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Comment by bfioca | Hacker News Reader

Journalism still baffles me. It seems all too regular that important details are carelessly reported incorrectly.

"then house those startups for a short period of time." This is commonly misreported and so easily gotten right since everyone at YC points out this is not true.

"strategic input from the Y Combinator team (Graham and his wife)" Overlooking Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris is understandable I suppose since they're not always around as much as pg and Jessica but, really? They left out 2 of the 4 people heading YC? They couldn't just, you know, look at the "people" page on ycombinator.com?

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Almost all journalism is this bad.The only reason you happened to notice it here is that it's a subject you know and care about. The pieces on Obama's strategy towards Iran aren't any better - you just don't notice it because it doesn't stand out to you. .

Agreed. Anybody who has ever been interviewed for an article understands how painfully one can be misinterpreted and marginalized.

I've been interviewed for various articles, and I agree that the published article never looks like a verbatim representation of what I remember saying in the interview. On the other hand, I've also been a journalist (not for any prestigious publication), and I've been amazed at how much is said in journalist interviews that is not the least bit verifiable or sensitive to context. So journalists usually do have to adapt what their sources say as they write up articles.

A really good book about the journalist process, sort of a "secret weapon" for sources, is Media Smart by Dennis Stauffer, a journalist whose work I used to see on local TV.

http://www.amazon.com/Media-Smart-How-Handle-Reporter/dp/B00...

Stauffer provides a lot of advice about how to get your story told your way if you deal with the press, to the greatest extent possible, and explains what extent of getting your way is possible.

P.S. I've also had occasion to read many court trial transcripts over the years, and no two witnesses to the same event ever describe it the same way, even when purporting to quote the exact words of somone else. It generally takes multiple sources to arrive at some reasonable approximation of the truth.

This wasn't journalism, if journalism is defined as "a reporter writing for an editor." (That definition was devised to exclude certain bloggers from the category of journalists.) This widely reposted article was blogging. Too bad about easily checkable facts being wrong in the article. Blogs can't be a replacement for conventional journalism if they are no better at getting facts right.

> This wasn't journalism, if journalism is defined as "a reporter writing for an editor."

harvardbusiness.org (the article's source) sure looks like an organization that has editors and the like.

> Blogs can't be a replacement for conventional journalism if they are no better at getting facts right.

Sure they can. A successful competitor doesn't have to be better on every dimension. It just has to be the right combination of good enough and better on the important ones.

harvardbusiness.org (the article's source) sure looks like an organization that has editors and the like.

I'll have to check that by digging around the site. Thanks for pointing that out. Then what other replies said about "journalism" would apply to that submission.

After edit: what I don't see readily by digging around on the Harvard Business.org site is how much editorial input goes into a blog post before it is posted. There plainly is editorial work invested in presenting the blogs in a common online format and serving up how they are ordered on the main blog page. I'm less sure what manuscript editing happens to submitted blog posts.

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