edavison1

Hook me up with the password for the alternate dimension Reddit you visit, it is so much smarter than mine.

Beyond the cringe of posting AI slop that 'argues' about eroding social norms and declining trust due to AI there's also this:

"The prestige and unmatched reputation of Communications of the ACM is built upon a 60-year commitment to high quality editorial content"

Hmmm. Ok whatever you say folks

Ran into this the other day researching a brewery. Google AI summary referenced a glowing NYT profile of its beers. The linked article was not in fact about that brewery, but an entirely different one. Brewery I was researching has never been mentioned in the NYT. Complete invention at that point and has 'stolen' the good press from a different place and just fed the user what they wanted to see, namely a recommendation for the thing I was googling.

I don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.

Getting dangerously close to inventing editors w that idea, no good we tried that already :)

Thanks, I think this answers my question, appreciate it

I'm sure they are, but I don't see how it relates to my question. Like, you wouldn't see anyone posting links to download a movie, or an app, that would otherwise require people to pay. So why is the practice so common to links here? I mean, shouldn't HN users pay for the journalism they're so eager to discuss?

I get your view, read the essay years ago and we agree on the facts. I'm a journalist who gets 5-10 PR junk PR pitches a day. I don’t pitch stories from PR hacks--I pitch and write about the stuff I think is interesting and important. If I got an awesome pitch from a PR person tomorrow about something like that, why wouldn't I pursue the story?

I fully acknowledge the PR industry exists but to suggest that coverage of a beloved indie game creator by one of my industry's most respected reporters is somehow paid off or inauthentic because PR exists is such a leap. As I said earlier he's probably been trying to write about the Stanley Parable for years.

I also have firsthand experience of people I know at startups believing that their PR firm 'bought' them coverage. But if you read Paul's essay again he's careful to acknowledge that the service good PR firms are able to provide is that they can connect with journalists for stories not because of some shady undisclosed loyalty but because the PR people bring them interesting topics.

The idea that arts criticism is somehow 'guerilla marketing' is such a deeply cynical, HN brain take. Of course the people who make things want to get the word out about what they're doing. But The New Yorker doesn't collude with PR agencies to promote things. It's news when people make new things; that's literally the whole idea in coverage of the arts. Is it really your position that when a movie, game or book is reviewed in The New Yorker it's because some PR person told them to? Chris Bryd is a well-respected games journalist, not some industry shill. He's probably wanted to write about this topic for years, and the forthcoming game is part of what makes the profile newsworthy right now.

Anyway if you believe arts criticism is 'quite gross' and want it banned, what does that world look like? Should people who make things not be allowed to tell publications about it? Will there be a cone of silence around new games?

Yeah it's unfortunate that we're in this place culturally but seems like just using the phrase suggests a lack of engagement with it so I guess it makes sense in some wacky way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/nyregion/social-media-ins...

This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.

So is the argument here that the New Yorker can make more money from AI slop writing overseen by low-wage overseas workers? Isn't that obviously not the case?

Anyway I think I've misunderstood the context in which we're using the word 'competition' here. My response was about attitudes toward AI from writers at the tip-top of the industry rather than profit maxxing/high-volume content farm type places.

If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

Whitman was a full-time journalist for many years, both at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and elsewhere.

How is exposing malfeasance and illegal corporate activity activism?

I hate to retreat into platitudes here but good journalism shines a light in the dark, it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, that’s kind of the name of the game.

If you’d prefer these topics go unaddressed and companies continue to take advantage of their workers or whatever, not sure we have enough in common to have real discourse on the subject. Sorry to be blunt lol.

Hey sorry, I thought we were talking journalism. Outbrain is an advertising/recommendation engine company right? Know zero about them but doesn’t look like they produce anything. Interesting you went with revenue per employee though because I think market cap tells a different story. They’re worth 256 million today and NYT is sitting at 6 billion. I don’t doubt clicky clicky makes money, just that brands in journalism that rely on clicky clicky don’t make as much as those that produce years and years of high-quality content.

I return to Buzzfeed because I think they’re a good example of a place that tried to do both but because they had so much low-brow clicky clicky, the brand ultimately suffered. Despite winning a Pulitzer in 2021 it really has a terrible reputation among non-industry folks who haven’t forgotten how the brand came to prominence.

You are commenting on an article written by a journalist. :)

Edit: made a typo.

How do I quantify the value of reporting? As a writer and reporter, not a finance dude, I'm really not qualified to answer that. But it's interesting you say 'unless you are a brand' because I feel like the brand is what you get from building up years and years of trust with excellent reporting.

In your second paragraph, I don't think your assertion is correct. It isn't 2008. While you were correct at one time based on trends in the industry, "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" content never cemented itself. It had a high-water mark and that kind of thing hasn't made good money in years. The New York Times is still the most valuable brand in journalism and it's thriving against its competition. Not only other legacy brands, but let's be real, look where Buzzfeed is at today. Shitty content lost revenue-wise as well as on a moral basis. The only way to reliably make good ad revenue is to spam articles but it's not a profitable (or serious imo) way to run a journalistic enterprise. I believe paywalls/subscription models will continue to dominate while the losers fight for scraps.

I am hardly a luminary of my field but if you take a look at some of my features you’ll see they are drastically different from the idea you may have in your head.

Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.

If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.

I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.

While some news can be generated exclusively from scraping Reddit threads or whatever, most decent journalism incorporates some form of reporting, i.e. the generation of novel information from trusted sources. Even without reporting, if you can't add to the store of knowledge in the world by writing the article, it doesn't offer any value to consumers or advertisers. That includes the the world of SEO spam. An effort has to be made to distinguish your work from the competition, or else your site isn't winning those top results.

Reddit threads are often just full of emotional responses to news already generated in this way. At some point along the line, a human has gone out and spoken to another human, forming an novel angle or argument, pursuing a line of inquiry, connected dots no one else has yet etc. That's news, not a summary of existing attitudes.

High Country News, Adventure Journal, Hakai magazine all carry the torch in some form or another.

The ‘content aggregator’ supported fantastic original reporting, increasing the share of knowledge in the world.

Generally speaking, the free content you love then uses the original reporting from these kinds of outlets and delivers poorly written nth degree xeroxes of that novel info.

At the end of the day, someone has to actually go out onto the polar ice or the remote research station and generate the story. So that’s the point imo.

The judges are experts in their fields, FYI. For the games list this year we had Tyler Blevins, Nicole LaPointe Jameson, Eric Monacelli and Kiki Wolfkill, all heavy hitters.

This is absolute Seraghina slander. Maybe it's not Ops quality, but definitely better than Barboncino and one of the greats in the Roberta's-style lineage.

It's tempting to see it that way, but I read your comment and see an unfair comparison between a small city and the largest in the United States. The MTA is ugly (I love it) but let's not kid ourselves, they spend a shitload of money maintaining nearly 500 stations, probably the yearly cost of that tunnel per day.

This has to be bait to some extent, but we're going to fight disinformation might as well start in the HN comments section.

To that end, two brief things. Journalists doing investigative reporting have ZERO interaction with advertising, so the idea that an individual ad bank would have any influence on the work you see from reporters in the paper is really out there. Editors at big papers like that are looking for stories that go hard... the crimes of autocratic regimes are pretty high on the list of shit you want to cover.

You might not believe that! But the other thing is that even if ads directed coverage and could buy press silence (they don't) NYT makes the lion's share of its revenue through subscriptions. Their ad business is cratering. So on an economic level it also makes zero sense.

I'm sure you know this because you read the article (lol) but the plant was shuttered due to lack of energy demand. So it isn't a question of coal vs. bitcoin, it's a question of beautiful lake frontage vs. bitcoin.

Journalist here. While I love that there's a discussion about burying the lede on HN, the practice you reference is known as a kicker. It's a last thought that is meant to twist, undercut, or add complexity to the narrative thrust of the story. The best ones add a ton of value to stories and reward people who read to the end.

Hi all,

Thought the gamers in the HN crowd might be interested in this. I discussed how different TTK's make for very different feels in shooters like Halo and CoD, and how it's usually a bad sign when devs change TTK.