New York Times' Reddit Piece Shows Dangers of Internet Journalism

http://techraptor.net/content/new-york-times-reddit-piece-shows-dangers-of-internet-journalism

by ColinWright • 11 years ago

354 254 11 years ago

techraptor.net

revelation• 11 years ago

That was the same article?! I was just reading that and though it was some kind of editorial followup.

That NewsDiff link seems like a case for Margaret Sullivan. I can already picture the appeasement article in my head.

jbuzbee• 11 years ago

Seems like a reportable issue to me. Margaret Sullivan's page is here:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/

rectang• 11 years ago

Publishers who wish to rein in the excesses of editors and journalists who abuse updates could establish a policy of linking to a change history which shows all the iterations of a specific article.

The temptation to make questionable edits would be curbed because evidence would be immediately available, enabling punishing critiques.

rory09617• 11 years ago

I was hoping someone would write about how bad this article was. (Shocked to see it's the same one as the pretty good piece from earlier.)

The worst part to me was the article quoting Mitch Kapor to back up its implicit support of internet censorship:

...charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web...
Mitch Kapor, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that Reddit users were predominantly male and 18 to 29 years old.
“In my view, her job was made more difficult because as a woman, she was particularly subject to the abuse stemming from the pockets of toxic misogyny in the Reddit ecosystem,” said Mr. Kapor, now a partner at Kapor Capital.

notcensorship• 11 years ago

It is not censorship to say that a private entity has the right to choose who gets kicked out of their dinner party.

I keep hoping that somebody will write about the difference between censorship and private parties choosing not to support and/or tolerate certain behaviors. It shouldn't be necessary, but there's a generation of people so incredibly entitled and so incredibly insane that they actually need a primer on reality.

rory09617• 11 years ago

Sure it is. It's just not freedom of speech.

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

reb2• 11 years ago

It shouldn't be necessary, but there's a generation of people so incredibly entitled and so incredibly insane that they actually need a primer on reality.

We best get used to it, the baby boomers will be with us for a while.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

How is intentionally suppressing speech that you don't like, not censorship?

It would seem to be the very definition of censorship.

mwfunk• 11 years ago

I'm really curious how these people are going to feel about themselves in 10-20 years when (hopefully) many of them realize how they're coming across to the non-feral, socialized bulk of humanity. Even into my 20s I thought and said some things that just horrify me now. This was back in the '80s and early '90s, so fortunately none of it's on permanent record the way things are now. I'd like to think I wasn't a bad person, just a product of my environment, but I cringe just thinking about it sometimes.

mingus680402• 11 years ago

This article was exactly on point. If you think this is off-base then you've been living in a reddit filter bubble; the dialogue there is skewed toward outright slander and misogyny from the most juvenile perspective.

leereeves7• 11 years ago

And how does that relate to the complaints from the moderators of IAmA, Science, etc?

Are you calling them juvenile and misogynist too?

bobbyi_settv• 11 years ago

It seems kind of self-defeating to wish that news outlets would avoid mentioning one of the most noteworthy parts of a story because having it in the open may somehow hurt "freedom of speech".

rory09617• 11 years ago

Mention, sure. Highlight, sure. But this is the top article on a CEO's departure and it doesn't even mention the trigger incident until the 5th paragraph, below the second picture. It says nothing about /r/fatpeoplehate, even though that would support its argument that the internet is 'cruel' (though not that it's sexist).

It solely tries make Ellen Pao into a martyr for anti-sexism in SV.

And don't get me wrong, the nasty behavior on reddit probably warrants an article. I'd argue that the prescription shouldn't be to hide people's behavior through censorship but to change it, whether by convincing them to self-censor or better changing people's minds, which I think sama did well in his announcement. But as a summary overview of why Reddit has a new CEO, this article failed miserably.

gambler5• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's a pretty good example of what has become of news reporting. It has an instance of almost every common issue, except misinterpreting statistics.

Emotionally loaded language. Blatant fact framing. Suppositions. Presenting one side of a controversial issue as an opinion of absolute majority. Manufacturing "context" out of true, but mostly unrelated facts.

It's especially striking in contrast to the original, reasonably balanced, text. Sort of like "before" and "after" pictures.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

Here is a breakdown of the article, helpfully numbered by paragraph.

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891

Here is the actual article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddi...

My challenge to you:

Either (1) tell me which of those paragraph summaries is inaccurate, and how the accurate summary would reveal "suppositions" and "manufactured context", or (2) tell me which of those paragraph summaries directly implicates either of those two things.

Again, you made a list of things that bother you about news stories, but also affirmatively claimed that the article printed suppositions and manufactured context, so I'd like to see if you can back those two specific arguments up with evidence.

Thanks!

gambler5• 11 years ago

I missed one: citing cherry-picked "experts".

tptacek37• 11 years ago

Why is it bad? Because you don't like Mitch Kapor? Seriously asking.

cma• 11 years ago

Just guessing, but it could be because he runs a competitor to Kleiner Perkins, who were tarred in the updated peice.

rory09617• 11 years ago

Do you think Kapor really supports additional censorship on reddit?

My issue isn't with what he said in his quote. It's that the Times changed their well-balanced piece into one that implies the crappy parts of reddit need to be brought under 'control' and quoted a sentence from Kapor that lends support. I may be wrong (and to be honest I don't personally know much about Mitch), but I'd be surprised if a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation feels that reddit should be more restrictive on speech it hasn't moderated to this point. While his quote doesn't directly say he supports more censorship by any means, including it in the context of that article misconstrues his (probable) beliefs.

zobzu• 11 years ago

News are corrupted as fuck, internet makes this worse. Rewrites, frequency, amount, lies, anything goes if you can get +1 view

brudgers6• 11 years ago

As someone who frequently rewrites, revises, and deletes their online comments, to me the article's changes just look like part of the writing process in a world of realtime publishing. The New York Times did not have a front page story ready within minutes of the news breaking, and unlike CNN, they didn't publish random tweets about the event as news: there's better and worse.

Maybe newspapers need git repositories...with no ability to rebase of course.

pron2• 11 years ago

But why not add the new story as a separate analysis piece, as the NYT often does? What did they gain by changing the original?

dimal• 11 years ago

They were likely getting a lot of views at that url and they didn't want to lose their SEO juice.

brudgers6• 11 years ago

To me, it appears that the primary complaints in the linked article are based more on the editorial direction of the changes wrought by additional detail than anything else. There's a reasonable position that not placing the initially reported facts into the larger context and treating it as the local police blotter would be poor journalism. Thus a reasonable explanation is that the first draft did not meet The New York Times's editorial standards. This would not be surprising given the constraints of real time publishing and in light of the fact that The New York Times revises the resources at its primary URI regularly. As we expect.

We're not outraged when other companies change content at a particular URI based on their belief that the changes are an improvement. If there's a SPOT, it is the print edition not the web.

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

There is a very clear movement in journalism to create the narrative that Ellen Pao is a feminist hero. Apparently the NYT is in that cabal.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

For one thing, it's not an "analysis piece". The additional coverage in the later version includes new reported details. An "analysis" is what you write when you're done reporting and want to synthesize several stories you (and perhaps other outlets) wrote. That's not what happened here.

anonymousab• 11 years ago

Pull requests on news articles sounds intriguing.

sireat• 11 years ago

No matter what the subject matter this does seem like a questionable practice.

Why not make a new article if it is that different? Is there a URL shortage at NYT?

Or was it a case of one commit, another commit and yet another commit and then you have a whole new article?

eli• 11 years ago

Probably should have just been a second article, though I could understand why they might not want two very similar articles covering a lot of the same ground. I assume only the latter version ran in print. The first version should probably have just stuck around as a web-only piece that links to the newer one. Be interesting to see what the Ombudsman has to say.

dekhn• 11 years ago

It looks to me like they published the original article as breaking news, then changed it to be similar to what is going to, or was printed, in the physical edition of the newspaper.

I would strongly prefer the two articles be posted in their entirety at different (permanent) URIs, but I'm guessing this has already been debated and decided at the Times in favor of what they did.

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

"Dangers" seems like a strong word to me. This blog post is strong on technical analysis, but light on substantive analysis. It tells us exactly how many words are common between the first and last piece, but doesn't say whether any factual errors or omissions occurred between the first and last piece. We know that facts and analysis were added, but is that a "danger?"

The undercurrent in the blog post, and I predict an undercurrent here, is that reporting on issues of gender is not appropriate for a story about a tech company. The Times article went from basically a transmission of the official line from Reddit, to a more in-depth story of the background and implications. This is presented, implicitly, as a bad thing. I don't necessarily agree that it is.

The Clinton story had the opposite problem--there were factual inaccuracies in the first version because of the rush to print. I agree that the rush to be first is usually pointless and potentially harmful.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

I don't get that angle at all.

Issues of gender are perfectly relevant in tech. But the issue wasn't gender - it was basic competence and cultural fit.

IMO Reddit would be absolutely fine with a good female CEO. But Pao wasn't a good Reddit CEO, she was a terrible Reddit CEO. Her gender is incidental to that.

So when journalists try to frame the narrative as "cellar-dwelling young male mouthbreathers vs a shocked and innocent victim of disgusting sexism" - that's heavy-handed editorialising at best, and plain bullshit at worst.

Now - there's always been a thick and disgusting stream of bullshit running through trad media. (See also, Fox News.)

But that's a problem with the old journalistic model, which was (is...) based on selling opinion-shaping to advertisers, sponsors, and media owners.

Pretending the Internet is worse than that seems very self-indulgent.

It's also a rather panicked attempt to undermine the effectiveness of Internet communities as opinion-forming media machines in their own right. The machines happen to self-assemble rather than being engineered in a top-down way like trad media, and they're certainly more open than they believe to external influence.

Even so. The newsies aren't just losing the ad sale and eyeball space, they're also losing the traditional op-ed space to spontaneous community narratives.

If you're an editor, that's a serious problem. If you lose both eyeballs and PR leverage, you really have no reason to exist at all.

pervycreeper2• 11 years ago

If you're an editor, that's a serious problem. If you lose both eyeballs and PR leverage, you really have no reason to exist at all.

Well, one can still be useful by becoming a toady for elite power interests by promulgating certain cultural narratives.

clamprecht2• 11 years ago

I think a lesson everyone should have in life is witnessing something first-hand in real life, and then reading about it in the media, and seeing how incredibly inaccurate media articles are. Anytime I read an article about a subject I actually have first-hand knowledge of, it reaffirms the lesson.

BurningFrog• 11 years ago

The fallacy of believing everything else you read is known as "Gell-Mann Amnesia".

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

jpmattia2• 11 years ago

I think a lesson everyone should have in life is witnessing something first-hand in real life, and then reading about it in the media,

Even better: Saying something to a reporter, and then reading what you supposedly said within quotation marks. (Although perhaps my data is old and things have gotten better since adequate interview-recording equipment is now on every smartphone.)

_red• 11 years ago

Yes, trying to give any sort of nuanced answer to a reporter is almost hopeless.

For instance if you say: "Plan ABC is good, however the specific concerns are X, Y, and Z. If care is not taken in how these issued are addressed it will likely be a very expensive failure".

The article will appear as: PLAN HAS BROAD SUPPORT. _red says, "Plan ABC is good".

w4• 11 years ago

Nope, it hasn't gotten better. I don't think I've been quoted precisely any time I've spoken with a reporter. The "quote" is usually the gist of what I said, so it's not a big deal, but sometimes the paraphrased version is different enough to change the meaning of what was actually said.

ZoFreX• 11 years ago

I sat down with a reporter and literally watched him type out my words, and corrected his article as he wrote it, and made damn sure exactly what I said was written on his screen... and the final article still managed to wildly misquote me. Nothing to do with incompetence (or lack of recording equipment), everything to do with making things fit an interesting narrative.

nailer• 11 years ago

Conversely, from when I used to write professionally, people would often not recall saying something I had recorded them saying on tape.

stretchwithme• 11 years ago

Not just true of "internet" journalism.

To write accurately about something that you don't understand is hard. You either have to be very vague or take the time required.

If anything, the internet allows you to publish revisions of the original article, allowing you to correct your mistakes. Very hard to do with the traditional newspaper.

sasori• 11 years ago

so true

mmphosis• 11 years ago

note: I am not a journalist, but I have worked with journalists.

I agree with you as it reaffirms to me how inaccurate media articles are. There are few to no news resources that provide in-depth investigative journalism. The internet makes the news slower because I check multiple diverse sources, and often the report, bias, story is different. It's interesting.

I also see where the story/article is continuously updated by mainstream internet news agencies to fix inaccuracies, spelling, grammar, reduce liability, change the title, change the entire story, change the bias, etc... The comments are almost always more interesting than the actual news report, and can often provide a more accurate report of what actually happened. What were once former respectable news organizations doing investigative reporting no longer exist. We cannot expect "journalism" when reading news on the internet, we need to do that work ourselves.

bithead2• 11 years ago

To be fair, that's not just true of "media" - try talking to a person with third hand knowledge compared to first hand knowledge. It's more a human phenomenon than just a 'media' phenomenon.

clamprecht2• 11 years ago

I agree, but it's kind of the news media's job to report it accurately. "You had one job" kind of thing.

slg• 11 years ago

That is very true, but you also have to keep in mind the flip side of this. The people who know the most about a subject, including ourselves, are likely the ones who will be most biased about it.

Not saying that is exactly what happened in the NYT piece, but that is certainly feasible in situations like this. The first person who writes the article is the person who was on duty in the newsroom or its virtual equivalent when the news broke. They don't know the details or history of the greater issue, so they stick to reporting the facts. Later, journalists with more domain expertise rewrite and add to the story. Maybe in this instance they are already knowledgeable about Reddit's questionable history with sexism. They see a story about a sexist website deposing a female CEO who is a controversial figure in gender relations (for lack of a better term). Suddenly the story gets reframed with that in mind. The extra opinion is only added because they know more about the subject.

Goronmon• 11 years ago

The people who know the most about a subject, including ourselves, are likely the ones who will be most biased about it.

Which isn't necessarily any worse than the external bias that the reporter/editor may have when covering a subject. And that bias is amplified coming from a place of ignorance.

comex• 11 years ago

In this case, Mike Isaac, the original writer, seems to have a good amount of domain expertise, as starting last week he has been posting frequently on Reddit in an official role, discussing/answering questions about his reporting on the site. (Also claims to have been a redditor for five years, presumably on some other account.)

Oddly, all of his official account's posts have been in the GamerGate subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/user/MikeIsaac

aklemm• 11 years ago

When I started reporting for my college newspaper this jumped out at me immediately and it was maddening. So I recorded every interview I did, and then had to transcribe the quotes. It took forever, so I guess I can see how it isn't feasible in the professional world, but it never seemed right.

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

That happened to me: years ago, '60 Minutes' did a hit piece on a friend at work, and I knew that the story was far from the truth. First hand knowledge in that case turned me off of watching '60 Minutes' in the future and helped me develop the habbit of second sourcing stories, preferably from news media in different countries.

PhantomGremlin3• 11 years ago

witnessing something first-hand in real life, and then reading about it in the media

You don't even need to read about it elsewhere. Your own recollection of the details of events you witnessed is usually very malleable. It's one reason why eyewitness testimony needs to be treated carefully. E.g. from Wikipedia[1]:

   Memory recall has been considered a credible
   source in the past, but has recently come under
   attack as forensics can now support psychologists
   in their claim that memories and individual
   perceptions are unreliable; being easily
   manipulated, altered, and biased.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony

mahouse• 11 years ago

This is interesting, since the piece by Mike Isaac was already very liberally biased.

guelo• 11 years ago

I don't understand what this post is implying. If the original article was neutral and information driven then the changes aren't a cover up, maybe you could call it a cover down? The people that read the original article and missed the updates are better off. So what's nefarious about it?

tptacek37• 11 years ago

According to 'yzzxy, "TechRaptor" is a GamerGate spin-off site. So the subtextual nefariousness might be what you think it is: a bunch of people who don't like it when people write about gender discrimination making special pleading arguments about how the Internet should be covered by press outlets.

Karunamon• 11 years ago

Seeing you, of all people, peddling this genetic fallacy claptrap is rather discouraging.

Any such "subtextual nefariousness" is in the mind of the reader.

pixelmonkey• 11 years ago

"This is a challenge that journalism faces today -- how to fairly update and keep stories current while informing readers as best we can."

I work in and around the media industry, and I don't think most publishers see this as a "challenge" -- they have other things to worry about (like how to survive post-print, how to operate in an Internet ecosystem with Google/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube, etc.)

Instead, I see a lot of excitement around the ability of journalists to update their work after they publish it -- one of the few upsides, in fact, of the Internet, from their standpoint. Just as Wikipedia articles get better over time, some important pieces of journalism do, too -- with the guidance of new information or challenges to the original writing.

But look, the Internet isn't print. You can publish something at a URL, then change that URL's content. That's not a crime and it isn't worrying -- it's built-in to the medium.

Just like nothing makes the moment of publication special, nothing makes the moment of re-publication or re-writing special.

The New Yorker did a nice piece on the Internet archive, who is trying to "solve" this problem by periodically archiving the web. They pointed out that when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, he considered the idea of versioning, but ultimately discarded it.

    In 1989, at CERN, the European Particle Physics 
    Laboratory, in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee, an English
    computer scientist, proposed a hypertext transfer 
    protocol (HTTP) to link pages on what he called 
    the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee toyed with the 
    idea of a time axis for his protocol, too. One 
    reason it was never developed was the preference 
    for the most up-to-date information: a bias against 
    obsolescence. But the chief reason was the premium 
    placed on ease of use. “We were so young then, and 
    the Web was so young,” Berners-Lee told me. “I was 
    trying to get it to go. Preservation was not a 
    priority. But we’re getting older now.”

You can read the full story here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb

I think ultimately having a strong and well-supported Internet Archive (if you care, donate: http://archive.org/donate/) is the best possible solution to this "problem". As long as we can go back and see how content evolved over time, we'll be able to study the changes.

And no, media companies are not going to embed Git into their news stories -- most of their visitors don't even know what Git or version control is. And most probably have never even clicked the "revision history" tab in Wikipedia.

penrod• 11 years ago

Quite. Who cares whether the NYT revised the article? The more salient criticism is that the article is a deeply lazy and tendentious exercise in using insinuation to push a predetermined narrative.

vonklaus3• 11 years ago

People simply choose the facts they want to hear. On balance, the news industry is rapidly declining and is not rewarded for objective and insightful well researched pieces.

People choose the facts they want

Then they choose where to read the facts they agree with. Feminist blogs and news agencies were quick to highlight a woman being blasted out of tech for her gender and highlighting other related stories of abuse on reddit and in tech, MRA blogs post about how a woman was promoted on gender and her attack on free speech in pursuit of a biased agenda, and some fell in the middle.

Virtually none of these stories generated revenue from consumers directly paying subscription fees. It is ad traffic from people rushing to confirm their own bias.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

"Feminist news agencies".

vonklaus3• 11 years ago

"Feminist blogs and News Agencies"

Is what I said. I don't understand what you are implying though.

danso2• 11 years ago

I've believed since newsdiffs.org (mentioned in the OP) was launched that an in-house diff-tracker/displayer for the New York Times would be both a win in transparency, accuracy, and the company's bottom-line. The first two are mostly self-evident...in terms of improving the bottom-line...well, I often go to the NYT for breaking news. For a given event, they'll often have a main story which they update throughout the day. The obvious problem is that if I've read it once, I have to re-read the entire story throughout the day, and mentally parse out the updated bits.

So why not have, for _every_ story, a "History" link, or even a _feed_ of latest changes, so that readers who re-visit a story can quickly see the atomic updates? For my own reading habits, this would cement the NYT has a place to go to for developing stories...the transparency/accuracy bit are just icing on the cake.

This issue of having an in-house Newsdiffs was brought up by the public editor back when Jill Abramson was still editor:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26pubed.htm...

Here's what she said:

Right now, tracking changes is not a priority at The Times. As Ms. Abramson told me, it’s unrealistic to preserve an “immutable, permanent record of everything we have done.”

I can't speak for her true motives or intentions...but part of the problem here is technical ignorance. Her perception seems to have been that tracking changes would have been too much of a burden -- and she is justified in thinking this if she has never worked with something that uses a diff-like program...and in my experience, this includes most news people...in a newsroom, editing and re-editing stories and supplying reasons (i.e. as in a correction) is a very manual process. If a newsroom is using WordPress, sure, they know of the concept of article versions...but they don't really grok the ability for machines to create timestamped diffs.

However, if Ms. Abramson was familiar with the kind of system that Github (or Wikipedia, for that matter) uses, she would see that keeping an immutable, permanent record is actually quite easy for machines to do. So to create a inhouse change-log-per-article would be quite easy, technically, and with some interface work, it'd be a very welcome feature to more than a few readers, IMO.

edit: In terms of "most news people" not knowing diff...I'm basing this on anecdotal experience with non-programming investigative journalists who, among all journalists, have the most to benefit from understanding the implications of an efficient document diff, but I haven't worked with any who demonstrated that grasp. A common scenario is having two versions of some important document and wanting to see every change made. A diff would not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be, it just needs to triage possible changes to further investigate.

reagency• 11 years ago

This is basic journalistic ethics, to post a log of corrections made to an article.

danso2• 11 years ago

Right...but the implementation details matter. And not everything that is worth tracking is not necessarily a correction.

In terms of corrections, for non-trivial ones, it sometimes takes more than a day to get the true story...and this is sensible, as no one wants to correct the correction. This process is pretty manual.

In terms of changes, as described by the OP, it's not always clear what kind of changes deserve a manually-written line-item description. Fixing grammar and punctuation? Adding a new quote (usually when a new quote is added, an "Update" note is prepended to the story, but for most WordPress using organizations, this is again a manual process)? Rearranging the lede to put a more important, newly discovered fact up higher?

So instead of leaving it to humans to decide which changes are worth manually logging...just let the machine timestamp the changes and show the diffs, allowing the reader to see them in a transparent way. For changes that require no explanation (i.e. the addition of an Oxford comma), let them stand alone. For changes that require some context, such as a new quote, give the option of letting the reporter/editor describe the reason, e.g. "Mr. Smith responded to a reporter's calls at 3 p.m. today".

toufka4• 11 years ago

It's interesting that the log would also reflect internal editorial struggles within the NYT. If you scroll through the future changes since the major change, you see Silicon Valley described "sexist" then "male-dominated" then "sexist" again [1]. Seeing the flip-flopping edits would surely affect how the article (and SV) is perceived beyond the words themselves.

[1] http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934591/934616/www.nytimes.com/2015...

tptacek37• 11 years ago

Maybe you should bring that up with Sullivan, their full-time public editor, or the full-time editor they have in charge of managing corrections and clarifications, or that editor's full-time assistant? If it's "basic", I'm sure they'll agree with you.

fnordfnordfnord2• 11 years ago

Inability to keep an immutable record of what's been published disqualifies nyt from its claim of being "the paper of record".

brudgers6• 11 years ago

Not if the print edition is considered the record. The analogy would be eventual consistency in exchange for higher availability: the tradeoff is the occasional stale read.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

To message board nerds, yes.

To anyone who takes seriously the notion that the Times is the "paper of record", no.

(This is a positive argument, not a normative one.)

jchomali• 11 years ago

I totally agree with you.

mc323• 11 years ago

One of my pet peeves with reporters and writers is that they believe themselves to be studied, enlightened and informed, more so than their audience. And if true this would be great.

If true they could inform me and give me better understanding of the world around me.

Sadly, I find, most of them rely on gut, opinion and lack rigor. They lack basic scientific investigative techniques. So we end up reading mostly opinion backed by further opinion, sometimes backed by unreliable social sciences studies. By unreliable I mean the results are often one offs but they are cited as if accepted fact.

For example, antivax. The opinions of antivax are given the same credibility as epidemiologists. That to me is egregious. Sometimes they do the right thing and call out the questionable opinion as they tend to do with the anti global warming crowd.... But I bet that is helped by their political leaning more than by their being rigorous.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that the mainstream US news media consists of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, and the Washington Post.

Could you cite an example in any of those four publications where undue weight was given to "antivax" people?

Just so you know: I 1000% agree with you that giving equal weight to antivax crazies and professional epidemiologists would constitute "undue weight".

threatofrain2• 11 years ago

I think part of the problem of scientific reporting is that journalists deliberately look for sensationalist material, and how journalists discuss science is little different from how Bill O'Reilly might react if he just found an exclusive clip of Hillary Clinton getting drunk and saying stupid things. Bill O'Reilly and his team would probably be thinking about how this might be worth a month of material.

The other part of the problem is that scientific writing is meant for scientific audiences, an audience which is expected to be aware of an ecology of evidence and professional debate occurring around studies. If we don't want pathological journalism, where a journalist finds a single piece of evidence and spins whatever narrative they want from it, then we need a journalist who is authoritative enough to represent a whole field and its diversity of opinions, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Would you trust Neil to be honest with you?

kbenson• 11 years ago

I would absolutely love being able to subscribe to a feed of changes to a story, and/or be notified as additional stories related to the subject story were released. For example, if I subscribed to this story for both changes and for related stories, and there's a revision to that article or there's another big reddit story a year from now, I would love to get some notification.

This is there news organizations can really add value in the digital age, by being more interactive with their user's wants and desires. I expect the NYT to report on most things worth a national audience. I would trust subscribing to them for additional info in a way I couldn't with some smaller news source.

imroot• 11 years ago

I worked for a major newspaper company (before they sold their assets off and focused on TV/Radio). Every change that was made on our CMS was logged...and stored on the backend. She might not be able to see the changes, but...the changes are probably still there. Editors didn't always focus on the technology side of the house -- they just wanted to make sure that the newspaper was presented in the best image available.

gambler5• 11 years ago

The fact that they deleted the original version, rather than added or appended the new one is very telling. People worked on writing and editing it and that work got thrown away. "Hey, Mike, sorry." Why do you think that is?

You know, in the age of hypertext and search engines you would think that news would become more focused on actual events and facts. (Because anyone who cares could follow the links and do searches to get background information.)

Instead, everyone races to push forward more "analysis" and "context". We get "news" articles that pull in unrelated issues, do everything possible to frame the facts, and use emotionally loaded language wherever possible.

trop• 11 years ago

The Times (as of 2008) was explicit that they had two stages for online publication (see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/washington/11askthetimes.h...).

The "Continuous News Desk" correspondent quickly write an article, in consultation with reporters. But the final draft of the article -- for print publication -- could be entirely different and with a different byline. I'm wondering if the techraptor reporter is noticing not a conspiracy to editorialize, but rather the difference between the breaking news story (just-the-facts) and a semi-considered story (context).

pcrh2• 11 years ago

I wonder how much the stability of the URL influences this sort of editing. If traffic is coming in via a site such as reddit, a new article with a new URL might not get as much traffic as an edited version of the original article.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

For minor edits in the same document is fine but for a practically full rewrite? No, put links at top or bottom of the article for "You might also be interested in".

ihsw• 11 years ago

Internet popularity should not take precedent over journalistic integrity.

pcrh2• 11 years ago

I was commenting on the motivation to edit existing articles rather than posting new articles, or even just pulling the original article.

istvan__2• 11 years ago

Thanks for sharing, next time somebody tells me news are not fabricated I just pull this up! :)

usaphp4• 11 years ago

Same thing happens with reporting on Qatar death toll of building stadiums for the World Cup in 2022, they have used a total number of deaths of immigrants in Qatar instead of those who build stadiums ( their overall death rate is on par with other counties even UK and USA), they have edited [1] the article since then but the original impression has been made and now people are throwing invalid "facts" everywhere blaming Qatar of slave workers deaths for building stadium.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/27/a...

MoOmer• 11 years ago

Slave labor in Qatar and Dubai is real. Some of the living conditions literally have a sewage trough running right through the run-down and horrible housing complexes. Forced to shit where you eat, have our passport taken away, work unpaid, have no where to turn to for help, and be beaten if you don't meet standards every day.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm

usaphp4• 11 years ago

Have you ever read the article I linked? You basically linked two articles with the same inaccurate information regarding deaths, they are masking total deaths of all migrants to the ones that died building stadiums. A lot of Countires that held World Cup had a horrible conditions of construction workers but that did not stop anybody from having a World Cup there.

usaphp4• 11 years ago

You should see how some Mexicans live in USA or Africans in UK, not much different from how those mentioned in your quoted article live in Qatar, these people decided to do it themselves.

yzzxy3• 11 years ago

NOTE: Techraptor is a site set up by Gamergaters to talk about games and tech news without reprecussions from people who find their views exclusive of progressives, minorities, feminists, and LGBTQ folks. They call this "ethical journalism" because they claim to not receive kickbacks or have special relationships with their journalistic subjects, as they perceive their ideological enemies do.

The quality of journalism is low in my experience, notable moments include the point where writers believed "death of the author"[0] referred to authors dying out as a profession.

[0] A major concept in contemperary literature concerning authorial importance after a work is published, see Rereading Barthes and Nabokov by Zadie Smith for a good intro

ams6110• 11 years ago

You might want to familiarize youself with the flaws in making an ad hominem argument.

alayne• 11 years ago

I find it very helpful to know if a news source has some kind of agenda. They may be more likely to use statements out of context or to suppress facts, biased towards one side of a dispute. I'm not saying that is the case here, but we are talking about the NYT vs a site I hadn't heard of until today.

yzzxy3• 11 years ago

This isn't ad hominem, it's directly related to the topic at hand (ethics, motivations in journalism). Ad hominem doesn't mean the mistakes of the past can't be mentioned, it means that character flaws can't.

aw3c2• 11 years ago

So what? You might be a /%$&/§$ or a )()%§&!"/$ for all I know but I can still independently make up my mind about what you just wrote. Are you suggesting censorship based on people's thoughtcrimes (in your opinion)?

verifiedbyvisa• 11 years ago

Isn't that he same point the article is making? People in both GG and anti GG were both doxxing, making sock puppet accounts, closing each other's events with threats. It was reported as 'internet people hate women' the same way this was.

pessimizer2• 11 years ago

That clears up my confusion - it was a bit shocking to me that someone who is commenting on the news could be unaware that Clinton actually did operate a private email server nearly four months after it was major news.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

What I'm seeing is a news piece citing sources I can independently verify.

This is really damning: http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015...

Did "gamergaters" (whatever that means...) set up newsdiffs too? Oh wait, googling it brings me to a git repository created in 2012, years before "gamergate" was a word on the internet.

So, I click that link, and I see exactly what the article talks about. A neutral piece on a CEO stepping down completely rewritten to push for a "look at how they're mistreating that poor female CEO" agenda. A solid article, turned into opinion mediatrash.

And you're making an ad hominem argument about the website because of who created it.

Quick sidenote (and if this gets me downvoted, have the decency to reply; blind downvotes with no discussion breed censorship)... As someone who is pro- women in tech, pro- women in general, pro- minorities, and even as an activist at times, I am finding it really fucking hard these days to be pro feminism when the agenda consists of lying to people to get into the spotlight.

I can't ever support a cause where this crap happens all the time. Where the facts aren't good enough to push the agenda.

Are there really not enough stories of opressed women that you have to find Ellen Pao, a CEO (which already almost nobody can relate to) in the middle of extremely controversial fraudulent lawsuits, that is accused of being out of touch with its own userbase? And people try to make readers relate to her?

There's so much shit to be outraged at in the world. Why fabricate?

Edit: Yep. Downvoted without discussion. Brilliant. We're really encouraging debates here...

reb2• 11 years ago

Are there really not enough stories of opressed women that you have to find Ellen Pao, a CEO (which already almost nobody can relate to) in the middle of extremely controversial fraudulent lawsuits, that is accused of being out of touch with its own userbase? And people try to make readers relate to her?

Welcome to Feminism: The Product. Reminds me of the business with Taylor Swift, defender of hardworking artists (oops, turns out she fleeces her independent contractors). Every powerful woman is a martyr for the cause of the common woman, despite every economic sign to the contrary. Meanwhile restrictive abortion laws are making a comeback, coverage of and investigations into campus rape have been roundly botched, the aggressive mainstream "feminist" narrative (at this point I'd argue feminism online is a news marketing gimmick, not a reflection of any real political ideology) stokes tensions that choke productive discussion. Women's rights are as critical as they've ever been but I get the sense all the talk I hear from self-proclaimed supporters is nothing but hot air with ads in the sidebar.

Such is the state of politics in this digital era.

istvan__2• 11 years ago

"Edit: Yep. Downvoted without discussion. Brilliant. We're really encouraging debates here..."

Common practice here nowadays. You have to be ready to take a hit in your karma if you bring up a viewpoint that is not widely accepted here. Kind of makes me sad.

Anyways back to your points, this is exactly right. Ellen Pao fired Victoria for no good reason and NYT conclusion -> she is hated because she is a female. I can't find words to describe this level of hypocrisy. I am pretty sure that there are people who disliked her due to sheer misogyny but 200.000 people signed that petition. You don't need to be extremely good with math to understand that those people cannot just all be like that.

Anyways, I agree with you that fabricating things like this article is extremely bad, btw. this is what Chomsky calls manufacturing consent, and he is damn right about it.

TorKlingberg3• 11 years ago

Your comment is a bit inflammatory, but thanks, it's good to know the political biases of a source.

yzzxy3• 11 years ago

Well, lots of vitriolic responses here. Let me say that I don't really have a strong opinion on this article here because I don't really wish to delve into the entire bibliography, but:

1. The points I mentioned are at very least closely related to the topic of the article. They are not totally an argumentum ad hominem, the moment TechRaptor began to commentate on journalistic integrity they opened themselves to comparison of their own journalistic integrity. This does not mean they are wrong about the NYT, it just means there is a possibility of hypocrisy and irony in their accusations.

2. I do not believe this history taints their reporting, only that perhaps greater care should be taken with accepting their claims on similar topics.

3. Please note that the first paragraph of my response carries no value judgement on Techraptor (just a quick, largely neutral history for context), and the second paragraph only includes what I mark as my own personal opinion. I mentioned the "death of author" incident only to note that TechRaptor writers seem to be amateurs (not a sin in any way) who are perhaps not as well antiquated with all industry practices in journalism as NYT writers may be. This does not mean they are wrong.

4. I have also been frustrated when news outlets silently update stories with changes/corrections after those issues are pointed out by myself and others. I have not really engaged over those because the topics of discussion were largely unimportant and I did not really feel invested enough to start a large public argument with a news site or magazine. So I think there is a real issue here to be discussed and I don't wish to silence anyone.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

I think came across as too aggressive in my reply, I apologise. Just yesterday when the news story broke, we saw people dropping the "gamergate" name randomly just to score some points on whatever they were arguing.

The name is extremely toxic, especially when there is a massive misunderstanding between people pushing for news stories which are less biased, written in a neutral point of view... and media spinning it as an anti-women movement. Wtf.

I'm of the belief the lack of neutrality in media is severely lobotomizing certain countries. I've lived in several european countries, each with strikingly different styles of media, and none of them are as shockingly bad as the american media.

Just like Pepsi and Coke, there's a symbiotic relationship between various media outlets where "rivalry" just helps drive the views up. Instead of having a handful of neutral stations where the reader can do their own research and form their own opinion (something which most readers are not interested in doing anyway), they divide their readership in camps, willingly driving away one camp while cultivating a soundproof echo chamber for the other. And within that space they'll do whatever it takes to get as many views, clicks, purchases as possible.

CGP Grey has two distinct really well written entry-level pieces on the subject; I'd recommend anyone to take a look if they aren't familiar with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...

pkinsky• 11 years ago

You sound just like the kind of person that refuses to read any article published in Al Jazeera.

Globrazu3• 11 years ago

It's funny because this isn't even true, TechRaptor as a Tech reporting site has existed since early 2013, here is a Web Archive from about a year before "GamerGate" started: http://web.archive.org/web/20131124114156/http://techraptor....

In fact it was founded by Rutledge Daugette in March 2013, over a year before "GamerGate".

What this should tell you both about said claim and the person making it I would like to leave to you.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

I'm not clear why I'm supposed to be alarmed by this.

The update neither changes nor removes any of the substantive material from the original story (look carefully). It adds additional material, and fleshes some of the previous material out.

It seems like standard practice at newspapers to get a first take on a story and then flesh it out later. It's certainly standard practice at The New York Times, as even a casual look at NewsDiffs.org will show you: all sorts of pieces are effectively rewritten multiple times between their quick-take online version and the final print version. The Times never posts correction notices when that happens; they post them when they get something wrong.

Later

A thread running through this controversy is that the new NYT story is an "opinion piece". Let's analyze it, graf by graf. This list is numbered by graf; the summaries are my own (you could dispute them if you wanted).

1. Pao is a hero to many online for her gender equality fight, but was ousted by people online as well. This is mostly beyond dispute, except for the presumption that the Reddit mob actually did oust her, which all the principals in the story deny. That interpretation favors the Reddit mob.

2. Pao's resignation was abrupt and happened amidst a torrent of misogynist drama, renewing concerns about SV sexism. It's indisputable that her resignation was abrupt. It's indisputable that the story has generated concern about online sexism. Some people may not appreciate that concern, but that doesn't make its existence not a fact.

3. There is a debate about online invective, particularly around gender issues. Calls for Pao's ouster focused on her failed KPCB lawsuit. First point: indisputable (see: GamerGate). Second point: indisputable (see: petition for her ouster). Second point particularly interesting because the suit has no obvious connection with Reddit.

4. Pao's lawsuit revealed a culture that prized machismo. This is the closest the article comes to opening up a salient in the debate. I happen to agree that the trial proceedings and community response did that, but reasonable people could disagree. It would be hard to argue that the Times simply made this up, though.

5. Pao's popularity amongst Redditors was influenced by the lawsuit. Again: indisputable; the petition for her ouster leads off with it.

6: A direct quote from Reddit's chairman about Pao asserting that misogyny payed a role. Reported story is reported.

7: Pao's unpopularity generated a petition, and lots of ugly comments. Nobody disputes this.

8: A direct quote from Pao's resignation letter. Reported story is reported.

9: A direct quote from Pao, and background on Reddit. Reported story: still being reported!

10: A direct quote from Mitch Kapor on the demographics of Reddit. Still more reporting. Three quotes in this story so far, two from the story's principals, one from an extremely well-known person in the industry.

11: Direct quote from Kapor about gender issues on Reddit. Kapor is corroborating points raised earlier in the article.

12: Many subreddits went on strike over the firing of Victoria. Indisputable, and also the event that precipitated the story.

13: Pao posted an apology over her mismanagement of the site that was somewhat broad in scope. Indisputable fact, directly relevant to the core issue of the story.

14: Pao's ouster is a setback, after losing a lawsuit and turning down a lucrative settlement. Indisputable fact.

15: Kleiner's side of the story is that Pao was a bad investor. That is indeed their side of the story. The Times does not rebut it.

16: Pao owes a large amount of money, which the judge believes she's capable of paying. Still more facts.

17: Pao is unclear on how she's going to proceed with appeals. Still more facts.

18: If Pao succeeded in her appeal, the legal showdown between Pao and KPCB could recur. Factual, and relevant to the story: Pao's suit was, again, in the lede graf of the petition for her ouster, and it could happen again!

19: Huffman is the new Reddit CEO and part time at Hipmunk. Indisputable facts.

20: Huffman and Ohanian started Reddit. Indisputable facts.

21: Reddit is a private company with 50MM in funding. More undisputed facts.

22: Pao is remaining as an advisor, looking forward to getting more sleep.

I'll go ahead and say it: by no reasonable definition is this an "opinion piece".

exstudent2• 11 years ago

You should be concerned because:

1. the rewrites weren't noted in the article, thus undermining the authoritativeness of ALL NYT pieces.

2. They added a bunch of opinion to what was a fairly neutral piece.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

Again: it is not standard practice at the NYT to note rewrites between quick takes and final versions. If you spend even a few minutes on NewsDiffs.org, you're going to see that this happens all the time.

This is important because the "TechRaptor" story doesn't concern itself with the NYT's standard practice --- in fact, it doesn't even seem to be aware of the practice. Instead, it takes a commonplace and uses it as a fig leaf to suggest that the NYT is distinctively bad at covering tech.

Reasonable people can argue that it's bad that the NYT posts quick takes and then substantially rewritten final stories. If they make that argument, they should acknowledge that it happens constantly.

Reasonable people can argue that the NYT sucks at covering tech. If they make that argument, they should not make quick takes the fulcrum of their argument.

notahacker2• 11 years ago

And if anything it's the opposite of "internet journalism"; it's part of an age-old newspaper tradition of adding the revised story into exactly the same slot in between print runs rather than the internet approach of "there's no daily space constraint; let's put Pao's background and court case in another follow-on article and leave the old one alone.

rory09617• 11 years ago

It's not an opinion piece, it's a biased piece. Let's compare the headlines and ledes, which set the tone of a piece (some might argue they're all that matter).

Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

1. Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned from the online message board on Friday after a week of ceaseless criticism from scores of angry users over the handling of an employee departure.

This a pretty matter-of-fact statement of what happened, as you'd expect from a quick reaction piece. 1) Resigned. 2) Week of criticism. (wait, only scores of users?) 3) Employee departure.

It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit

1. Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched sexist culture of Silicon Valley. But sentiment is a fickle thing, and late Friday the entrepreneur fell victim to a shrill crowd demanding her ouster as chief executive of the popular social media site Reddit.

Boom. 1) Hero. 2) Anti-sexist. 3) Angry mob. There's some serious spin being applied here. No mention of any reasoning, we only know they're "shrill."

Next couple:

(initial article was matter-of-fact details that should definitely have been buried later)

2. Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist attacks, many of them on Reddit itself, is likely to renew charges that bullying, harrassment and ugly behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized lack of interest in hiring anyone who is not male and white is contributing to the problem.

3. The debates over diversity in technology and invective on the Internet have been simmering for a long time, but they boiled over in the last year. One reason was Ms. Pao’s lawsuit against her former employer, the venerable venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Most people will have stopped reading at this point. It's 100% about sexism, bullying and shitty internet behavior. No mention of Victoria, /r/fatpeoplehate, or IAmA.

Victoria's not mentioned until paragraph 5, below the second picture, and it's hedged by an unrelated part about Pao's gender fueling it. Victoria's gender is never mentioned as a factor, and isn't revealed except by her name the only other time she's discussed, in paragraph 12.

The moderator protests get one sentence, also in paragraph 12. None of their complaints besides Victoria were mentioned. Note that the IAmA mods' op-ed was published in the Times 2 days prior.

FPH never makes it in there, even though it would lend credence to their argument about bullying and harassment being "out of control on the web." I would argue its omission leans the article towards the SV sexism storyline.

I'm not saying that anything in the article is false. Nor do I think it's an opinion piece – it absolutely falls on the "objective news" side of the spectrum. It could even be perfectly cromulent as a standalone article — just not as the lead story on the reddit drama.

It's about what's said, what's emphasized, and what's buried. That's spin. And this article is spun, whether because the reporter hates freedom or because Silicon Valley sexism makes for a hot story. That's not the type of reportage I expect from the New York Times.

tptacek37• 11 years ago

I think we mostly agree. I'm willing to concede that the piece is "biased" --- I don't know if it is, because I think misogyny is in fact the most important attribute of the Pao story, but that alone forces me to accept that reasonable people could believe the piece wasn't perfectly balanced.

So when you say:

I think that leaves us in a place without much interesting debate. You think the lede of the latest piece is "spin"; I think it's pretty self-evidently the right lede for the piece.

But this is a very far cry from the debate "TechRaptor" and this thread are suggesting we have!

nraynaud4• 11 years ago

There are two convenient fact omissions when talking about sexism and racism towards Pao: the fact that the fired employee was female too. And the fact that Pao is of asian origins and that Asians are traditionally over-represented in SV and not traditional victims of racism in technology.

Those facts made the case for a racist and sexist crowd a bit too nuanced for a front page.

(Or maybe Asians and Indians are officially not counting now? They were getting too much in the way of the simply racist technoworld narrative?)

notahacker2• 11 years ago

Regardless of whether the article's editorial stance is a bit kind to Pao, I think the fact that numerous racist comments were directed towards her is a lot more pertinent to the story than the number of Asians working in SV...

nraynaud4• 11 years ago

in a world where storytelling and example is more important than statistics and hard numbers, this story will be used in the future as an example instead of an exception.

Brakenshire2• 11 years ago

And the fact that Pao is of asian origins and that Asians are traditionally over-represented in SV and not traditional victims of racism in technology.

Is the reddit audience particularly strong in SV? In the people on the board, and working for the company, yes, in the audience, I would say no.

Also, it doesn't necessarily matter about what people really think, the behaviour on reddit was more about trying to find the most unpleasant thing you can say, rather like when a football/soccer crowd tries to rile up opposition players with abuse - it's more bigotry than genuine racism. Although, just like with football crowds, the genuine racists do then get to ride in the slip-stream. And people don't necessarily go back into the real world and shake it off, these movements develop their own momentum. Much in the same way than 4chan started off being racist in an ironical or troll-like way, and is now unashamedly, sincerely racist.

nraynaud4• 11 years ago

there is a straight Kierkegaardian element in that behavior, crowd vs people.

rquantz• 11 years ago

You misunderstand racism if you think Asians in tech are not subject to it.

redml• 11 years ago

All that these professional victims do is drown out the voices of the actual victims.

thomasjames• 11 years ago

For actual journalism on the internet, it is worth going to shared common sources. I almost always rely on Reuters and AP. Since they are cited so often by downstream media, which is a major part of their business model, their content is--by its very nature--somewhat static. I have also generally found their writing to be less biased, with the exception of Reuters being inherently pro-finance and globalization (again, due to their specialized business model). In terms of more immutable print media, back n the early 2000s, I was also a firm believer in that the ridiculously low word count limits and easier barrier to reader entry encouraged at the Metro (the free public transportation newspaper) left whatever was able to make it through less biased. This again is on the basis that bias would add too much complexity to stories whose sole purpose was to impart the basics of widely agreed upon fact (cf. Simple English Wikipedia).

brudgers6• 11 years ago

For context in regards to journalism, the linked article offers "related" content. Looking at what TechRaptor believes to be relevant, recently TechRaptor in their editorial Reddit Banhammer [1] took the position:

CEO Ellen Pao of popular social media site Reddit seems to have more up her sleeve after a failed gender discrimination lawsuit. After new anti-harassment terms have been laid down, subreddits have mysteriously vanished. Of the subreddits that have been banned, /r/fatpeoplehate was among the largest. For those readers unfamiliar with what a subreddit is, think of them like mini communities.

One might think that we’re better off without bile aimed solely at a targeted group, but something doesn’t sit well with me.

The phrase "up her sleeve" has no positive connotation in this context. More importantly, the same history of alleged gender discrimination that the linked article claims is irrelevant to The New York Times's reporting forms an important part of TechRaptor's position regarding her actions in Reddit Banhammer. Indeed it ends with the conspiracy suggesting:

How do you readers feel about Reddit’s censorship with the banning of certain subreddits and would you agree they were justified? Or is this part of something bigger?

TechRaptor's position appears to more about The New York Times's interpretation of events than about the relevance of the facts about Ms. Pao's history when interpreting events.

[1]: techraptor.net/content/reddit-banhammer-crack

pessimizer2• 11 years ago

"Associated Press caused a major uproar when they reported Hilary Clinton was running a homebrew email server from her home. This story was updated numerous times throughout the day with archive sites not catching all of it, though ZDNet has a very good run down of the situation with screenshots of the original. By the end of the day the story was about the Benghazi email probe instead of the original story about running a homebrew email that was essentially disproven once people looked into it."

That story was not only not disproven, but not even contested.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/hillary-clinton-says-she-did-op...

declan2• 11 years ago

I worked as a journalist for over a decade -- CBS, Time, CNET, Wired, etc. -- before founding https://recent.io/ and every news organization I can think of updates articles after publication.

This practice predates the Internet by decades; wire services called updates "writethrus." Updated copy would be labeled internally for editors as 2nd-lede writethru, 3rd-lede writethru, with perhaps some details about what was changed or added, with those internal notes typically not being published for readers. So east coast papers would print a different version of the story than later-deadline west coast papers. The Washington Post did this in print form, with stories in the early "bulldog" edition often modified and expanded before appearing in the final edition. News has always been a snapshot in time.

There is significant pressure on reporters to post news quickly to capitalize on social sharing and search -- even if the quick first post is one or two paragraphs with little review by editors -- and update their articles quickly. This was the official policy in at least one newsroom where I worked. That can and does lead to inaccuracies and hasty reporting, though errors do tend to be corrected quickly. But the linked article does not accuse the NYT of factual errors.

It is true that it would be near-trivial for news organizations to have a history tab appear on each article that shows older versions -- I've suggested this and other features before, like providing people quoted in the article an automatic right of reply in a text field underneath the story. The reason we don't see history tabs is probably a combination of legal risk (imagine that a green reporter writes that John Doe was convicted of murder, and John Doe was the prosecutor, not the defendant), little demand from readers, embarrassment about errors in early versions, and newspaper-era newsroom thinking.

stefantalpalaru2• 11 years ago

This was not a simple update. This was a rewrite that changed the format and the content - from a factual report to an opinion piece chastising the evil white men of SV, all while managing to put a positive spin on a humiliating trial.

This may not be new in the dishonorable world of journalism, but it's the first time many of us outsiders get to look behind the curtain. We kind of suspected how the sausage is made, but actually seeing it is still shocking.

magicalist3• 11 years ago

This complaint and others in this thread all seem to be that you don't like the new content of the article and have nothing to do with the article being updated.

declan2• 11 years ago

My intent was to describe newsroom practices, not to express an opinion about the NYT's rewrites. It is commonplace for important stories to be extensively rewritten and amended. I don't know enough about the Reddit saga to discuss it intelligently.

I will stipulate that the NYT editorial board has lectured Silicon Valley on diversity, though it is not diverse itself, and its female executive editor made less than her male predecessor: http://www.aei.org/publication/silicon-valley-gets-stern-lec... http://www.businessinsider.com/nyt-explains-female-editor-sm...

As for the rewrites, changing the lede graf to "entrenched sexist culture of Silicon Valley" is significant. It replaces neutral reportage -- "a week of ceaseless criticism" -- with the newspaper asserting as fact that Silicon Valley represents a more "entrenched sexist culture" than, say, the NYT newsroom itself. It's intended to frame the story in a typical high-level next-day NYT fashion by injecting the author's, or editor's, perspective. It's excellent journalism when it's accurate, but creates the type of controversy you see here when it's not.

anon3_2• 11 years ago

Who here didn't know anything about entrenched sexism in SV until codes of conduct, angry twitter mobs and odd journalism articles such as this post came about?

Lerc• 11 years ago

Technically this should be quite easy to fix. Each story gets a git repositiory. URLs denote the state at the time of view. A visitor to the URL gets a small header giving them the ability to read the article as shared or the most recent version. The full commit history should be accessible.

The reasons for not doing this would be mostly non-technical. Face-saving and risk of liability would seriously inhibit implementation.

ender72• 11 years ago

If you, like me, or tptacek [1], were confused why this is a big deal, that's because it's not. It's common practice for online articles to be changed after they are published, especially as new information comes in. If the article originally contained factually incorrect information that was later corrected that would be one thing, but that's not the case with this article; new information and context was added.

TechRaptor, the site that hosts the article, is strongly associated with the GamerGate community, and that is the source of this concern of this new non-existent "danger". Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens. In this case, the NYT article was modified to include context that TechRaptor author didn't like. However, it doesn't look good to say "no, this totally wasn't about the fact that Ellen Pao was a woman" because that's easily disprovable: there are a trillion and a half Reddit threads out there displaying some of the nastiest sexist invective you've seen in a long time, all targeted at Ellen Pao. Instead, TechRaptor attempts to attack the article via a sidechannel discreditation. It attacks an unrelated feature of the article (that it was modified after it was published), which casts a pall over the entire thing, effectively undermining the main argument simply by association.

There is a ton of talk in this discussion thread about how the NYT article is "biased" or trying to present an "opinion". This seems to me like just another way of disagreeing with the argument without seeming like you're disagreeing with it. Claiming that this should be reported on like any other CEO being fired is not a cry for journalistic integrity, it's a request to willfully ignore the very, very special context that this firing took place in. The behavior of the Reddit community during this process, a behavior that was blatantly sexist and clearly occurred at an outsized volume and level of rancor because Ellen Pao was a woman, cannot and should not be ignored. To do so would be, well, unethical.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891

brymaster2• 11 years ago

If you, like me, or tptacek [1], were confused why this is a big deal, that's because it's not.

Ah yes, because you two are certainly the authorities on the matter.

Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It's getting stale that the diverse group of people associated along with GamerGate are merely harassers: you know that isn't true.

Downvoted. You use scare quotes and have to link to someone else's post in an attempt to add weight to your clearly weak argument, make no attempt to add evidence to your points and eventually fallback on claiming thinly-veiled harassment and misogyny. Absolutely no legs to stand on.

For some reason, your particular group of people cannot have a real discussion about ethics without dismissing it all together and then dropping your boogeyman term "GamerGate".

Why do you think that is?

tptacek37• 11 years ago

I'm going to go with "because the loudest people who chose to adopt the label 'GamerGate' also managed to spoil the word 'ethics', so that in discussions of interest to 'GamerGaters', readers have to be cautious about whether there are actual ethical concerns, rather than fig leaves used to promote misogyny."

Whatever you might think of the issues "GamerGate" advocates for, another indisputable fact is that its troll faction very definitely turned the words "ethics in journalism" into a punch line. So much so that simply saying the words "ethics in journalism" is very effective code for "this is really about misogyny".

Ralfp• 11 years ago

Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens.

This is very unfair and uninformed statement to make about GG.

Most important thing to know about GG is that there are many images of GG circulating around. For some people GG is internet hate campaign. For others its political movement. For others its protest of trends on game scene. For others its outrage about reporting on poor releases or cliques in gaming media. Finally there are people who are just exploiting whole thing for internet fame they can capitalise from down the lane.

So quite obviously everybody finds the thing he/she seeks in GG, and so we have number of people attacking other people in different ways under different pretenses, like "IGN sold out!" or "GooberGaters chased girl out of her house!" naturally followed by "they didn't, they display game ads because they are gaming site" or "girl didn't run anywere, reporting her escape off her house's sofa all the time" retorts.

The greatest tragedy here is that there's whole lot of people with binary perception amounting to "with us or against us" who can't tolerate the tought that there may be valid points raised by other side, and thus dismissing (or more often flaming) either Adrian Chmielarz or Anita Sarkesian voices simply because they are on wrong side.

ender72• 11 years ago

I sympathize with your plea for us to move beyond labels, but that doesn't change the nature of this TechRaptor piece.

This is a smoke screen and it is being used in the same old way to obliquely discredit an argument that a member of the GG community doesn't like. And the argument being discredited is, once again, about the status of women in tech and on the Internet. Far from being an "unfair" characterization -- it's depressingly apt here.

spopejoy• 11 years ago

It's kind of a big deal. Real and ongoing issues with male-supremacy and misogyny in SV are being actively misappropriated for salacious clickbait. C.f. Newsweek's horrific cover story with a mouse lifting a woman's skirt.

C.f. the title "SV 2, Ellen Pao 0". I mean jesus, talk about derailing the convo from the start. Ellen Pao blew it with the Victoria firing, so there's at least one thread of this story that has nothing to do with sexism and everything to do with typical tone-deaf executives.

I personally don't think the FPH incident is involved in her dismissal, nor her previous harrassment lawsuit -- if the latter was a problem they would have never made her CEO in the first place. Regarding FPH, yes that ruffled feathers but the management seemed united behind it.

So, I don't think it's anti-feminist to call out this article as gender-wars clickbait. The focus on edits is indeed a sideshow, but I'm not surprised it took a GG-focused site to bring it up.

jondubois• 11 years ago

I had read the "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0..." article. I remember being surprised that misogyny was mentioned since this issue had nothing to do with gender.

And they even attacked Reddit users themselves - Essentially calling them sexist. It was obvious that this article was politically motivated - There is some corruption happening there.

Journalistic integrity is dead. There is a financial or political motive behind every article you read. I don't trust anything I read online anymore. Maybe Reddit itself is the only place which still has some degree of credibility left. Maybe it's only a matter of time though before moderators start using their powers for personal gain.

mayneack2• 11 years ago

NewsBlur (newsblur.com) automatically diffs everything I think. Mostly just grammar updates.

harmonicon• 11 years ago

site is not accessible to me, google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:techrap...

New York Times' Reddit Piece Shows Dangers of Internet Journalism

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