How is The New York Times Really Doing? (om.co) 408
Wired magazine did a profile on The New York Times in its this month's issue. Talking about the paper's transition from print to more digital-focus than ever, author Gabriel Snyder wrote, "It's to transform the Times' digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever." Veteran journalist Om Malik analyzes the numbers: -> The company reported revenue of nearly $1.6 billion in 2016 -- remarkably consistent with prior years.
-> Print advertising revenue dipped by $70 million year-over-year to $327 million in 2016.
-> Digital advertising revenue, while a meaningful portion of the Times' revenue, did not grow enough to offset vanishing print ad dollars.
-> Total digital ad revenue in 2016 was $206 million, up only 6% from the prior year.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business, which added more than half a million paid subscribers in 2016. Thanks in part to interest around the presidential election, the newspaper added 276,000 new digital subscribers in Q4, the single largest quarterly increase since 2011 (the year the pay model was launched).
The Times' digital success is hinged upon two major drivers: affiliate revenues from services like the Wirecutter and digital subscriptions. Advertising might be a good short term bandaid, but the company needs to focus on how to evolve away from it even more aggressively. The Times needs to simplify their sign-up experience and make it easier for people to pay for the subscriptions. As of now, it is like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
-> Print advertising revenue dipped by $70 million year-over-year to $327 million in 2016.
-> Digital advertising revenue, while a meaningful portion of the Times' revenue, did not grow enough to offset vanishing print ad dollars.
-> Total digital ad revenue in 2016 was $206 million, up only 6% from the prior year.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business, which added more than half a million paid subscribers in 2016. Thanks in part to interest around the presidential election, the newspaper added 276,000 new digital subscribers in Q4, the single largest quarterly increase since 2011 (the year the pay model was launched).
The Times' digital success is hinged upon two major drivers: affiliate revenues from services like the Wirecutter and digital subscriptions. Advertising might be a good short term bandaid, but the company needs to focus on how to evolve away from it even more aggressively. The Times needs to simplify their sign-up experience and make it easier for people to pay for the subscriptions. As of now, it is like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
-> arrows? (Score:2)
Re:- arrows? (Score:2)
It shouldn't be "arrows" anyway, this is a list.
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UTF-8 (Score:2)
You don't want to be holding your breath on that one.
Code point whitelist (Score:2)
The last time Slashdot tried anything Unicode-related, vandals used control characters in comment subjects to mess with the layout and spoof moderation scores [slashdot.org]. The administrators had to put in a strict code point whitelist to prevent these code points from appearing in comments posted thenceforth.
Kowtowing (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't this sort of thing just kowtowing to Trumps use of "failing" every time he mentions the New York Times in tweets or press conferences? We all know why he does that - spread enough misinformation about a companies situation and eventually enough people get spooked to make it true. The numbers don't show a failing company, they merely show a transitional one.
Clickbaiting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clickbaiting (Score:5, Insightful)
I rather put it that Trump posts enough stupid things every week to invite Trump bashing. Live by the media, die by the media.
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Slashdot posts a couple of articles a week that invite Trump bashing.
AKA "actual news".
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Like the Microsoft bashing and Apple bashing and Firebox bashing and systemd bashing stories, Trump is just an easy target. The easiest, in fact, because you can guarantee that if you posted on story a day he would have said something stupid in the last 24 hours.
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Funny, the majority of the posts I see at +1 or better now are repeating some form of Trump's 'failing NYT' bullshit. And it is bullshit, as even TFS shows that the NYT is doing fine.
I thought it was the Right that was supposed to be the realists and the Left the ones living in a fairy-tale world?
Re:Clickbaiting (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it though? I'm not American but share the rest of the world's fascination with the crazy shit Trump says, but I don't follow him on Twitter or read everything he says - but even /I/ know he regularly refers to the NYTimes as "the failing NYTimes".
As he's the President of the United States, whether or not he's using the 140 character limit of Twitter to say things that are trivially provably false I think is extremely important. If the NYTimes is failing then Trump is saying a true thing.
If it's not failing, then he's making a statement as if it's a fact that is at best just completely unsubstantiated, and at worst a complete lie to push some other agenda. Given his position in the world, it's important to try to establish a baseline for how useful his word is.
So far it doesn't seem to be very useful.
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An awful lot of people are simply political automata. Press the right button and they'll literally DuckSpeak a response with no actual thought involved.
Trump does tend to trigger a lot more buttons, but in large part it's because he's a natural button-pusher.
Re:Kowtowing (Score:5, Insightful)
... When you can get news that you like from nearly anywhere and for free, why pay for it and why subject yourself to a New York City viewpoint from barely educated and mind warped fanatics?
"News that you like" is the operative phrase there. I'd like to think that it used to be different, bit I'm not sure it ever was. Maybe the majority always gravitated to the news they 'liked' in favour of the news that did its best to be accurate and unbiased, and maybe the generally more accurate and unbiased news of 40 years ago obscured the fact.
There's so much at stake now for governments and corporations wanting to control the narrative. 'News', (and I use the term very loosely), is often a make-or-break thing when it comes to elections, IPO's, product launches, sales numbers, law suits, new legislation, and even criminal cases, (to name a few); so simply reporting the facts and adding a bit of insightful analysis is kind of obsolete. The distinctions among news, editorials, and advertising have all but disappeared. If people already have a tendency to choose the (um...let's call it 'reportage') that they like, regardless of its accuracy or relevance, then the market is ripe for hucksters and con men of every stripe looking to sway the opinions of a constituency or a nation. It's no accident that Kellyanne Conjob coined the phrase 'alternative facts'. She was pilloried for it, and rightly so, but in one sense she was just pointing out the nature of today's reality, which is that, for a distressingly large number of people, fact is no different from opinion, and is simply a matter of preference. Our culture seems to have made 'critical faculty' a pejorative term; for the history of why that's so, read John Taylor Gatto, among others.
In an era when people can hear the 'news' that they prefer, for little or no money, does the NYT have any chance of long-term survival?
Newspapers used to be named Austin American Democr (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think it was ever more objective, certainly not since William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s. Newspapers used to be more honest about their political leanings. For example, the Austin American Statesman used to be called the Austin American Democrat. Similar names can be found in smaller cities, the newspaper will be named Middletown Liberal Times or whatever.
The LA Times had a very clear policy of simply not reporting anything that didn't support their political leanings. In 1884 the ignored Grover Cleveland's election to president for several days, pretty much pretending it didn't happen.
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The Internet has done 2 things. It has pretty much levelled our sources of information. One link is as easy to click on as another, so we tend to follow the links that gratify us,
The second thing it has done is made it easier to ignore inconvenient truths. A TV news program will typically present a number of articles, and if you don't like/disagree with one of them, you're still obliged to wait until it's over to get to the ones you do want. So at least alternatives have an opportunity to make a case, even
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NYT & FNC grammar (Score:2)
Re:Kowtowing (Score:5, Insightful)
They keep reporting what he actually says, as opposed to what he apparently meant to say... or something. The whole "what happened in Sweden" thing is a perfect example of how Trump makes unhinged and false statements, and then his press team and the legions of true believers will reinterpret those statements so, at least in their minds, he doesn't look, well, unhinged and dishonest. "Ah well, he wasn't talking about a specific event, but you know, general problems in Sweden." How is it that a grown man who is such a tremendous dealmaker needs a full-time public relations team to translate his utterances into something vaguely like the truth? And how is that you can condemn the press for reporting those utterances? Isn't that the press's job? But oh no, because the press doesn't do Conway's job for her, they're "pushing a narrative".
Re:Trump on Sweden (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for providing an example of how Trump's supporters happily reinterpret his statements so as to at least try to make them jive with reality.
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I'm not the one rushing around trying to find some set of circumstances to match to Trump's statements so he doesn't look like a fantasist.
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Don't expect a legitimate answer from the troll. He's been going rampant through the comments section with his bullshit.
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Being Trump TrumpoTrump
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
When I saw the headline, my first thought was that slashdot had picked up the story about the major newspapers buying fake clicks from Chinese bots to increase their page rank and advertising revenue.
See here [thegatewaypundit.com] and here [archive.is] (or here [8ch.net]).
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
o Taiwanese, Japanese, and Indians care way more about Trump (especially Indians), and India is an English speaking country. But there is no spike in viewership from these countries.
o As it has already been pointed out, these numbers are ridiculous compared to the number of speakers of English.
o Why only these three journals (one of which is banned)?
o Do you have any actual argument or evidence to support your claim.
o Please, realize that you are the idiot, your post and your signature are full of contradictions.
Now, back to the actually rational, non-brainwashed people left in this site. The data seems pretty legitimate, do we know why it hasn't been picked up by anybody (the news is pretty old). A google search returns very few results, and I couldn't find anything debunking it. Any actual, technical idea of why this info should not be trusted?
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Kinda hard to judge the figures where there are no references as to where they came from in the links, but there are over 1.2 billion people in China. Anything you say about the "average Chinese" is bound to be wrong for many tens or hundreds of millions of them. There are only about 65 million people in the whole UK, so mild interest from China would likely constitute a massive boost in readership for a UK newspaper.
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Probably for the same reason you will find few results for flat-earth denial, or phlogiston theory.
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Hard to read (Score:4, Insightful)
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More people hate Trump than like him. You are saying they should censor themselves then?
P.S. I'm really worried about Sweden. The latest terrorist attack against their country never made the mainstream news.
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Even as someone who has no particular like for Trump, it's getting old fast. The anti-Trumpers are raving like lunatics and their little fits of rage have worn thin. For people who ride him about tweeting about the irrelevant issues, they sure don't bring a lot to the table themselves. At the rate they're going they may have me voting for him by next election just to put them off.
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When I meet these people, I always thank them for volunteering so much time and effort to Trump's reelection campaign. The best part is that they usually react by doubling down - making them even more repugnant to normal people.
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TBH, that goes both ways and why I find the Horse-shoe theory applicable. Both sides are doubling down and the real question is which side is pissing off the middle more than the other. Right now, I think more people are getting fed up with the left, hence POTUS Trump. Yea, Trump is disliked but that was true before he was elected. Obviously, that dislike wasn't enough. All he has done is what he promised on the campaign trail, like it or not. Just like the ACA that pissed off R's that Obama said he would d
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You mean like Fox and Breitbart got over ranting about Obama and Hillary? That certainly hurt them. Face it, never letting go is now seen as the winning strategy, both in terms of news and politics.
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Sorry, but when your president is a habitual liar, at war with the free press and surrounded by even worse people it's not a "fit of rage", it's genuine and justified concern.
Trying to dismiss it as some kind of childish tantrum is a straight up silencing tactic. It's not going to work. Especially when the POTUS is prone to doing exactly what you complain about, often at 3AM on Twitter, or through his spokesman at a Whitehouse Press Conference.
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What does war with the press mean? Seriously. All I can see is that each (government and press) are vying for authority on truth which neither have. So what?
What I find funny is that news has become a 3rd person reading of twitter tweets. lol, because twitter has nothing to do with shit-posting. As the internet became more ingrained in society it was inevitable that politicians began shit-posting like the rest of us. It's just hilarious to find "old media" out of touch with shit-posting.
War on memes because
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Trump's election represented a repudiation of "got'cha" journalism. We have "gotcha" fatigue as a society. With media, it was always, "Forget about policies for a second, people... he SAID THIS DUMB REMARK! Got'cha, Donald! They can't vote for you now! Time to accept an establishment candidate!"
We're tired of being told who to vote for because somebody's remarks upset elite professors and business owners. They act like outrageous comments should automatically invalidate policy ideas. "Paul Krugman thinks Do
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They are just echoing the anti-Obama people who went before. We were treated to "stories" about his birth in Kenya even after his Hawaii birth certificate was published. We even had a presidential candidate honk on about it long after it was a dead horse.
Before that, it was the anti-Bush people who decided their inside joke was to call him a Nazi.
Before that, we were treated to the Bible thumpers thumping about Bill Clinton and Sex...funny how the Bible thumpers are fixated on Sex.
Before that, it was the an
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Yes! They should serve King not country! It's the American waaaayta minute, somethings not right here.
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I'm really worried about Sweden
What you are, actually, is ignorant of the facts. Talk to a cop who has to deal with what's going on there. Or better yet, try living with it yourself for a week or two.
This guy caught heat for being honest about it. [dailymail.co.uk]
But you can be honest about it without risking public backlash, so why not try it?
Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Insightful)
So now we've moved the goalposts from "fake news" to "blowing the subject out of proportion". I guess that's what happened with Flynn. It went from "claims that he was chatting with the Russians are fake news" to "the media blew it totally out of proportion" to "he didn't do anything wrong but pissed Pence off."
Nixon's supporters did much the same thing, invoking the same trajectory of "made up" to "not a big deal", and it ended up with him abandoning the Presidency before the inevitable impeachment and removal from office.
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Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't really avoid reporting what the POTUS and wider government does, and it's not really their fault if honest reporting tends to paint Trump in a bad light. Maybe they can lighten it up with more cartoons or something.
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"The Press is supposed to cover what the government does and what the impact of that is. You might not like that, but the rest of us prefer it "
I love it! Just how long has the New York Times been doing this? Must be right around 3 months now?
LOL
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Even anti-Trump people want to hear about something else once in a while.
Actually not. Our appetite for anti-Trump information is apparently insatiable, and that's a problem for us. In fact I think it's one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college.
Like everything else, negative information reaches a point of diminishing returns. There comes a point where more bad news doesn't hurt you any more, but crowds out other news. In a divisive election, you win by getting more supporters to the polls than your opponent, and for that you need media bandwidth. So while
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Failing business (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wait until he decides that, being the King of Debt, which he proudly proclaimed, decides the U.S. should have a lot more of it. And his Republican Fausts in Congress are going right along claiming the increase in the economy will wash out the extra money they are willing to spend under Trump which they were unwilling to spend under Obama.
They love to point at Kennedy and Reagan. However, when tax rates are relatively high, you can get a big bang for your buck lowering them...all other things remaining equal
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You don't get it do you? Creating a child company, moving all your liabilities over to it, then have it file bankruptcy is a very successful and LEGAL business tactic that nearly all big US companies use. Companies like Apple and Microsoft are doing this shit every day.
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"Merely a tool". No, it's not "merely a tool". Insolvency means your broke and the courts basically take you over and you're either restructured, if that's possible, or you're sold for spare parts.
But to say Trump's business ventures fail is to misrepresent what Trump's business is. He may look like a real estate developer, but in reality what he's selling is his name. He licenses "Trump", gets paid up front and if the development goes tits up, well that's irrelevant, and at least until recently, even if th
No longer all the news that fits (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the NYT no longer meets their motto of "all the news that fits, we print" (apparently it's not "fit to print", but that's a quibble).
Rightly or wrongly (and I'd argue wrongly), they've embraced "advocacy journalism". Having a monoculture is never a good thing, because it renders the entire organization vulnerable to a common flaw. The NYT embraces diversity in every way, except in the most important one: thought. Politically, they are a monoculture, and that hurts them.
The problem isn't that lockstep ideology renders their editorial positions predictable; that's fine. It's the fact that it affects their news coverage, and it affects it negatively. When I'm reading a news story, I shouldn't be able to tell what the writer's opinions on the matter are, and yet in far too many cases, it's obvious. Worse, it's not only affected how stories are covered, but whether they get covered at all.
The most damning criticism of the NYT I've heard was a friend of mine who cancelled her subscription a few years ago. Her reason was that she was "tired of hearing people discussing controversies I'd never heard of". When newspapers decide not to report on a story because they feel it might empower their ideological opponents, they're not being reporters, they're being advocates. There's nothing wrong with advocacy, but you should at least be honest about it.
And, as the saying goes, "that's how you get Trump". How could an organization the size of NYT get the election so wrong? Because they were looking at it with blinders on. They may have put on the blinders intentionally, but their readers didn't. And yet their readers still suffered the effects of the blinders, too.
Re:No longer all the news that fits (Score:5, Informative)
Elections are never a sure thing. Even fivethirtyeight was weighted towards Clinton, but everything has an error margin, and any prediction of something as large and complex as hundreds of millions of voters in what amounts to fifty separate elections, each with its own dynamics, is inevitably going to have a significant margin of error. For chrissakes, even many Republicans expected, and probably hoped Trump would lose (as is evidenced by the chaos now surrounding repealing and replacing Obamacare, as it turns out no Republican in Congress, save perhaps for Rand Paul, ever actually believed they would ever be in a position to replace Obamacare).
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yeah but that's not really the point. Who one I mean. It is the 'attitude' and the bias that it indicates.
When I watched news footage of the election I literally saw , horror on the faces of some reporters, other actually cried , it was obvious not only who they thought would win but that they assumed their audience was devastated and disappointed she didn't.
That is because they all( more then 80%) have the same political leanings, and any that don't are expected so shut up and pretend to agree. The sam
Re:No longer all the news that fits (Score:4, Insightful)
There has always been a bias in the press. If you think the big press agencies and newspapers now are bad, open up a newspaper from the 18th or 19th centuries.
The best solution isn't to abandon papers like the NYT, which despite any bias, still remains one of the best news gathering organizations in history. The solution is to find multiple sources.
And the anti-Trump bias extended a lot further than allegedly left-leaning press. A lot of Republicans were alarmed by Trump's rise, and remain pretty skeptical even now. Even Fox News, while generally the most pro-Trump of the big news sources, has had its problems with Trump. He is an "atypical" candidate to put it bluntly, and how does one cover such a candidate, when his supporters are willing to overlook, or outright support his more outrageous statements, and yet are so thin-skinned that anyone reporting those statements is accused of bias? How do you report "just the facts" about someone who happily dispenses with facts whenever it pleases him?
Re:No longer all the news that fits (Score:5, Interesting)
Elections are never a sure thing.
Absolutely true. But the NYT (and others) was not reporting the possibility of a Hillary win, they were debating the size of the landslide that she was going to win. That's why readers were so stunned. The NYT had not only not reported on the possibility of a Trump win, they had openly, and publicly, dismissed it.
This was a repeat of the infamous Pauline Kael line back in 1980, where Reagan's victory over Carter stunned the NYT, because "no one I know voted for Reagan". If a reporter cannot claim to have met a single person who voted for a president that wins in a landslide, they are living in a bubble and need to get out more. And that's the crux of their problem - they are living in an insular bubble, and they're only marginally aware of it. The lack of awareness alone damages their credibility.
For a news source that claims to be authoritative, not being aware of its' own shortcomings shows significant ignorance. And who's going to trust an ignorant news source?
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And there was a point during the election when a landslide Clinton victory seemed likely. But what of it? Papers having been making wrong calls for as long as there have been elections and newspapers. Remember "Dewey defeats Truman"?
The other thing about all of this that bothers me is that people seem to be confused about what constitutes "reporting" and what constitutes "opinion and analysis". Op-ed pieces are renowned for their bias, and in fact that's the whole point. Now it is true that there is a subtl
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Well said. Dishonesty in the news isn't only about getting the facts wrong. It's is also about what facts you don't include. I.e. Lies of omission are a big problem.
If all you do is report on one side of an argument is it really surprising that anyone on "that side" think of you dishonest? The best example I can think of is immigration. The argument has been framed as "racists hate immigration" and "immigration helps everyone". It is not the full story even if the "immigration helps everyone" is true. What
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Re:No longer all the news that fits (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that the NYT no longer meets their motto of "all the news that fits, we print" (apparently it's not "fit to print", but that's a quibble).
Of course you realize (and for those that don't actually know) that the actual quote is, "All the News That's Fit to Print" (printed in a box in the upper left hand corner of the front page on the physical paper since about 1896) and what you quoted is a really old joke.
From The New York Times [wikipedia.org]:
The paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print", appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page.
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You forgot the biggest one (Score:2)
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business,
You forgot the ongoing program of the whole paper being a blatantly hardcore left wing proaganda rag. Thats gotta be worth quite a few undercover $$millions from the Democrat party, the Clinton Foundation and god knows which groups of billionaire social manipulators.
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@donaldjtrump
Re:Echo-chamber fake news (Score:5, Informative)
Really, I have to give them credit where credit is due: by repeatedly pointing out errors (however trivial) out of the tens of thousands of news stories that are published every day, they've managed to get their supporters to the point where they'll trust a new story on www.siteiveneverheardofbefore.com/newishstuff/hillaryclintonpedophilering.html more than they will an actual newspaper. It's a real masterstroke in terms of controlling the narrative. "Anything negative you hear about me, it's fake, because there exist cases where newspapers have made errors, and we've selectively presented you only with those cases to create a narrative for you that newspapers are packed full of fakery." Not just newspapers - fact checkers, peer-reviewed articles, even official government statistics - all fake, because they've been presented with every case people can get their hands of of error, without the balancing context of the 10000x more that wasn't in error.
In the words of XKCD: "Dear God, I would like to file a bug report". ;)
It's the same thing that contributed to the Challenger explosion. They had a nice clean graph [wordpress.com] in front of them that plotted O-ring failures vs. temperature. There was no clear trend visible on the graph. The problem was that they omitted the successes, the cases where there were no O-ring failures. Here's what it looked like [wordpress.com] with that added in. All of the sudden there's a very clear trend of failure increasing at low temperatures - in fact, every low temperature launch had had O-ring failures, while very few high-temperature launches had. By being selective in what data you present (accidentally in that case, on purpose in the present case), you can get people to believe precisely the opposite of what is true.
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Re: Echo-chamber fake news (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a Trump supporter, and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I know Trump is a narcissistic asshole who doesn't give a shit about the truth. He's playing the game your ilk invented, and doing it better than you ever imagined possible. You're just angry that your side lost, but you know they're all playing the same game.
You're either a moron or intellectually dishonest if you actually believe that Hillary or the Democrats have some kind of moral superiority. They lie, cheat, and steal just as
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Don't forget Tufte's Challenger graph, which provides really the best visualization of the data. He's a master of visual communication.
If the information was presented in his fashion, a no-launch decision would have clearly been a no-brainer. This is why the soft arts are essential for engineers too.
https://groups.nceas.ucsb.edu/... [ucsb.edu]
Re:Echo-chamber fake news (Score:5, Informative)
As Feynman showed it was a management fuckup of ignoring experts.
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How do we fix this?
Seems like either we have to fight harder to make people see fake news and these dodgy blog sites/social media posts for what they are, or we have to give in and use all the same tactics to create a counter-narrative.
The same technique is being used to try to influence the up-coming French election, to get a far right candidate elected. Do we start posting counter-memes and creating blogs full of lies about her and linking to them on Facebook.fr?
Perhaps there is a third way, but it's risk
Learn from Wikipedia? (Score:2)
Report facts and give a list of verifiable sources. Don't expect people to believe that anonymous people told you what you wanted to hear.
It's terribly simple and they'd know it if they hadn't fallen down into the clickbait hellhole, but random internet comments often have better sourcing than stories from corporate media outlets.
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and that is exactly the problem. The AP and every major United States news outlet is more then just 'selective' about what data they present. .
They may 'pretend' what they are giving you is the news, but what they really give you is 'the news' they think 'should be'
Here is a good example that was given to me by a ex-girlfriend who was a catholic and worked in a local news room.
Standing orders, if there was a story that came across the wire and it involved child molestation and a priest it would be presente
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There were a lot of contributing factors, but yes, this sadly was one. The Thiokol engineers were against launch, but they failed to make a sufficient case as to why exactly they felt the O-rings were unsafe (there actually was a Thiokol document showing that not only was O-ring failure high at low temperatures but that the second O-ring ceased to be redundant - but they didn't have the document available to them). The Shuttle program managers were getting mad at them for insisting on delays due to the low
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He believed that NASA's delusional bureaucracy was ultimately to blame and it needed to be torn down entirely and rebuilt. The other members of the commission disagreed, which is pretty much why two decades later the crew of the Columbia died. Sadly, a
Re:Echo-chamber fake news (Score:5, Insightful)
And this will be a fair comparison the moment when:
a) Trump prints retractions of his errors when they're pointed out to him
b) The signal-to-noise ratio of the Times approaches anything near Trump's utterances
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Shut up, you fucking liar. [nytimes.com]
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I'd started a long rebuttal, but you're not worth the effort if you're not willing to attach your name. I'll just settle for this: Show any evidence whatsoever that:
a) There really was an IRS witchhunt for the tea party (hint: there wasn't, they also targeted keywords like "progressive" and "occupy")
b) Obama ordered it
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05... [nytimes.com]
This one was on Page 11 and drafted 2 years earlier. Make you feel any better, you shill?
Go jack off to Alex Jones and enjoy your bubble of ignorance.
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Here you go: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf
start on page 11 where they admit the targeting of conservatives was improper
The question is why nobody got fired/jailed for improper persecution of conservatives at the IRS. Why did e.g. Lois Lerner get to resign and keep the pension, instead of ending up in jail. Did Obama intervene, or was it somebody else? Who covered it up?
Pres. Trump, it's not too late to appoint a special prosecutor! Subverting the Constitution using
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That doesn't mean they lie more than he does (of course not), but they are a much deeper and more durable fixture of American (and world) culture than the shit talking 70 year ol
Re:Echo-chamber fake news (Score:5, Insightful)
Does trump a) apologize for his mistakes or b) blame someone else & double down?
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Where do you think they got it from?
Felix Sater.
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Re:Echo-chamber fake news (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why Donald Trump is more believable than the NY Times
Only if you are a self-insulated, ignorant non-reader who only wants to hear your point of view from anyone willing to tell it.
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Just because people believe something doesn't make it true.
BTW, Trump supporters take him seriously, but not literally. They aren't parsing his words for nuance and subtlety.
And yet he constantly shows everyone that he should be taken exactly literally.
Balance, for one. See recent Slashdot story (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot recently had an article regarding a law suit against Apple. The summary went something like this:
Google's lawyers said blah blah blah on Friday in the appeal they filed ABC's to law suit. Google says they blah blah blah. According to Google's lawyers, they are right because blah blah blah.
Not a single word about what the other company's position is. Does that sound like a fair and objective story?
Does such reporting *work*, does it strongly influence opinion? ALL of the comments posted on Slashdot
Doh! Law suit against GOOGLE, not Apple (Score:2)
I correctly said "Google" five times in my comment, but I see I accidentally typed "Apple" in the first sentence.
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Really, the simple fact is that we don't need as many outlets as we used to. One outlet can serve people around the world.
Naturally, there's going to be some consolidation - particularly if you can't convince enough people that your product is worth paying for above all the others.
Re:Kids these days... (Score:5, Interesting)
No it can't. There's value in local news teams that you don't get with national or international outfits. That's why the televised networks usually have local news followed by national and world news. Most people are primarily interested in their area, and only the top stories beyond.
Re:Kids these days... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta agree with sibling, and can drill down even further...
There's a reason I still support and read our local paper [vernoniasvoice.com], printed in the town nearest my house; this is a town that has barely 2,000 souls in it, mind. Oh, and the "local" TV news around here covers and centers on Portland, OR - which is 50 miles away.
The NYT isn't going to tell me the school board minutes, the city council minutes, or the local budget/tax/bond stuff. I don't expect the NYT to print a picture of my kid making the winning score at the last high school basketball game, or remind me when stuff like the Friendship Jamboree is coming up. No coupons for the local grocery store are going to be found in the NYT, either.
--
Also, there is a hazard in consolidation, one we can already see. The US (and UK, and etc) have a grand tradition of slanted/yellow journalism that is present even today, denials be damned. Only difference is back then, the papers proudly proclaimed their slants up-front (today? Not so much - you usually get denials from 'em). The best way to counterbalance that bias was to have competing outlets with different slants, then you could compare/contrast to get the actual truth of a given matter if you wanted it.
Besides, do you really want to go back to the days (1970's-1990s or so) where a select few outlets were the literal 'gatekeepers of truth'? Personally, well, fuck that. Let the marketplace win out - webhosting is cheap, the code for it is free of cost, and it doesn't take much more than a 10th grade education these days to set up a working bit of homegrown journalism. The market can (and in my opinion will) choose the winners and losers from the lot (see also The Drudge Report --love it or hate it-- as an example of a local gossip rag/site that exploded and went international.)
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Seriously? In the era of overt bias and propaganda, 'fake news', and 'alternative facts'?
Re:Failing, obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
The GOD EMPEROR spoke. HIS word is law. All praise Trump!
Trumpmen!
Trump is definitely helping the NYT to succeed, even if that's not his intention. By singling out the NYT he's giving them a legitimacy as a voice for those that dislike Trump (which according to polls is well over half the nation). If he really wanted to hurt the NYT, which his words imply, he should stop talking to them and stop talking about them.
Everytime he bashes the NYT 100,000 people wonder what it is they said to upset him and go read the paper. Same with Saturday Night Live, the only reason I've watched it a few times is to go see what Trump was complaining about (and if he had a legitimate beef), I know I'm not the only one doing this.
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Except that the polls didn't show either of those things. They showed them as being less likely than a Clinton win.
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Re:news will die forever mark my words (Score:4, Insightful)
The human brain is wired for pessimism. It's a survival reflex. We want to read about bad news so as to be better prepared in case something like that comes our way.
Perhaps the original "fake news", in fact, came from our religious leaders. They tell us that sacrificing a hecatomb to Zeus or chanting a magic spell such as "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet" or "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour" will ward off evil. Bad news reminds us that reality is different. That prayer and a positive attitude stop short of being able to halt the anvil falling from above, that mountains have more faith that they won't cast themselves into the sea than we do otherwise (and that TNT has more faith than either us or mountains). That it truly does rain upon both the Just and the un-Just, although the un-Just can generally afford umbrellas.
A steady diet of bad news isn't healthy either, though. Which is why we like our news sources salted with tales of baby ducks being rescued from storm drains.
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I am signed up as well, but still pissed about how they did it. I was enticed by the $15/mo. trial subscription for a one month trial. Then they simply continued charging me. I thought it was deceitful. I only put up with it because I rather like the in-depth journalism.
I think what bothers the Trump supporters is that the stories are not supporting of Trump. I would argue that the major events covered are simply not supported by Trump's world view....well, he doesn't have a view so much as an ego, and the
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Well maybe if conservative republicans stopped acting like giant douchebags who seek profit over duty, then they might actually write some favorable articles.
Any bias that exists is born out of republicans' general hatred for doing their constitutionally-mandated civic duties in a manner that clearly displays their level of shill.
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Your comment is about as bland as cheez-wiz. Can't you think of something a little more original?