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Comment by Iuz | Hacker News Reader

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/reddit-victoria-tayl...

> One of the criticisms of the Jackson AMA was that, in some cases, his responses seemed out of sync with the questions. But this wasn't the standard AMA format, wherein an interviewee reads questions off the screen and types in answers directly. As often happens with other celebrity AMAs, Taylor selected Redditors' questions and asked them to Jackson live. She then transcribed his verbal responses and posted them on his behalf. Yet Jackson's AMA was even more complicated than usual because it was also one of the first in a forthcoming series of video AMAs to be released this fall. In this setup, he answered the questions in front of a camera in a ballroom in Los Angeles' Hyatt Century Plaza while Taylor communicated with him remotely from New York...

> ...Taylor asked Jackson the upvoted question despite its confrontational nature. It was hard to blame her, since Reddit does call it "Ask Me Anything." Jackson's response was criticized as rambling and nonsensical, and to an extent it was, but the critics may not have realized that he didn't hear the full question. Out of politeness, perhaps, Taylor had paraphrased it to omit the most incendiary language. It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.

As the Mother Jones article quotes Reddit's execs as saying, this purportedly didn't have anything to do with Victoria's firing. While I still think there's a need for a community leader like her, I wasn't aware how much of her job was being the transcriber and translator between celebrity and fans. Frankly, I think Reddit's IAmA would be much better off without this kind of arrangement...this isn't a statement against Victoria's performance, but against the whole dog-and-pony show in the first place. IAmA's give the appearance that the questionee is deciding which things to answer...as the MJ article describes, not only was a Reddit employee acting as a filter, but was paraphrasing both question and answer.

That to me kills a bit of the spirit of Reddit IAmA's...again, there's obviously a need for Victoria in a community leader role, but I'm happy if IAmA's go on without a Reddit employee acting as a translator for celebrities. If that means fewer celebrities do IAmA's, whooopteedoo. The best IAmA's have always been the non-celebrities, like the vacuum repair technician, or the woman who fought off a bear who ripped her face off, or the guy with two penises.

> It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.

This is an incredibly dishonest thing to say. There's only one reason to publish someone's verbal responses verbatim, which is that you're trying to make them look like an idiot. Someone who gave verbal interviews and published the responses verbatim would be totally unfit for their job.

So television interviews...?

Television interviews aren't read, they're watched (and more relevantly, heard). Transcriptions of television interviews aren't verbatim unless they're made for the purpose of research.

I think "incredibly dishonest" is overstating it. I've worked in journalism, I know that what we print as reporters is often not "verbatim", such as not including "ums" and ahs". I'm assuming that the writer of the MJ piece has also done enough journalism and so when he says that things weren't verbatim, it's possible he is applying this same level of tolerance and standard.

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