Tag Archives: reporting

If You Want to Make America Great Again, Have Media Outlets Stop Using Tweets As Actual Stories

News, Politics, Social Networking, , , ,

I don’t even think people realize the problem that exists today with media. It’s not that media is wrong, false or lying. It’s that it’s lazy. And yeah, I know a big reason behind it is the consolidation of media outlets to get rid of people and save money. So, the problem has emerged to the next logical step: Find media anywhere you can get it.

And tweets is where they’ve found it. Because, let’s face it: It’s easy, it’s free, and it requires absolutely no work to put together a story that consists of someone’s response on Twitter.

But let’s also face the fact that it’s not actually a story. It’s a reaction from someone to something. And most likely, it’s irrelevant to practically everything.

Let’s take the Tweeter-in-Chief that gets quoted on Twitter the most. Instead of paying attention to actual policies the president is enacting or proposing, we get knee-jerk reactions from him at 3am in the morning when he’s just watched Fox & Friends and wants to let the world know that we must stop illegal aliens from stealing the world’s toilet tissue. or whatever stupid idea the bottom of the barrel commentators on that show have proposed at whatever time they actually air.

But the media eats this stuff up and actually reports it as a legitimate news story.

When news is dull or boring, we suddenly start to see “news” whenever one of the Kardassians picks a fight on Twitter with Taylor Swift, or whatever other shenanigans occur during that news cycle. The “famous for being famous” celebrities plan these stories for maximum coverage, and our media, realizing they don’t have anywhere near the amount of coverage to fill a 24 hour news cycle, eats it right up, and suddenly a turf war between two aging rappers ends up being a leading story. So, instead of reporting on something legitimate, or important, like anything written by Nicholas Kristof, or Rebecca Solnit, we get nonstop nonsense about the Kardassian sisters or “news” about toddlers in beauty pageants.

This morning, I woke up to read a “news” story about a Tweet from the president saying how much he believes that….

Not a story. It’s a moment of thought about something that is not a story. A story would be something actually happened. Legislation got passed, someone died, someone was arrested, an accuser was heard and listened to, a country declared war against another, a country attacked another, etc. Someone’s thoughts on something, especially something that came as a reaction to hearing an actual news story IS NOT NEWS.

So please. Stop passing drivel off as news.

And people, stop listening to it. When you hear it, turn it off because you didn’t get news. And better, contact the news agency and complain. Otherwise, it’s ALL you’re ever going to see and hear.

Just saying. I’ll tweet it for you, if it might cause you to think of it as real news.

Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

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Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

The recent Charlottesville riot (get together/protest) is a really good example of why the BBC is so much more superior to crappy CNN. When watching the feed on the BBC story, it has absolutely no voice over and shows the actual protest going on. When you watch CNN’s coverage, it’s a voice over, explaining the situation, and then immediately after two talking heads starts bantering back and forth.

http://www.cnn.com/…/charlottesville-white-natio…/index.html

And I don’t think people ever even realize how significantly different the coverage is over one particular story. The alt-right will often equate BBC with CNN, calling both “liberal journalism” or, my favorite, “fake media.” What has basically happened is that the whole talking heads phenomenon that CNN projects into its coverage is bringing down other news agencies that are actually pretty damn good at being completely a reported story rather than a participant observer to a story (like CNN).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40909547

I really wish more people would see this and that news agencies would try to be BBC rather than CNN because nothing is more frustrating than having a news agency dictate the news to you rather than report it to you.

(Unfortunately, Facebook sucks for embedding stories, as it only wants to show the first one, and not the second one, if you’re trying to make a comparison. Follow the links rather than rely on Facebook, which gets no kudos for being a lousy service for reporting the news)

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.