The Rise of Hoax News 181
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reporter Luke O'Neil writes that 2013 was journalism's year of bungles: the New Jersey waitress who received a homophobic comment on the receipt from a party she had served; Samsung paying Apple $1 billion in nickels; former NSA chief Michael Hayden's assassination; #CutForBieber; Nelson Mandela's death pic; that eagle snatching a child off the ground on YouTube; Jimmy Kimmel's 'twerk fail' video; and Sarah Palin taking a job with Al-Jazeera America (an obviously satirical story that even suckered in The Washington Post). All these stories had one thing in common: They seemed too tidily packaged, too neat, 'too good to check,' as they used to say, to actually be true. 'Any number of reporters or editors at any of the hundreds of sites that posted these Platonic ideals of shareability could've told you that they smelled, but in the ongoing decimation of the publishing industry, fact-checking has been outsourced to the readers,' writes O'Neil. 'This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed.' O'Neil says that the stories he's written this year that took the least amount of time and effort usually did the most traffic while his more in-depth, reported pieces didn't stand a chance against riffs on things predestined to go viral. That's the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, Viral Nova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out: You don't need to write anymore—just write a good headline and point. 'As Big Viral gets bigger, traditional media organizations are scrambling to keep pace,' concludes O'Neil. 'We the media have betrayed your trust, and the general public has taken our self-sanctioned lowering of standards as tacit permission to lower their own.'"
Re:Hm, sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
"That's the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, Viral Nova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out: You don't need to write anymore—just write a good headline and point."
So, like Slashdot then?
People don't come to slashdot for news that much, we come for the insightful (and inciteful) comments.
Re:A natural reaction to Faux News i think (Score:4, Informative)
It was considered scandalous if a newspaper reported something that wasn't factual. Prestige newspapers still won't print anything that wasn't verified, and then work hard to regain their credibility when they find out one of their staff falsified the report. The reputation of the paper is valuable and affect subscriptions. Compare that to blogs that appear and disappear constantly with very little credibility to lose in the first place, or with services like buzzfeed that are geared towards click-bait and not actual news.
You want citations? Look up Jayson Blair [wikipedia.org], AP fires reporter and editor over McAuliffe [timesdispatch.com], and many other examples are available from a simple Google search [bit.ly]
You mean like CBS News? (Score:5, Informative)