The Fandomization of News

https://www.theverge.com/23836187/gen-z-news-creator-sourcing-tiktok-instagram-lil-tay

by xingyzt • 3 years ago

53 57 3 years ago

ta8645• 3 years ago

Pick your poison. For all its flaws, I'll still take citizen journalism over corporate interests. The MSM abdicated its journalistic responsibility in favor of activism and manipulation; they caused this as much as social media did.

marban• 3 years ago

CJ suffers from the same cases of activism and even more extreme tribalism – I'd rather read 3 different newspapers than follow a guy on Twitter who starts all his tweets with #BREAKING.

mypastself• 3 years ago

Amusingly, that’s exactly what CNN was doing the last time I turned it on.

bregma• 3 years ago

"citizen journalism" is what we used to call rumour, gossip, and hearsay. It still is.

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

And that is still (marginally) better than what the commercial and political propaganda machine we call "journalism" has become today.

nonethewiser• 3 years ago

Take that as a signal. The messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more. I can appreciate that people might pick “unreliable“ over “actively manipulating.”

tqi• 3 years ago

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have grown beyond making connections and delivering entertainment into places people trust to keep themselves informed

And the NYT, MSNBC, Foxnews, Verge et al have grown beyond places people trust to keep themselves informed into delivering entertainment, going back to the early 2000s with 24 hour cable news and talking heads shows.

NoZebra120vClip2• 3 years ago

Oh I think it goes further back than that. Read a turn-of-the-20th century newspaper for some sensational headlines and muckracking. Perhaps it's always been this way. "Informing the public" via news is inseparable from gossip and campfire tales.

extragood• 3 years ago

The lawsuit against Fox by Dominion made it clear to me that they exist to sell ads to their viewership by telling them what they want to hear, regardless of facts. I have no doubt that there's a long-standing legacy of that amongst many news groups, or maybe even most of them, but I'm not aware of a bigger manipulation of the American public

brightlancer2• 3 years ago

Absolutely. Ben Franklin regularly passed fictional stories off as fact in his newspapers. It has always been thus.

10g1k• 3 years ago

News has always been fake.

The earliest centralised news was local kings, lords, whatever, instructing the town crier or scribe what to tell the people. You'd be nuts to think it had anything to do with facts.

As civilisation developed, and we had things like the Roman Empire, it was the same deal, except different senators or others would pay criers to spread stories in different sectors, usually their own or a competitors, to sway things one way or another. Remarkably similar to today. And yes, it was fake news. Such as telling citizens that the Carthaginians were baby-eating deamon worshippers, to get people to support a war to wipe out an economic rival.

Then we had governments in WW1 portraying Germans as monsters in those silly posters, inventing horrific crimes against humanity.

Then we had all the media telling tall tales about Saddam Hussein and his secret invisible nuclear chemical weapons in cartoon trains in the desert where they didn't even have railway lines, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people who never harmed the USA, and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades.

It has always been nonsense.

So when you're evalutating the credibility or utility of random internerds and their "news", just be mindful of what you're comparing them against.

NoZebra120vClip2• 3 years ago

So true. Sorry you're downvoted.

Even investigative reporting and historical scholarship suffer. Anyone investigating or studying anything needs to pick and choose which sources they're going to rely on, and therefore introducing intrinsic biases and only as reliable as the sources they rely on.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

As opposed to Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity?

Sounds like sour grapes because it's too hard to buy enough of gen Z's influencers.

jpizagno• 3 years ago

Does anybody have a source (CJ or traditional) that is unbiased?

It seems that everything from mass media to small tiktokers are so biased, I can't believe anything they say.

pasc18783• 3 years ago

All news is biased and has been. Even if not deliberately, the journalists are not experts on what they report on so don't alwys spot errors or biases in their sources.

You have always had to read or listen to several sources.

Some sources are less biased than others. E>g. in the UK the print media is biased and readers do know which way e.g. Daily Telegraph is right wing and Guardian is left wing. The broadcast media is less biased as there is legislation to form some form of control. Most of the broadcast media get complaints from both left and right wing - although GB News seems to be firmly right wing.

basch2• 3 years ago

Unbiased is the wrong premise.

Bias will always exist, so identifying it and consuming the spectrum is the way to see it. Seeing bias is better than avoiding it, as it helps you understand others perspectives (as they consume biased news.)

allsides.com is good. Modo News is good.

incompatible5• 3 years ago

Looking for different perspectives doesn't seem very helpful in this case. "Tay is dead"; "Tay is alive".

rt4mn• 3 years ago

Nowadays my go-to source for unbiased (or perhapes better to say "non-partison"), easily digestible information on incredibly complicated topics is CRS: https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=&ord...

These are the people whose job it is to make complex topics understandable for both parties of congress. Its a fantastic source if you want to set aside 10 minutes to quickly digest a complicated topic.

For a fun example, see some of their reports on Directed Energy Weapons: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/details?prodcode=R46...

Its not really a news source, but then again you did not actually specify news and I wanted to shill CRS since they do fantastic work, especially given the tightrope they probably have to walk every day.

wolverine876• 3 years ago

I can't believe anything they say.

There's the bias problem, and it's one you can do something about!

rayiner3• 3 years ago

Lack of bias doesn’t exist. Even people who are in good faith trying to be objective can’t help but report the facts through the lens of their worldview. Even reporting that just sticks to facts is colored by what facts reporters choose to highlight, what additional context they elect to provide, and which primary sources they treat as trustworthy.

The best you can hope to do is listen to a range of smart people who are transparent about their priors.

tptacek• 3 years ago

It seems pretty clear that the commenter is asking for sources who try in good faith to be objective.

hnben• 3 years ago

you could try out https://ground.news/

antigonemerlin• 3 years ago

There was a Vox video called "Who made these circles in the Sahara?" that really showcased the investigative powers of journalists once they have the budget to bring in the big guns.

Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader.

https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og

smfugit• 3 years ago

When I was 16 there were better things to do than pay attention to the news. I mean if the "adults" were struggling to solve complex issues, why give me anxiety over it.

The over riding goal today has become attention capture/Like/View/Click collection. But this is a temporary blip.

The story is breaking down with the platforms seeing growth stall, reduction in free content (pushed behind paywalls/login screens), banks collapsing, period of low interest rates ending, advertising budgets shrinking, subscription charges rising, new regulations that are upending how things used to work etc etc.

The Attention Economy is under assault and things are going to change. Content creators (be it news orgs or influencers) are functioning under the belief that if they create the "right" content they will get the views.

But the platforms (just like HN) dont inform them as more and more content creators enter the chat, and more and more content is Produced, the amount of content being Consumed doesn't increase cause total collective Attention is a constant. It has become easy to produce content, copy it, broadcast it. So supply goes on rising. But demand cant match it. And then spending time analyzing what "works" for the content creators is delusion.

KKKKkkkk1• 3 years ago

Technology has brought increasing competition to the news business, starting with AM radio, then cable news, then the likes of Drudge Report on the internet, and finally social media. As a result, the media are pursuing consumers much more aggressively, and in particular they are targeting specific demographics. Hence polarization, "juicy collection of great narratives," [0] and the death of objectivity [1]. The age of Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow is not coming back.

[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461796763162054663

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms...

incompatible5• 3 years ago

If you want to find out whether Lil Tay is dead or alive, it's a bit of a conundrum. Apparently, you can't trust any sites or accounts that she might have, since they could have been hacked. It's unlikely that you could get any government verification like a death certificate right away, and there won't be one if she is still alive, and who trusts the government anyway. The verification that she is alive comes from "a statement provided to TMZ from Tay's family", but is there any reason to trust that? I've never heard of TMZ so have no idea how credible they are, and in any case perhaps somebody spoofed being Tay's family and they didn't check very hard, and Tay is actually dead. What are you going to believe, a video statement from Tay herself perhaps, which may be a deep fake?

Edit: Of course, I have no idea if Tay was a real person in the first place, or just a personality created by deep fakers.

Edit: Wikipedia (dubious of course) says that TMZ is a tabloid owned by Fox Corporation. Yeah, like I trust Fox. let alone some tabloid they own.

enlyth• 3 years ago

TMZ are pretty much the de facto celebrity deaths reporters. They wouldn't risk their reputation by making up stuff like that.

incompatible5• 3 years ago

But according to the article, “When there’s no face to it, it seems like it’s a corporation, and corporations to a lot of Gen Z equal bad or untrustworthy”. Do they make an exception for TMZ?

theonlybutlet• 3 years ago

I'm a bit flabbergasted as an outsider. Reading these comments, there's such a lack of trust it seems in very basic tenets of society and it's institutions in America. (Dismissing certain factors to a degree I'd understand.) If this were an actual sample (which I hope it's not) the country may just descend into anomie.

eastbound• 3 years ago

Inversely, I’m flabbergasted that some people still have trust in institutions like journalism. I can’t count the times I knew about a subject, then read it in the newspapers and it was true.

The scientific article that is not quoted in the article may say “…therefore we can’t conclude that XYZ” and all your colleagues are persuaded of XYZ because the AP or Reuteurs or AFP dépèche said “Scientists conclude on XYZ.” Anything, from police arrestation reasons to diplomatic stories, is rehashed into something unrecognizable from the truth.

Did you know that “Man sues $1m from McDonalds for a coffee served too hot” was false?

mcny2• 3 years ago

I have heard about the case and how McDonald's was clearly liable but I didn't realize how mass media acted as a mouthpiece of the chamber of commerce.

ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

I won't assume malice rightaway given the PG essay submarine but it is not journalism either. I can see how people wouldn't trust the news.

assimpleaspossi• 3 years ago

The biggest problem I see is that, from a quick scan, all of that so-called news has nothing in it that affects anyone's personal life in any way. Mostly for entertainment but no value otherwise and probably forgotten within seconds of reading it.

I also question any organization that has vulgarity in their name or title. What is the need for such a thing over civility?

hliyan• 3 years ago

One day, I hope we look at this period in history and marvel at the fact that our knowledge of current affairs was largely left to chance (or worse yet, algorithms that are designed not to inform but to sell) -- whatever happens to catch our eye as we scroll through our various timelines. With all the data, technology and query capabilities we have at hand, I'm surprised I can't set up preferences like this:

    drop sports
    drop celebrity news unless death or court case
    drop crime unless within state
    prioritise presidential election
    prioritise rocket launches
    prioritise aviation accidents

tunesmith• 3 years ago

I've had this half-baked thought for a while that the state of our world is based off of facts, values, and the various arguments/conclusions that emanate from them... and therefore the most newsworthy events are the events that have the "loudest" impact by propagating furthest through those argument graphs...

Terr_3• 3 years ago

People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells.
To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.”
“And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?” Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.” That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters.

-- Earth by David Brin

solarkraft• 3 years ago

I REALLY want customizable recommendation algorithms. I believe a lot of people would like this and it would keep them on platforms more because it makes the experience more enjoyable.

878654Tom2• 3 years ago

Made the same comment yesterday on another submission but it still fits this discussion.

I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news.

I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing.

The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are.

Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper that tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.

crimsontech• 3 years ago

I stopped following the news sometime in 2017 I think, it wasn’t really a conscious decision, I just felt annoyed or saddened by it.

A few years later I was talking to my dad and he was in a state, going on about current events and how bad things are so I told him I stopped following the news years ago and felt better for it.

About six months later he called me to tell me he also stopped after our call and realised he felt much better too.

A big part for me was that it was just a barrage of sad or scary topics which left me feeling helpless, mixed in with some celebrity antics which I didn’t care about.

I keep up with what’s going on in my industry, and science and technology through sites like this, newsletter subscriptions, podcasts, etc. But in general I’m mostly clueless to what is currently happening in the news.

It makes me feel somehow ignorant, but it works for me. If someone brings up a topic from the news I normally just say “Oh I hadn’t heard about that!” rather than explain I don’t follow the news.

pasc18783• 3 years ago

And so voters become less informed and so don't know what politician to vote for. How does this help society?

878654Tom2• 3 years ago

He actually talks about this in his book, democracy already existed before newspapers became big (or even existed). People got informed through books, pamphlets, essays, debates and public gatherings. Now, some articles do inform the people more, one of the big examples is Watergate. But the difference in quality and research between the Watergate articles and the daily news is immense. Most political news-articles are nothing more than copy-pastes from what a politician sends to the writer and newspapers aren't the only medium where investigative journalism can exist. In my home-country a one-man journalist published some big scandals on his blog which showcased some unsavory corruption in one of our cities, all the big newspapers could only report what he already said, they had zero investigation themselves.

The other part is, do daily newspapers really inform you? Do they follow up the promises of candidates? Do they analyze effects of laws? Do they give you a neutral view of the situation?

Democracy can work fine without newspapers, maybe even better. Politicians in my country focus mostly to solve small fires without addressing the problems underneath it as those get them in the news but the big problems with complex solutions don't give them the same return of visibility in the papers versus the work required to fix it.

jacooper• 3 years ago

The Los Angeles Times took note of V’s success and tapped them to help launch its own personality-based TikTok account. They’re one of many publications attempting to recreate the success of individual creators on TikTok within their newsroom.

But what's the point? TikTok doesn't share AD revenue, so why do all of that for nothing?

Is it in hope that these followers become readers?

I personally don't trust any single creator news source, a single person is much much easier to influence than a whole news agency.

I used to follow johnny Harris regularly, then he dropped an economic video about a supposed new economic model that's supported by many companies.

The issue is almost all the talking points in that video were taken from the WEF, the same "you will own nothing and be happy" guys.[1]

I still think news creators have a place in the news cycle, maybe for more fun stuff, like science questions maybe economics, Tom Scott style videos, or digital investigations like coffeezilla, but for real news, news agencies are still king, especially ones that are publicly funded.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw

The Fandomization of News

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