The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage

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>Instead of covering the [tech] industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair.

...

>Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits.

The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

That's nonsense. Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. Large tech companies have huge impacts on politics and news. Suggesting that tech should not be subject to investigative coverage is hard to understand. It seems like one of the most important subjects of that coverage today.

You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue.

As noted in the quotes you yourself pulled, what OP "agree[s] with" "[t]ech executives and investors" about is tech coverage that is "highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair."

Nobody is "suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens."

You said

that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?!

Yglesias actually said:

And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector.

Which would include investigative coverage when appropriate.

Fawning is typical of media coverage of most business sectors.

Don't think mining and oil and gas really get fawning reviews, or the local pizza place.

Or the most expensive restaurant in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-...

Dude's been going on a downward spiral for years. Nothing he says these days follows any kind of coherent framework, it's just something thrown on the wall to see what sticks.

He's really honestly describing himself with this take.

MattY is extremely consistent, but also can't help himself and constantly tweets in a layer of irony or two. This causes some people to get extraordinarily mad at him in the replies, at which point I like to play a game of figuring out how they misread the tweet, which they always seem to have done.

His actual articles are perfectly straightforward, sincere, and usually on some topic like "Boston subway stations should cost less to build".

He certainly USED to write articles like that!

He's not saying that they shouldn't be subject to coverage "with an investigative lens." He's talking about the adversarial, negative tone of the coverage, relating to the tech industry primarily as full of bad actors rather than a power center worthy of investigation that also does some good things, say. I don't think Yglesias would say we shouldn't investigate these companies, but rather that we should paint a more wholistic picture about both the good and bad contributions of these companies that better matches reality.

He correctly identifies a fundamental difference between business/consumer reporting, which is often fawning regurgitations of PR materials made with limited due diligence and investigative reporting. I stand by my comment, it seems to me that he is saying the change from business/consumer to investigative was unwelcome and he agrees with that reaction.

I think investigative journalism should be fair, but I don't think someone investigating Alphabet has to present the good that the company does - that's the job of Alphabet's PR department. Fair journalism does not leave out relevant context but doesn't speak to unrelated "good" contributions.

Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.

Personally when I look at the tech section I want to hear what's new in technology (I guess you'd call this marketing), not politics and gossip about what some rich meathead said. Put politics in the politics section, and the gossip in the tabloids.

That boat sailed a long time ago. And while yes, there is a lot of interesting tech news out there, we've had tech companies become the largest corporations on the planet gobbling up every bit of information on every person, well it gets political really quick.

Information technology companies have a lot of information you say? And I guess you mean a long time ago measured in months. These are soap operas to hook a million or so like-minded people, not real news. Certainly not going to change the minds they want to change.

Generally I think that's a problem with modern society, everyone thinks the biggest "problem" that needs fixing is each other and wastes their "civic improvement" energy on fighting to change rules back and forth. Step away from it all for 6 months and it will look small and childish.

Step away from it for 6 years and I think it will look incredibly unnerving to anyone concerned with healthy public discourse, or who values a shared sense of community.

Shouldn't good investigative journalism just tell you what's true regardless of whether it makes the subject look good or bad? I don't mean that every story must convey the totality of the subject, but the body of reporting should try to resemble the subject - some good, some bad.

> Shouldn't good investigative journalism just tell you what's true regardless of whether it makes the subject look good or bad?

GP already covered that:

> Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.

I don't think journalism is actually useful if the journalist is pure negative all the time; if you can't tell the difference between a journalist and a teenager with oppositional defiant disorder, why believe the story? And to investigate, they actually need good sources, but tech people who would be the sources aren't going to talk to an unfriendly uninformed reporter.

Although in this case, the NYT wasn't doing "investigative journalism", Matt is talking about a literal actual editorial mandate to write negative stories.

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

I think the one I remember is when they wrote a story about LinkedIn doing unauthorized human experiments on the newsfeed, by which they meant A/B tests.

"XYZ corporation donated thousands of dollars to needy children this year as an example of an exemplary tech company.

In addition XYZ corp sold Iran social media tracking software allowing the government to ruthlessly execute the traitors that dare say negative things about the glorious leader

We offer XYZ the leaders in tech award" --NYT

Um, yea, have HR departments that tell everyone how damned good they are already. You could fill encyclopedias with the output every year. Meanwhile they aren't going to tell you how they do 50 bajillion means of tracking your wife to determine if she's pregnant in order to serve an ad to her first before their competitors (and offer the data to the state if requested).

It is OK to use adversarial tone. Journalists do not have to limit themselves to fawning admiration. And before there was criticism, there was surplus of fawning admiration.

Cool companies were praised to heaven and admired, Thermos, Tesla, Uber, Google, Facebook you name it. Correction was necessary.

The tech industry needs more investigative coverage, not less. The reason disasters like Theranos or Nikola were able to waste as much time and money as they did is because most of the tech press is focused on regurgitating press releases and hyping up the next big thing.

I don't see how investigative journalism would fix the situation though. Theranos scammed wealthy investors. Wealthy investors should be able to do at least a little bit of due diligence. If they had done that then they would've known their idea was not feasible.

It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.

Theranos scammed wealthy investors but also hurt a lot of other people in the process, namely patients who received bad tests and employees who have a black mark on their resume.

In an ideal world maybe investors would have done more DD, but there is a lot of money out there. Many investors likely did turn them down, since their funders didn’t include many traditional SV VCs, despite being next door to Sand Hill Road.

It was ultimately the WSJ that broke the story. Even if investors find something during DD, they have strong incentives (libel law) not to share it.

Remember Theranos wasn't even big tech, and only had one major Silicon Valley investor in it; they were a fake big tech company attracting people who wanted to be SV but weren't. The usual VCs didn't even trust them!

Add NRGV ("Energy Vault", once well over $2B, now $0.4B and still badly overvalued) to the Theranos pile. And all but one of the fusion startups. (Maybe them too.)

Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups.

BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.

A major problem with the technology media is that they don’t investigate the companies, because they have to stay on their good side in order to be invited to the events, and to get the information. When they criticize the company the company freezes them out; i.e. Apple.

Yglesias doesn't think that no investigation should be done or that tech is all good- he has a riff that "Facebook is bad, Facebook employees should feel bad about working there, and they should feel shame admitting where they work" that he goes on occasionally.

> You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue.

That's because he's being very charitable to what is happening. In fact, under the guise of aggressively investigative coverage, the media is constantly propagating false memes about the industry. Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Too on the nose. When I worked at faang almost my entire org was Indians.

The generalisation of "Indians" in the tech sector is doing a lot more harm than one may think.

India is a massive country, with some of the most diverse range of cultures and people. The fact that most FAANG CEOs are Indians should speak volumes.

Negative stereotyping hurts everyone, only by acceptance and embrace our differences can we move forward.

Do you consider "Indians" to be pejorative?

He probably considers being lumped in with certain other Indians pejorative.

It's funny, on producing that interpretation my first thought was 'He must be high caste'. Now that's a negative stereotype!

Well it's less pejorative than "white tech bros" which encompasses an even broader range of cultural variations.

Do you mean Indian or Indian looking? Can you generally tell which of them were American citizens vs. immigrants? If not, can you see the pretentiousness in your statement?

People actually discriminate a lot more on accent than looks - which makes sense as an adaptive strategy, since accent is a much better signal of tribal association. And if one pays attention to accent it's pretty obvious who's an immigrant and who grew up locally.

Think about this the next time you read a New York Times article on some other bad industry: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

> Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Those are two related but also completely different things. Just because immigrants work at these companies doesn't mean they have a large impact on the overall culture, especially not the outward facing culture, and they certainly aren't dominating it. If anything those groups are underrepresented in culturally influential positions.

How many white tech bros in india etc etc

I don't understand how you can say this when many of the largest tech companies have first immigrant CEOs. Of the top 10 tech companies globally, 4 (Meta, Apple, Tesla and Amazon) have CEOs of European descent.

Is the position of CEO not "culturally influential"?

We would need to look at the ethnicity statistics across C-level executives. Rishi Sunak is the British PM but I can say "UK politics and government is still dominated by Whites" and the British Parliament would agree with me [1]

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

That document says that Britain is 87% white I mean I don't know what you expect.

yes, that's exactly what I meant. I was demonstrating that just because the top guy is a member of the minority group does not mean that organization is "influenced" by minority group.

Edit: I finally read the context again. Yes the top guy is a member of a minority group, and of course he will have some cultural influence. But people will disagree whether the minority group is _at the right level of influence_.

Conversely, if you say that "UK politics and government is dominated by Whites" without mentioning that the Prime Minister is of Indian origin you are making an equally misleading omission.

That isn't something I said so there is no "equally misleading omission".

I didn't say it didn't exist. Considering how many Chinese and Chinese Americans work in the tech industry how many famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalist or programmers of such descent do you know of that the average hackers news reader or even the average person will know of? I bet that for most people it's few.

The argument was that investigating "tech bro" culture is frivolous because the tech industry is made up of immigrants and that is simply not true. It's still very much a prevailing culture. Heck, this entire discussions stems from "what is Elon Musk going to do (next)?" after replacing the CEO of Indian descent.

I wouldn't say the same thing about hardware. But that also isn't nearly as influential and also not a hot topic either.

>Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.

I thought weapon and pharmaceutical industries beat the tech.

On power, probably (at least lobbying power - direct influence on us is the opposite); but on wealth, Apple + Microsoft is enough to make the tech sector the wealthiest.

Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.

Nowhere near as powerful as media. Wealthy sure.

media == tech these days. twitter, Instagram, TikTok, FB, they are media, YouTube is media.

When it comes to the business of telling you what the nature of the world is and how to think, it's really impossible for me to conjure up something more authoritative than the New York times.

Sure there's people on social media saying things, but the stuff that's an echo of the NYT sounds right and true, the stuff that's against it sounds low-brow and coarse.

The New York Times (et al) set the official narratives. Faceboot and its ilk shape the many counter reactions to it. Despite being comprised of multiple journalists, everyone basically thinks of NYT as a singular entity with its own reputation. On Faceboot, memes carry the social proof of your own personal relationships. And the most worrisome is that people know NYT's narratives are not their own thoughts, whereas people think the narratives they got from Faceboot are.

That is your educated perspective. A larger share of Americans place greater trust in what they hear about public issues on social media from interesting personalities than in the NYT, sadly.

the NYTimes at this time has 4.sth Mio subscribers and 10k videos, indeed:

https://youtube.com/c/nytimes

Google is media.

The largest US companies by market cap considered “Information Technology” nowadays are Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Visa and Mastercard.

I was going to post the same thing.

> The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

That this very basic failure of reading comprehension has been voted to the top is both sad and surprising.

That this very basic lack of clarity in writing was misunderstood is unsurprising.

Not so sure about that, with a certain clickbait coverage of solarwinds story creating bad PR for Jetbrains, (perhaps among the least controversial tech companies).

That's what happens when liberal arts people think they're too delicate to understand anything more nuanced than US political thing of the day.

>> highly oppositional at all times

> tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

I don't see how you can read his quote and come up with yours. Absolute strawman

“Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.”

Industries more powerful:

-Finance -Banking -Defense -Oil&Gas

Tech has received almost universally fawning coverage for the at least 2 decades that I've been following it. The only tiny hints of holding it to account came from the RMS Free Software folks.

The idea that the press should be focusing on fawning coverage instead of highly investigative reporting when there's a whole ecosystem of tech news, Youtube videos, and conferences and WWDCs and Google IOs to do that seems completely nonsensical.

The correct criticism of the NYTimes here should be why their investigative coverage does not extent to other areas where it might be missing.

To save you a click,

> What's happened is that they have mistaken their own resentment at journalists' unearned checkmark privilege for something that journalists themselves care deeply about and are either willing to pay for or are mad that other people will be able to buy.

Basically he's arguing Musk's $8-check decision comes from a misunderstanding of the journalism industry. His point is only marginally related to NYT's coverage of tech.

By this interpretation, it is attack on free speech. He wants to prevent criticism of Tesla. Yglesias said not me.

This seems like wild conjecture. As far as I can tell, the only part where Musk ties into the story is the fact that he's monetising the checkmark. At no point is there actually any discussion on how Musk feels about journalists and their cbeckmarks.

I find the notion of "Musk overpaid for Twitter and is now desperately trying to figure out what people would pay for" as convincing if not more convincing, and to be backed up by as much evidence.

And the first tweet here: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1588240007000911873 (I think it’s generally right even though I don’t really like the author)

I think the general thrust seems pretty reasonable: saying ‘we should cover all tech with an investigative lens’ isn’t actually a neutral policy because if you’re a newspaper then you already want to find good investigative stories anyway. Instead it’s saying that the only stories that go through must be critical or uncovering various hidden harms or issues. It doesn’t seem like a good way to learn what is true.

(Nitter links)

https://nitter.fly.dev/i/status/1588231892792328192

https://nitter.fly.dev/balajis/status/1588240007000911873

> it’s saying that the only stories that go through must be critical or uncovering various hidden harms or issues

Speaking outside my circle of competence. But I don't think it's that direct. When a topic is put under an investigative lens, it's assigned investigative journalists.

These aren't folks who write fluff. They don't resonate with baseless optimism. They're men and women of hard facts. So they sniff, sniff, sniff until they find something juicy. Then they write about it. Everything they're writing is true. (It may also flatter. Underdog stories, for example.) But when the beer fridge was swapped with a gin cabinet, the journalism got noticeably darker. No conscious filtering needed.

Now that I think about it, this may also be happening in political journalism. Positive stories are dismissed as shilling. Writers write to be read. So they stop writing those, and instead write darkly.

I think we have different views about what ‘investigative journalism’ is and different expectations for the competencies of journalists. I also assign a lot of importance to editorial decisions: they are a lot of the selection that leads to selection bias in everyone else. Perhaps you assign less importance to those decisions.

An example totally unrelated to tech is that if some politician spaffs tens of millions of dollars up the wall or tens of billions of dollars, the stories can look roughly the same to readers despite 1000x the money being spaffed in one than they other. I think it leads to people assigning badly wrong importances to the different spaffings.

(I don’t want to suggest that journalists are incompetent, just that they aren’t super competent in the way you describe and that motivated reasoning is pretty easy for any human to do, eg a lot of comments on this submission feel a lot like they’re motivated by disliking big tech and not really thinking about journalism at all).

If you’ve ever had first hand experience with what investigative journalists write, it’s not all true. The better ones do a good job, in the worse ones their editorial opinion shines through.

I feel like people are forgetting the real value of verification. If you aren't verified, someone will pretend to be you on Twitter. Prominent people aren't paying $8 to get a check, they're paying $8 to make sure they can't be easily impersonated, which I think is really worth it.

Identity theft is a crime. If a platform facilitates this, it should be liable.

Identity theft is a crime when used to commit fraud. Just claiming to be someone but not otherwise defrauding anyone is fine.

But if a conventional media source published a quote from someone impersonating a public figure, and discovered this, they would publish a correction. Big tech companies wash their hands if this kind of responsibility. That degrades the value of our public spaces.

Note - I am not an American.

From what I have read in American News Media I see so many things that have been blatant lies published by respected News Media like NYT and WaPo. But I don't think I have come across corrections regarding such national and international stories.

Regarding your statement - " ... degrades the value of our public spaces." I believe even your mainstream news media is guilty of the same.

I don’t disagree with this, but it is a form of whataboutism so it doesn’t really undermine the original point that some MSM are also terrible actors. Press in the UK is bad, but I don’t yet see it as this bad.

Twitter verification started because of a fraud and a lawsuit: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/193279-tony-la-russa-law...

The news is that they're effectively removing what verification there was, and the checkmark becomes basically a TF2 hat that means nothing. You'll be able to change your display name to "Elon Musk" and buy a checkmark.

I would be surprised if they do any "verification" at all. If you are a paining member, you will get a special icon. That's it.

I knew web forums that had that. Members that donated to the forum got a special status icon. It could get "trendy" and every one wants to show that they are part of the in-group.

Having to pay in order to be save from impersonation sound like extortion though.

You are being downvoted, but the news just broke that this is true. No id verification will take place for the $8. Just a cc.

A credit card is tied to your ID through your bank or other cc provider.

If you abuse the rules your payment account and your Twitter account will be banned [0].

Maybe you have more than one CC, but keep playing shenanigans and you’ll eventually run out.

An $8 disincentive is also enough of a bar to knock out 95% of the problem.

0: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587853006699401216#m

That would only be true if scammers and other professional criminals were not already easily able to obtain stolen CCs and other payment methods. And that's who you're trying to protect against, not the average person.

We have sold our public spaces for big tech companies to monetise, but basic functions like preventing fraud must now be paid for again? It’s a form of blackmail. Don’t want to be impersonated in an important public forum? Pay up!

>Prominent people aren't paying $8 to get a check, they're paying $8 to make sure they can't be easily impersonated

If they're giving a checkmark to anyone with $8 to spare, then what is stopping me from registering the "realRealRealDonaldTrump" and paying $8 for that sweet checkmark?

"[The NYT] decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny and needed to be taken down a peg, and this style of coverage became very widespread and prominent in the industry ... the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector."

The irony here is that a prominent member of the 'tech industry' (with enthusiastic support from other prominent tech industry luminaries) just bought one of the most important social media networks with the specific intention of making substantial changes to the way information is disseminated in the United States. That may turn out for the best, or it may not -- it doesn't matter.

What does matter: the NYT's decision to focus skeptical reporting on tech as an "important power center" sure seems to have been vindicated.

Meanwhile Bezos owns the Washington Post, and while he doesn't seem to have messed with it too much, Amazon has absolutely been messing with the neutrality of IMDB where it comes into conflict with Amazon's media IPs.

https://letterboxd.com is the best source for scoping out a movie now. The ratings histogram for each film is incredibly informative about quality. It also happens to be my favorite social network right now since it's so focused.

I like letterboxd a lot as well. Its a bit like patreon for me where you can follow some person that you really like and read their stuff and its cool. You get a lot of nice in depth reviews from people, and varied tastes, and unlike other movie sites it doesn't feel like big blockbusters with big budgets float to the top.

I also like hackernews.

I think the magic is in very focused social media.

Tesla and SpaceX are not traditional members of the "tech" industry imo.

Elon Musk is a prominent member of the tech industry and of Silicon Valley history, dating back to the days of Zip2 and Paypal. It's just a fact.

It’s also weird coming after decades of tech reshaping media: local news is a fraction of what it once was, leaving important stories uncovered; things like Facebook’s infamous pivot to video, instant news pages, Google AMP, etc. all pulled control to tech companies and lost money for media companies; and the very way people write headlines and stories changed based on social media and search company decisions. Musk isn’t just some weird outlier, and it’s bizarre to me that someone who works in journalism is basically saying “we focus too much on the times where Lucy pulled the football away.”

Nothing stopping the media companies from making their own football. The owner of the NYT is a billionaire, he couldn't hire a few CS grads and make a site people wanted to go to?

It's like they saw the whole Napster situation and said, "Thank goodness that's happening to audio media; we'll be fine because we're visual media! Let's just keep running the printing press."

> he couldn't hire a few CS grads and make a site people wanted to go to?

The Times has a strong digital presence [1]. It's also a uniquely-successful media property.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-times-nyt-q3-earnings-...

> What does matter: the NYT's decision to focus skeptical reporting on tech as an "important power center" sure seems to have been vindicated.

So in effect the NYT which have been an "important power center" of American media since the 1800's, decides that another entity that comes along with too much power needs to be "taken down a peg".

Its a power play to discredit a new entrant into a business sector that threatens the inheritors of the incumbents.

So call it vindication, but its only in the same vein of a third generation monarch trying to quell threats to his inheritance. But to that perspective I agree, its definitely the correct power move to keep threats from taking away the power one inherited.

What did this person say that was wrong ?

These type of comments are sadly immediately downvoted by the HN hivemind. No credible response is given.

Sad.

Note - Not an American. Not White. If you are Downvoting please respond. I would like to know if it's due to your political leanings or because of something I can improve upon and learn.

This would be good reporting by NYT if this was not conflict of interest.

Strong Social Media companies give voice to the people, that runs counter to the power of the media.

We have seen many stories run in the last 5 years of Global importance, that NYT, WaPo, CNN etc decided were not TRUE.

And Social Media reacted to the words of these Guardians of Truth. Banning many accounts and even hurting many careers.

Now we see those stories by Mainstream media were either misguided or plain lies with an agenda.

Do we want even News Media to have this kind of power ?

Who is watching them ?

> I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.

indeed it is the other way around, Twitter derived a lot of prestige by essentially pursuing "endorsements" by having their checkmarks accepted by prominent journalists with big audience. Twitter does not control the narrative, except from very fringe issues in which they go with the flow of journalists to keep them on their side. The MSM still controls the narrative and of course they dont depend on checkmarks

> I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from [being verified]

That’s totally missing the point. Journalists want to be read. If Twitter decides to have verified accounts show up earlier in the search results, or in some aggregated feeds, journalists will pay the 8 bucks.

Twitter in that regard is the opposite of Youtube. Youtube’s bread and butter is make litlle known content creators famous because they’re good (and sell ads on top of it).

Nobody gives a shit about content on Twitter - Twitter is ALL ads. So journalists will pay to have their voices heard cause Twitter is in essence an ad network for personal brands.

Was it really a top-down decision by the NYT publisher, or a visceral reaction by the journalism profession to the destruction of its career prospects by the Internet?

He's been a prominent opinion writer for almost 20 years and has close ties with a lot of people who work at the NYT he probably knows.

The NYT itself has been doing amazing in the internet age. Check their stock price chart.

Musk's acquisition of twitter was, among many other things, an attempt to use his wealth to steer the marketplace of ideas. The man lives in a world where he can freely attempt to destroy anyone who tells him "no" without consequence. The New York Times, then, would seem to have been fully warranted in their apprehension regarding social giants like twitter.

Twitter is hardly a marketplace of ideas. It is a marketplace of hot takes. Twitter format is the enemy of depth and nuance. More importantly, Twitter has been steering this marketplace in a very specific direction, promoting certain viewpoints and suppressing the opposing ones. I am not convinced Musk is going to handle the issue in any good way, but Twitter has not been a neutral "public square" for a good number of years already.

It was the place where you could read what actual biologists think, actual layers think etc, without having it filtered through third party.

As duch, you really could use it as marketplace of ideas.

> The man lives in a world where he can freely attempt to destroy anyone who tells him "no" without consequence.

That's Tuesday for the NYT -- they live in a world where they can freely attempt to incite wars and overthrow governments.

This is telepsychology.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588190763413868553.html

Why the content-free click-bait headline? Why not honor us all by providing enough info so we can make an informed choice about whether we're likely to be interested?

That's because they directly compete with big tech for ad revenue.

I thought it was $8/month and thought that was way too low.

The weird NYT editorial decision that tech companies HATE!

A good example that people with Blue Checks are idiots?

When Blue checks mention each other they get notifications. This is valuable to journalist who want to interact with other people of note.

Ever wonder why Blue Checks seem to interact more than the unwashed masses. It's more than respect or following, it's also the Blue Check technology pushing them together.

Will allowing anyone with a Blue Check give Stephen King a notification, meaning it'll all get blocked and make the whole thing pointless and not worth $8. Probably, but something new will emerge with destroying the old money that goes with Twitter journalism, and that at least is interesting.

New York Times is a rag, imo. Maybe it's just because I'm a leftist and NYT absolutely loathes the idea of leftists even having the ability to discuss non "radical centrist" ideals, but I've never found much worth reading there. Some anemic both sides opinion pieces, some inflammatory diversity pieces, etc. (And I'm an extremely pro b diversity, equity, inclusion person).

It's just not a great paper unless you are a boomer looking to tell yourself, "no it is the children who are wrong."

I agree. Other commenters seem to think the NYT actually does proper tech investigative journalism, which is completely untrue beyond sensationalistic coverage, surface-level coverage of antitrust critiques, an obsession with social media misinformation, and whining about techbros. Their acquisition of Wirecutter has made their coverage even worse, filling it with "tech advice" blogspam. The idea that the NYT holds the powerful to account is risible.

What a joke, standing anywhere else other than the spot where this guy has found to lodge his head it's been clear that the people most enamored with pontificating on Twitter and checkmarks are journalists. The only reason Twitter has been so overrun and to some extent captured by journos is that before they were aware of its existence people had started to rely on it for news and reporting over the existing media outlets. As soon as they got wind of that they flooded in to mine it for red meat stories or easy topics they could latch onto. Now it's practically the de facto source for most reporting.

This guy is trying to spin it as the very bad, no good tech bros are really jealous because journos get free checkmarks with their laptops when they get hired? That tech execs are angry at the media for doing so much hard hitting, in depth Journalism about the tech sector? Does this guy think we were all born in 2017 and don't remember the Obama Twitter years when the media and tech were side by side in the big 'ol government circle jerk?

I guess the media have found their new Trump, his name is Elon and he's elected himself president of their little clubhouse so they've gotta try real hard to make it seem like they're the resistance fighting against the evil dark lord, cause everyone loves Star Wars. That's what the kids are into these days, right?

-----

I apologize for the snark but goddamn it's just revolting how fucking whiny they are right now. Twitter isn't real life ffs just do your job and write about real things that people care about, not shitty internet drama.

> As a longtime working journalist, longtime check-haver, and someone who knows lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of media professionals I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.

Blatantly false, as the childish histrionics over the new verification system from many journalists this past week have shown. A lot of journalists' entire self worth seems wrapped up in their twitter audience frankly.

Most of the journalists I've seen have expressed just the oppossite, an ease with leaving twitter if these get enacted, what makes you say that " A lot of journalists' entire self worth seems wrapped up in their twitter audience frankly."

Ehh this is all so vague, both Yglesias's original thread and my disagreement with it, and I"m not sure it's benefited from getting specific. Who cares if I find some random tweets supporting my point, I'm sure you can find counter tweets. This ironically is the problem with a lot of modern journalism in a nutshell, tweet hunting to support narratives.

In any case my opinion is that a lot of journalists (at least the active ones, not the ones with auto-tweets of their stories) really enjoy twitter and really enjoy being "a blue checkmark" and are annoyed that their club is no longer exclusive. This annoyance has been verbalized in a myriad of criticisms of musk, the new system, etc.

Edit: because I can’t completely punt I did remember seeing this tweet which amazingly has 85k likes https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1587508595553353729

Which blew my mind, oh course not completely representative of all journalists

So you read that tweet, but you think it is support of blue checks? Like, you think that tweet indicates the author thinks blue tweets are important and valuable?

Like most status games, it's deeply uncool to seem like you care about them when you are completely obsessed with them.

> an ease with leaving twitter if these get enacted

I'll believe that one when I see it; feels very much like celebs announcing they're moving to Canada.

More broadly, I think the original tweet thread picks up on something interesting: that blue-check group is bifurcated into actual-clout-havers, e.g. Steven King, who really could/would walk away, and epsilon-from-irrelevant journos who have it as a facet of their employment, who really couldn't. There's a small overlap of journos-with-actual-clout, but they're the exception.

Low-clout journos are riding on the cachet generated by the other group, and benefit more from Twitter than they contribute. This is obviously anecdotal so I can't cite or anything, but in conversations with non-tech people IRL I tend to notice a stack of assumptions: Steven King == blue check == important =?= rando journalist =?= also important? If you're a reporter in Columbus, OH or whatever, the effectiveness of that platform, handed to you by the Twitter gods, vastly outstrips your "actual" impact.

Steven King doesn't care. Journalist who wants to believe they're a member of the same club as Steven King definitely cares.

"Steven King doesn't care. Journalist who wants to believe they're a member of the same club as Steven King definitely cares."

Really? You think journalists want to be in the same club as Stephen King? Because they both happen to write?

> an ease with leaving twitter if these get enacted

I'll believe that when journalists stop writing articles with unnamed sources, that are based on random twitter posts.

They could always fall back to “people are saying…”

> A lot of journalists' entire self worth seems wrapped up in their twitter audience frankly.

A good barometer for journos integrity, i suppose. As far as i can tell, the better ones just want a voice and a platform, others like click-baiting and self-validating checkmarks.

The most prominent complaint came from Stephen King.

Not a journalist. And he definitely doesn't have his self worth tied up into his Twitter audience.

But anyways, by your logic, the entire HN audience's self worth is tied up in whether an iPhone has an audio jack or not, because this audience spent way more time and energy on that issue than journalists have on the blue checkmark.

See how many will give the check up willingly and you’ll figure out how valuable it is to them.

I’ve seen a lot of “hey you just got your spurs” back slapping when someone gets a check.

I haven't observed any journalists reacting the way that you describe

In other words: jaded, snarky, city hipster. Not about fairness or journalistic integrity like Walter Cronkite, but with a particular agenda. That's not investigative journalism but merely lazy, superficial gossip with a patina of formality and credibility-washed with their brand.

So much for "the paper of record".

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