Tag Archives: reporters

Supreme Court health care decision reveals how clueless mainstream reporters really are

Education, Healthcare, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

Like a lot of other people, I was waiting on the Supreme Court decision over health care legislation. At the time, I happened to be in the hospital awaiting the decision, but that’s really not a significant factor. However, when CNN, and then Fox News, announced the decision IMMEDIATELY after it was written, I didn’t get very excited. The reason being: I figured they’d probably get it wrong.

And they did. CNN first reported that it was repealed. It wasn’t. Fox News then announced something equally stupid, and they were wrong as well.

The important question is Why did both of them really screw up the decision?

Well, the answer is simple. Reporters write differently than Supreme Court justices. You see, the reporter process is to report the decision first, and then they continue to write the story, filling in relevant facts later. The most irrelevant facts are left for the end, just in case an editor has to snip the end of a story. This way, the important parts of a story remain untouched.

The Supreme Court doesn’t work that way. If they issue a 30 page majority opinion, that means that somewhere on page 17 or 18 you might actually get the decision. Everything else is legalese and details that back up that decision. Quite often, you can read for pages and still have no clue where they’re going with the decision.

I learned this in graduate school when I used to have to write briefs on Supreme Court decisions. There were times when I’d read through the whole thing and still couldn’t tell you what was the decision. When you’re a reporter, you’re expected to be able to figure out that ruling quickly, and what happened was they failed at it. They kept trying to read the first few pages of the brief and basically got lost. So, when they got it completely wrong, it made complete sense.

That’s why I waited. I figured after a couple of hours, someone would actually read through the whole thing and then report what actually happened.

Why Hire Reporters? Just Have Your Staff Rewrite Someone Else’s Story.

Business, News, Writing, , , , , , ,

An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.

The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.

This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.

Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.

Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.

I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.

Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.