complicated topic can save readers time if it replaces the need to read a lot of short ones.
Readers either want to have a quick piece of information or something that justifies the longer read.
A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900.
Taking 700 words or 800 words to make a single point will just annoy readers.
Keep it short. Think of the reader.
I'm not sure the evidence supports that. The online tech pubs I write for (not news stories), posts/articles tend to be in the 800-1200 word range. Shorter than that and it's hard to get into a topic. Longer than that and people stop reading (as supported by data). If you need 3,000 words, the advice is to turn it into a series.
Shorter may be OK if you're just communicating a fact and no background is needed. Although standard journalism practice would be to hit the new stuff in the first few paragraphs and add more content in inverted pyramid style that provides context.
“Enterprise stories” are where reporters take the time to learn something rather than just rewrite a press release or someone else’s reporting. This type of reporting has been under pressure for years because it’s expensive and media budgets are very tight. This editor-in-chief is saying the clicks don’t justify the expense.
The story of the destruction of the media is well known but some of the details are underappreciated:
* Individual articles are now the fundamental unit. They are promoted on social media then carefully tracked and evaluated. A hot story get orders of magnitude more clicks/revenue so they focus on trying to produce that an ignore everything else. This narrows the scope tremendously.
* Reporting is no longer a profession but more like a calling similar to the arts. The demands are too high and the pay is too low. It takes sustained outside support (rich family, spouse, sponsor) for most reporters to make it today. Many reporters have strong ideological motivations which substitute for pay but can compromise reporting.
For the reader the bottom line is the news media is no longer the neutral source of information we used to think it was. First it is now highly biased to provoke a response, usually emotional and often just to the headline (clickbait), at this point the job is done, the ad is sold. Second the people writing and editing the stories have strong beliefs coloring their selection and content.
The result is the article contains biased, incomplete and inaccurate information. And once you let that bad information into your head it is very hard to unlearn it. You often know less after reading a news article these days!
...
Fascinating developments. Matt Taibbi has done some good reporting on this but it is typically covered very superficially by media critics. There are a few books I have yet to read but pointers to thoughtful analysis would be appreciated. This is a complex and still evolving issue.
What is an enterprise story?
That makes sense because he was in the memo balancing the development of sources (which can lead to enterprise stories) against the investment of writing ones that don't seem to be panning out well.
Wonder if the Bloomberg platform defines enterprise stories like this. It might be different, anyone know?
"We are all suckers for statements about culture - which is not surprising when culture at first glance seems so balefully homogenous, but upon closer inspection, is so unappealingly atomized. A new angle is invariably more charismatic, more assimilable, handier in every way than the work which presumably springs from it." [1] pg20
I can't lay my hands on the exact quote but in [1] the author makes an point in the context of inflation (of ideas, and everything American): when no idea is worth a anything the only thing to do in this environment is come up with an even more seriously hyped idea I presume to sooth that gnawing sense of emptiness. This feedback loop ensures each idea is inflated keeping the inflation of ideas going and thus cheapening each idea. One unintended result in my view is paranoia, alienation, conspiracy that comes from atomization which we see in spades nowadays. This also has strong connections to another HN post in the top 50 stories on creative management.
Way underneath the original article is something far deeper than I think [1] sunk his teeth into way back in 1984. The BBG editor is struggling with how to deal with the reader who deals with zillions of possible stories and how BBG will add value for time the reader will spend. The editor's stance is but only the highest ceiling on a much deeper problem. Gents, the reader has changed. And too much of today's culture coddles him (us, me) as an anxiety ridden middle-class person trying to fight the good fight. Well, I am not so generous. A lot of readers are lazy. A lot of readers want meaning handed to them because getting experience and ideas are becoming separate islands. In Reddit Pro Life Tips format: 99.9% of what you need to know you're gonna have to learn yourself.
I close with a quote from the forward in [1]:
"'No longer is it, 'When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver.' We are permitted instead, 'Culture sits so well in my pock that whenever I hear the world "thought" I smile' Phillip Sollers" [1]
[1] Salmagundi "The Post-Modern Aura" Charles Newman No.63-64 Spring-Summer 1984
I wouldn't be surprised if regular newspapers have bullshit metrics that lower the quality:
- Words per article
- Number of clicks
- Articles posted
It's the equivalent of measuring lines of code and transforming agile points to man-days.
"A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900. You either have a simple news story or a single observation (in which case go short) or a yarn or a chance to explain something very complicated (in which case go long"
He's basically saying - listen, when a company is paying for a news article, don't let them stuff the piece or bury the lede. Get their key message down and move on, our readers skim the article for the beef anyways so you're just wasting their time by adding filler.
That is why he says:
> Before you embark on a piece of enterprise, ask yourself whether it’s really going to be worth the investment, And if an idea doesn’t turn out as envisaged, be prepared to spike it and move on. A week or two spend on source-building, without any story published, is often a much more valuable use of our reporters’ time.
ASD = Attention Surplus Disorder
I seem to be the only one here that likes Bloomberg, but then again I work in finance.
No? Not a word about it?
It’s almost like they’re continuing to pretend that their giant journalistic screwup doesn’t exist.
Don’t care. ‘Are articles are too long’. How about yours articles are untrustworthy?
It's exactly like. They did not publish a retraction because they stand behind what they wrote. But as long as they keep it short...
Why would they do that?
What if they are correct, and stumbled onto the same trail the FBI has, and the FBI gave them an order to not discuss it anymore due to a pending investigation with national security repercussions?
Given how BB has just walked away from this article - no rescinding, no nothing, I think it's a possibility.
The requirement of perfect secrecy and vast involvement in a lie is what typically weakens conspiracy theories as not realistic.
And media has held back articles several times due to govt request - maybe this one just got through.
Not saying I'm right - only saying it's possible.
It would be obvious if the results were opposite what Cook said publicly, or if the investigation was suddenly stopped and made inconclusive.
Apple would also be counting on the US government and Bloomberg to not leak "the truth" so that Tim Cook's statement would not be revealed as a lie.
The idea offers intrigue but doesn't pass any kind of reasonable pass of consideration.
I'm also curious why they were not sued, and tbh that makes me wonder...
To be clear, I'm definitely of the belief that this was a screwup even if the reporter/editor still believes the story was accurate. Based on what is known, it certainly seems to be false.
I'm all for journalistic freedom and anonymity of sources; I'm not saying they have to unmask their sources but they definitely have to be able to provide - confidentially to a judge or a mutually agreed upon third party - something to substantiate their allegations.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/07/bloomberg-fires...
It's unfathomable to me that they would dare publish something like that without having an ironclad case and even more damning that they never even bothered to retract it.
So, best to not speculate and conspire.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents."
This was then parroted in all the other major publications.
(I'm not counting things like Pompeo just saying stuff https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/intervie...)
Here’s a very unbloomberg source article that says that China underreported deaths by 50%.
I don't know if many countries progressed to the stage of being able to look back to revise and reshare adjustments on previous statistics.
If just number jumps are your thing, you'd have more fun with the 100% jump in china cases when they revised the definition of confirmed cases as anyone with glassy spots in their lungs from CT scans but without viral tests yet.