Chicago Tribune Stops the Journatic Presses 62
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the news-on-the-cheap dept.
from the news-on-the-cheap dept.
theodp writes "In April, the Chicago Tribune touted its investment in and use of news outsourcer Journatic. 'We're excited to partner with Journatic, both as an investor and as a customer,' said Dan Kazan, the Trib's Sr. VP of Investments. 'Journatic will expand Tribune's ability to deliver relevant hyperlocal content to our readers, and we believe that many other publishers and advertisers will benefit from its services as well.' That was then. In a Friday-the-13th letter to readers, the Tribune announced a plagiarized and fabricated story has prompted the paper to suspend its relationship with Journatic. The move comes two weeks after Journatic's standards and practices were called into question by This American Life, which noted several Journatic-produced stories had appeared this year on TribLocal online with false bylines. Explaining why he went public about his experience at Journatic, reporter Ryan Smith said he felt 'people should know how their local newspapers are being hollowed out.'"
Re:The This American Life Program (Score:5, Insightful)
He actually argues that this saves newspapers money and therefore allows them report on the important stuff while outsourcing the inane stuff to Filipino freelancers who get absolutely no credit (and ridiculously low wages) for their (often correspondingly subpar) work.
You'd be surprised, behind a lot of what appear to be scummy businesses are people who really believe they're doing the world a great service. From seminar leaders to pyramid schemes to cubicle monkeys, a significant percentage of people really believe in what they do for a living.
Re:News Has Been Outsourced for Years. (Score:3, Insightful)
News has been outsourced for years. Read a newspaper and see for yourselves how many stories are AP, Reuters, AFP or syndicated from the NYT, WA Post or LAT. This trend was evident in the early nineties to anyone paying attention to the papers they read. It was not unusual for the front section of the SF dailies to be mostly wire service content and advertising. The net didn't kill the newspaper industry, they were busy digging their own grave before the net became popular. The net just helped them fall into the hole they dug.
There's a huge difference between running a story written that gives full byline credit to a real journalist who happens to work for the Associated Press and having a story credited to "James Albertson, Chicago Tribune" when it was actually written by Jayjay Alvarez in the Philippines, who has never even been to Chicago.
Re:The Ole' Chicago Sucker-Roll (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay, more rich envy on slash dot.
Do you understand what the word "fraud" means? Because selling content-free stories under fake bylines is about as clear-cut a case as I can think of.
There's nothing wrong with getting rich honestly. The problem is that so few people do, and the much larger number of people getting rich dishonestly has a lot to do with that.
Re:Hyperlocal (Score:4, Insightful)
But this isn't about the newspapers as a medium. It's about the content they publish.
Even if traditional newspapers migrate to the Internet they still have to offer a modicum of quality content to remain relevant. Let's not confuse the content issue with the medium of delivery issue, even if both are relevant.
Even in the Internet era you still need journalists to corelate and verify facts, to uncover hidden issues, to give stories the personal touch, and last but not least, to write with professional and even artistic command of the language. Sure, you can try to use machine-generated or outsourced content, but this story has shown exactly how insipid that kind of content is. This very story would have never been created by Journatic, it took a real journalist to write it.
It's cool that we're switching to a world where information doesn't flow only one way like it was with old TV, radio and newspapers... but it doesn't mean that we don't need oversight, validation and professionalism anymore.
Re:Hyperlocal (Score:3, Insightful)