- Yes you never agreed to the panel, but how does this email chain not reflect an honest invitation?
- Of course the debate was framed; it is impossible for an event to not have context. Would you have preferred it framed differently? How so?
- Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?
The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
The context of "dropped out" is universally "The person went from participating to not participating". Alexis was never participating.
Dropping out means that you were planning to go and then you had to cancel. Whether Farhad knew this before or not, Alexis's email was very clear and so there's no excuse to claim today that Alexis dropped out of anything.
The author is now being deliberately disingenuous.
How so? Farhad is not Rebecca. She may be, as we speak, still completely unaware of Farhad's e-mail exchange with Alexis.
"Oh, uh, it fell through."
"Oh, ok."
I can think of hundreds of other variations of the same exchange that don't include negligence on the author's part. This isn't a cross examination - which is the price we pay when we gleefully shoved a knife in the chest of real journalism and twisted it hard, and went and partied with blogs afterward.
"To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us."
"he dropped out" is clearly false.
This is part of the responsibility of self-publishing.
It reminds me of grammar arguments on the internet; people don't like what she says, so they find some easily arguable but minor flaw in the text to jump on.
Those three sentences do not need thorough researching. Maybe she just needs to write a quick email to Alexis for a comment/confirmation (or omit the 3 sentences). Or are bloggers not journalists, anymore?
Also, I didn't attack the premise of this article at all, so don't lump me in with that crowd—I just think that the author does a disservice to her premise/argument. For what it's worth, I agree with the high-level sentiment of the article (though not all of the details).
Of course they're not. For better and for worse, bloggers are not and never have been journalists in any useful sense of those two words. Blogs do, however, fill some of the same niches that used to be the exclusive purview of journalistic channels, such as news curation and commentary.
If you're expecting blogs to match the rigor of journalism, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. I should note, however, that blogs are much more of a two-way street; they're more likely to get things wrong, but they're also more likely to be corrected when that happens.
That was the view I came away with after reading the article.
Her blog post starting out fine, but half way through, she decided she was more interested in mud slinging and shaming than having that discussion she so desperately wanted to have. It is left up to the reader to infer a motive for her choice in direction.
[0] Shaming I'm not so concerned about - a few of those tweet authors should definitely be fucking ashamed of themselves.
Thou dost protest too much, by the way.
If there are images of child sexual abuse being put on Reddit people can contact the Internet Watch Foundation (http://www.iwf.org.uk/)
There are other problematic images: non photographic images of child sexual abuse not hosted in the UK. I have no idea if these are on Reddit, nor what Reddit would do about those. Christopher Handley trials suggest that these are criminal and could cause trouble for Reddit.
And the sexualised (not not sexual) images of children are also a problem. Luckily Reddit has banned /r/jailbait and continues to ban similar subreddits.
My guess it was a stab against Gawker Media?