Craigslist Founder: Most Online Outrage is Faked For Profit (theguardian.com) 208
The Guardian profiles 66-year-old Craigslist founder (and former IBM programmer) Craig Newmark, calling him "a survivor from the era of internet optimism."
He's now investing "significant sums" to protect the future of the news industry -- "and rejects the idea his website helped cause journalism's financial crisis" [H]e firmly rejects any notion that all the philanthropy -- an estimated $50m in the past year including to New York Public Radio, new publication the Markup and local journalism efforts such as the American Journalism Project -- is an attempt to assuage guilt, a reach for atonement. "That takes an active imagination that I don't understand. I have very little imagination...."
Newmark, by his own admission not a journalist, says: "I had great hopes for citizen journalism 10, 15 years ago. It hasn't worked out. One reason is that journalism is a profession. You have to know how to write well. You have to fact-check. You have to know how to develop sources, often over years. You have to have specialised knowledge on a beat like disinformation or crime or birds. Citizen journalists can complement what's going on and, sometimes, citizens come to journalism with skills... Now I think more: what are the practical problems of professional journalism? For example, we've seen a couple of cases where bad actors will try to really hurt a publication by engaging in lengthy, frivolous lawsuits. There is a great need for shared risk pool insurance, media insurance in the US, and I talk to people about that...."
Social media fights, he insists, get attention but are not representative of what is really going on. Much of it is manufactured. "Americans are much more reasonable and moderate than what you might guess when you see a little Twitter war. But I'm guessing that the purpose of many Twitter wars is to polarise people and, in fact, we've seen that happen because you can often trace some of the fighting groups to the same location. Outrage is profitable. Most of the outrage I've seen in the online world -- I would guess 80% -- someone's faking it for profit..."
Indeed, he remains convinced that the internet is still a positive for humanity. "It allows people of goodwill to get together and work together for common good...."
The Guardian notes that during their interview, Craig also "cheerfully admits he is 'simulating' social skills."
He's now investing "significant sums" to protect the future of the news industry -- "and rejects the idea his website helped cause journalism's financial crisis" [H]e firmly rejects any notion that all the philanthropy -- an estimated $50m in the past year including to New York Public Radio, new publication the Markup and local journalism efforts such as the American Journalism Project -- is an attempt to assuage guilt, a reach for atonement. "That takes an active imagination that I don't understand. I have very little imagination...."
Newmark, by his own admission not a journalist, says: "I had great hopes for citizen journalism 10, 15 years ago. It hasn't worked out. One reason is that journalism is a profession. You have to know how to write well. You have to fact-check. You have to know how to develop sources, often over years. You have to have specialised knowledge on a beat like disinformation or crime or birds. Citizen journalists can complement what's going on and, sometimes, citizens come to journalism with skills... Now I think more: what are the practical problems of professional journalism? For example, we've seen a couple of cases where bad actors will try to really hurt a publication by engaging in lengthy, frivolous lawsuits. There is a great need for shared risk pool insurance, media insurance in the US, and I talk to people about that...."
Social media fights, he insists, get attention but are not representative of what is really going on. Much of it is manufactured. "Americans are much more reasonable and moderate than what you might guess when you see a little Twitter war. But I'm guessing that the purpose of many Twitter wars is to polarise people and, in fact, we've seen that happen because you can often trace some of the fighting groups to the same location. Outrage is profitable. Most of the outrage I've seen in the online world -- I would guess 80% -- someone's faking it for profit..."
Indeed, he remains convinced that the internet is still a positive for humanity. "It allows people of goodwill to get together and work together for common good...."
The Guardian notes that during their interview, Craig also "cheerfully admits he is 'simulating' social skills."
Reset to the early 90's Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
We all need to get back to where we came from.
Since I'm not Trump, I assume this won't generate fake outrage at my "racist" sentiment.
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We all need to get back to where we came from.
Cosmic dust?
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I wasn't planning for this to go in a theological direction, but, "cosmic dust to cosmic dust" does have a nice ring to it.
From a evolution / Matthew 3:9 perspective, anyway.
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There was nothing "theological" there. Gas and dust are what we come from.
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I always nod my head and agree when 'Kansas' sings that song. All they are is dust in the wind, apparently.
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From a evolution / Matthew 3:9 perspective, anyway.
Glad to hear you reference the gospel of Matthew. Have you read either Matthew 6:6 or Matthew 7:1 or just adept at cherry picking?
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While we're riding the rail right after that last switch engaged ...
I was debating a bible (lower case because there are many, and each has many versions) thumper about justification for hating on LGBTQ+.
He cited a bunch of stuff so I counted with the (very unimaginative) ploy of pointing out that he married a divorced woman who should be stoned to death and that he ate shrimp and would go to hell for that and so on.
His answer (I was expecting this one) was that that was the OLD testament which was replaced
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Lets compromise and just go back to being tetrapods.
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About half of you already are just another random DNA permutation. No additional effort required beyond your self-identification.
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About half of you already are just another random DNA permutation. No additional effort required beyond your self-identification.
All of you, us, are/is just another random DNA permutation... self-identification is the most difficult task, as it requires an objective self analysis we are quite uniquely unable to conduct.
Perhaps nature has provided us our false confidence as necessary to breed more little idiots like ourselves.
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Speak for yourself.
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About half of me believes that I/we was/were.
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Well played.
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Yeah, I see the resemblance [thoughtco.com], do you? Like the ill fitting jacket?
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No. Queens [theatlantic.com].
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Never mind the clown, fear the audience...
Re:Reset to the early 90's Internet (Score:5, Funny)
Removing real names from the internet would be quite a good start.
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Z80a is a real name. Well, it is if the A is uppercased. I still have a few tubes of the processors named that.
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Do you want a global 4chan? Because that's how you get a global 4chan.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
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Slashdot is as anonymous as 4chan is.
Post your whole name. Post your phone number, postal address, etc.
See? Completely anonymous unless volunteering extra information.
Those penny arcade guys were projecting their own behavior on to others. Anyone paying attention in the last 16 years knows this.
Re:Reset to the early 90's Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything, Facebook has shown us that the audience part is much more important than the anonymity part when it comes to encouraging fuckwadery.
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Your sentiment isn't racist (Score:2)
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So, emac or vi? Pick a side and RUMBLE!
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Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the outrage I've seen in the online world -- I would guess 80% -- someone's faking it for profit..."
I would guess it's closer to 100% -- for political gain.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Political gain and profits are both, at their heart, the acquisition of power.
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Indeed. And in this pathetic world, power almost never goes to the ones competent to wield it. Explains the various messes the human race is in nicely.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Belief sets need attention to recruit others to their cause. An unfortunate evolution in the algorithms that generate trending news for social media is to identify what's new, hot, and trending... as opposed to mundane news reports like trffic deaths and climate change.
Influence peddlers have learned to game the system.
How algorithms run the world [wired.com]>
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Political gain and profits are both, at their heart, the acquisition of power.
The part that truly disgusts me is when you see very intelligent people rationalize voting for those like Trump who will smile as they set the world on fire and blame everyone who tries to stop it.
What's worse is while those like Trump stoke hate, they know it simply works for them, since you weren't getting most of those votes anyway, and even if the hate he stokes boils over he will just blame it on his enemies. Hell unless you spend a lot of your time following the news you have no concept to how many l
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Most of the hate I see is actually the Left fuming about Trump (such as yourself). If being hated is "stoking" hate, then I guess Trump is responsible. I see him being called the "most divisive" as well. Most of the divisiveness is the "resistance" that refuses to acknowledge the result of the election. The Left pitting various groups against each other to divide and conquer and win votes based on division. All these leftists that think they're very intelligent people accusing the other side of what the
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Many Republicans would have stayed home is the choice was "Trump vs Not Hillary".
As it turned out, many Democrats stayed home, because the choice was "Not Hillary vs Hillary".
The true story in the 2016 election was that Trump did about as well as the generic Republican. He doesn't want to hear it, but he really didn't win the general election. He did win the primary, with a fairly small part of the Republican party that was tired of candidates that would apologize every time the Democrats called somebody
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As they said, its all about power - all the outrage over Trump and none about Obama shows who's get control of the narrative in the media - all the division we have today is truly about getting one of "their" people elected to power, which amazingly didn't happen last time round.
All their money, all their careful planning, all their setup to control the media, the internet, the tech giants, and those peasants didn't do what they were told. And ever since, the whole thing has been ratcheted up a couple more
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
As they said, its all about power - all the outrage over Trump and none about Obama shows who's get control of the narrative in the media
Cool story dood! Unless you didn't start paying attention until Trump was elected, you missed a metric shit ton of outrage over the Magic Negro, terror baby from Kenya, President.
Reading all of the news outlets that I have access to, it seems a little odd that with your outlook, you don't confine yourselves to the media that you find politically acceptable. If you want crypto-conservative biased news, you have many fine sources.
And you have a tell too. "Control of the narrative" That's what you want. Funny - some of us want some honesty, and you are just like the leeburls you hate. Just a different narrative, but the hate is the same.
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Probably, but in either case it doesn't change the bottom line: it may be fake, but it causes real harm.
Like the current temper tantrum the left is throwing about Trump continuing Obama's immigration policies. (Except now the detention centers Obama opened are somehow now "concentration camps.") Some crazy went and tried to blow one of them up to "free the oppressed" or something over that.
Or the many times that real economic harm has been generated by faux outrage being used to pull advertising or deplatfo
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Same here. Outrage is one of the cheapest "sentiment amplifiers" available. It is, by now, also an almost sure sign the one claiming to be outraged is lying and just trying to manipulate the audience. I would guess that anybody somewhat smart that is actually outraged will avoid saying so these days.
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Outrage for political gain goes together with fundraising. Everyone involved gets a paycheck at least. Gains may not always be profits, but it's a similar motivation.
So pretending to care makes a mercenary sort of sense.
The real question is why would anyone genuinely give these play-actors any credibility? Why genuinely listen to phony assholes at all? Do "outraged" people help anyone? Do they produce anything? What value do they have? Is their value more than the value of the things they complain ab
Nah. Profit. $$$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fake outrage is a highly profitable industry.
https://youtu.be/l63nY0AYebI [youtu.be]
https://youtu.be/_-P9_oUV9Gw [youtu.be]
There is a huge industry out there first manufacturing outrage, and then getting meta-outraged about the fake outrage in order to get views. That first example using the new Doom game shows how a single tweet suggesting that one joke in the trailer wasn't that funny ultimately lead to over 100 meta-outrage videos being posted, all of them monetized.
It's a long running tradition from the traditional media. Th
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Case in point, your post. Meta-meta-outrage. You're posting about the very thing you yourself are doing right now and sharing two fake videos that try to repaint the massive left wing outrage campaigns over Doom and and Cuphead as the opposite of what really happened. As recently as this past week the left was at it again, reviving the dead horse of Cuphead's supposed outrageous racism in light of the news about netflix.
You're right in that it's mostly about making money. Everything from college diversity a
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I'm not actually outraged though, I'm just noting what is happening.
Your post is a great example of meta-outrage. Take nothing, pretend it was some massive outrage, and get meta-outraged about it. Both about my post and about the Doom/Cuphead things. It's got all the tropes - "the left", faux victimhood, a fake statistic and even Anita Sarkeesian.
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Is there some kind of IoT device you can buy to monitor your blood-alcohol levels? I'd love to put that on a giant screen above my desk, like Mission Control.
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It's not. Trump has changed no immigration policies (it would be up to Congress to change immigration laws, after all) and everything he's doing was originally set up under President Obama. Nothing has changed but the man in charge.
They didn't care prior to Trump taking the Oval Office, but now suddenly they're all outraged. It's all fake, all virtue signalling for their base, in an attempt to build support and donations.
Re: Politics (Score:2, Interesting)
Trump is pretty much doing what Obama was doing who was in turn doing pretty much what Bush was doing.
We do not have a president. We have a symbolic figure heads that either develope feelings of support or hate depending on where you grew up. Voting allows the masses to pretend to have an affect on the corporation.
The only thing Trump has done is raise the debt. Yet for some reason the left believes he is Aldof Hitler and the right thinks he is Jesus
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Are you really suggesting that Obama would have:
1) Backed out of the Iran nuclear deal (which his own administration made).
2) Remove the tax-penalty of the Affordable Care Act "Obamacare" (which his own administration made).
3) Visited North Korea with no concessions in advance.
4) Trust Putin more than the CIA (or at least say he does).
5) Backed out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which his own administration was arranging).
6) Constantly insult Western European governments while lauding China and Russia.
Yo
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We do not have a president. We have a symbolic figure heads
That is the way the founders planned it, and that is how most people prefer it.
Would you want President Trump to have more power?
Would you have wanted President Obama to have more power?
Our system of government was created to limit a single person to being a figure head.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, which is why the 3.5 billion dollar spending package presented to congress last November to stop this overcrowding crisis was blocked by a handful of senators with pro-Latino immigration positions. They pushed it back eight months until the election season started before passing it.
The whole crisis was engineered by the people that ostensibly care about southern immigrants the most. Those senators let people that they champion suffer so they have a better chance at re-election. They are disgusting human beings.
Damn (Score:1)
Man, what a chump I've been; giving away all my online outrage for free.
We live in the age of outrage (Score:2)
And thereâ(TM)s zero sign of it going away or changing.
Re:We live in the age of outrage (Score:4, Funny)
I am absolutely and horribly disgusted by the mildness of your offense. Just go and die, please.
Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a number of factors. Certainly there is a lot of manufactured outrage, but there are also people who frankly enjoy outrage and who wilfully choose to be triggered. Plus Twitter itself is essentially straddling the boundary between real information and opinions and a virtual reality role-playing game where people can take take anything they want to whatever extreme they want.
Re:Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, "outrage" has become a thing to make me stop listening. I can only hope more and more other people feel that way.
Re:Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortuitously, we've devolved from, "If it bleeds it leads" to "If it outrages, it pays the wages."
Re:Yes and no (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Yes and no (Score:2)
It's akin to allergy which is not a good thing. But it's still better than eating up all the MSM crap for the face value.
Re:Yes and no (Score:4, Insightful)
Social media has replaced circuses and freak shows. Witch trials and backyard gossiping. Humanity has always been fascinated with spectacle. Now it's available 24/7/365, in the palm of our hand.
We're emotional creatures, and we need a certain amount of it to survive and flourish. The problem is that we're drinking out of the firehouse with social media. The only sensible option is not to drink, because you can't sip from that.
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Playing Devil's advocate for a moment, you could argue that social media has made people more away of the things going on. For example, Trump's recent outburst would probably have been done in private, and his staff would have made sure it never made it out to the public before we had President tweeting from his own phone. So now you naturally have outrage from people who perceive their president as being racist, and meta-outrage from people who don't like him being called a racist.
Re:Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
It made me think about that person - what kind of person enjoys having triggered someone else? I'm not even sure people like that are 'trolls' in the internet-sense, which IMHO do it for the fun. Many people nowadays get a sadistic kick out of triggering people after having exposed their screwed up beliefs.
If I remember correctly, people used to share their more controversial beliefs in a quiet manner, which I would hope made those same beliefs a little less strongly ingrained into their psyche.
But in recent times, having an manifesting extreme beliefs is seen as a great thing, in a weird and horrible popularity contest that attempts to tribalize and radicalize everything, making any form of discussion utterly impossible.
And the OP is correct: all this outrage works. It pushes out lower instinct buttons. You get more clicks, you get more attention, you get more power.
ow, a worrying extra is that the shortened definition of pychopathy is, according to wikipedia: "traditionally a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits."
How do people that enjoy having caused outrage, triggering people and causing social dis-cohesion fit into that?
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Here's one, if we want to start working on reining in outrage culture, how about we stop with some of the hyperbole. Like "triggered" as an example. When I was in school we had a guy who worked there who saw some shit in Vietnam. Unexpected loud bangs would trigger him. He's start having flashbacks to some of the fire fights he was involved in. This guy had PTSD in the worst way. A few years after I graduated he ended up committing suicide. That's what "triggering" is. What all of these people are c
Don't forget Trolls (Score:2)
"Citizen journalism hasn't worked out." (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither has corporate journalism, and independent media has in fact taken a small but growing lead in credibility and accuracy in the last few years.
Other suboptimal options which are closing the gap but haven't quite caught up yet are "Sifting through random contradictory twitter posts and believing whichever ones fit your biases" and "Blissful ignorance".
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It hasn't worked out. One reason is that journalism is a profession. You have to know how to write well. You have to fact-check.
He's blowing smoke. These things haven't been necessary for journalism since the late 19th century and Randolph Hearst.
Re: "Citizen journalism hasn't worked out." (Score:2)
Creating news from events is often combined with a tainted view.
The real news is out there, but the form is not always recognized. Just watch some YouTube live streams and you'll see some stuff.
Faking it for profit (Score:1, Insightful)
Most of the outrage I've seen in the online world -- I would guess 80% -- someone's faking it for profit...
I think Fox News figured out that business model about 20 years ago.
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Fox news was a brilliant financial decision. Nothing more.
Mr Newmark (Score:4, Interesting)
For the lack of highly lucrative classified revenue for local newspapers, Mr Newmark is blamed for the desert of local news publications in places like Youngstown, Ohio where:
Last month, the Vindicator, the sole daily newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio, announced that it was closing after 150 years.
But. It seems likely this mode of information delivery to the masses was dead already, just awaiting the inevitable innovation of destruction that is the internet, like a duckling eating fat polliwogs in the alligator-infested swamp.
Re:Mr Newmark (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I placed a classified in an actual paper was so incredibly expensive that I am not surprised this market has died. They were too greedy and killed themselves.
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"Greedy" would be appropriate if they made a profit at it.
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Greed is a motivation. No connection to whether it works out or not.
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Greed: intense and selfish desire.
Do you believe "keeping the paper running" to fall into that category, then?
Classifieds (Score:5, Informative)
Newmark offered to sell Craigslist, which was already becoming quite popular, to a consortium of newspapers for a few million dollars. The consortium passed, rolling out their own online classified system where you had to visit each newspaper to read the classifieds for THAT newspaper. You still had to pay for classifieds. If you paid more your listing would show up in multiple newspaper sites. It was stupid and clunky, and lasted three years before shutting down. By then it was too late.
Re:Classifieds (Score:5, Interesting)
not quite.
I was on that consortium. They were more afraid of Levis dumping display advertising in favor of selling direct on their own web site.
After display ads, employment classifieds was by far the biggest money maker in Newspapers and, thanks to people like me, the newspapers were convinced it would be easier to knock-off the idea of craigslist and do it better (have you seen that site? In 1998, would you have believed it could last this long? Pretty much no one did.) Or, buy it and then try and swat down every other new craigslist dupe profiteer out there.
We built Jobzilla, which became CareerPath which became CareerBuilder. And it's still there.
ListingLink became Realtor.com.
We did dating web sites too. Pet foods, car parts, movies, hobbies... We were well funded and we did it all. We watched hundred-million dollar developments get shot down by a couple of kids from a garage because of nothing more than sheer luck. The zeitgeist is a fickle bitch.
As an old timer who was there in the beginning and wrote a lot of the original code that shaped the early web, I love reading all the bullshit opinions on sites like this, offered as fact. It validates Henry Ford's quote that ninety percent of all history is bunk.
The beauty of growing old is that you got to see a lot of history happen. Pay attention young ones, there are some interesting patterns out there.
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If Craigslist hadn't killed classified ads, some other web site would have.
Re:Mr Newmark (Score:5, Interesting)
"For the lack of highly lucrative classified revenue for local newspapers"
Yes, classifieds may have been lucrative to some newspapers but there is a much more important consequence. Classifieds were small and numerous and none were critical to the publisher's survival. A newspaper that lived off small ads was free to report the news as expected.
OTOH, the big full-page ads from auto dealers, real estate developers, and other big business were essential. The loss of the small ads made publishers more dependent upon the big ads. And the big ads came with strings.
When you are taking $10,000/week from a major advertiser, for instance the electric utility or a local university, you don't step on their toes. Many of these advertisers are closely allied with local political forces. The scandals associated with those advertisers and their friends tend to go unreported. The subscribers are not properly informed. Eventually they discover that the newspaper is just fluff and the real news is not being reported. Subscriptions drop. The paper dies.
A newspaper that is dependent upon a few powerful advertisers can never be trusted to bring honest news to the subscribers.
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A newspaper that is dependent upon a few powerful advertisers can never be trusted to bring honest news to the subscribers.
Indeed. Difficult enough to run the newspaper in a company town, let alone remain true to one's beliefs... having to answer honestly to the advertisers making your company's payroll? Often, it's pick your rent money or your principles... if you think it's changed much over the last few millennia, well, that's your penalty for being too poor to pay attention.
Difference between Journalism and make believe (Score:1)
Journalism used to be a profession which people look up to. That is because people appreciate the hard works (fact checking, source gathering, in-depth reporting) that the Journalists did, in order to report to us what had happened.
Nowadays though, what we get from the mass media is but a bunch of make believes sugar-coated with pretentious authority.
The so-called 'News' that we are getting today are no longer what had happened but what they want us to believe ., and the role of the reporters had transfo
Re: Difference between Journalism and make believe (Score:1)
Not just that, but need outlets used to try to be objective. Now they give both sides an equal say even if one side is making things up without bothering to correct them.
Advertising money (Score:2)
was traditionally the primary funder of profesional journalism. Maybe it's time that the streams of advertising is again used for journalism. Maybe those proclaiming to be media companies start doing exactly that and produce something of note, not just fictional angry people using The Force.
And stop using tracking scripts while you're at it.
Multi-Motives (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the things cynical people do is find one motive and think it is the only motive. Worse, they think that is the only motive that all people do things.
There are three general categories of motive: Desire, Results, and Fear.
When my good friend has sex with a gorgeous woman, it is because he wants to.
The woman has sex with him because she wants the cash he gives her.
The cops arrest them because they are afraid their daughters will take that job.
The thing is, that most things are done for MULTIPLE reason
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When my good friend has sex with a gorgeous woman, it is because he wants to.
The woman has sex with him because she wants the cash he gives her.
The cops arrest them because they are afraid their daughters will take that job.
"good friend". "gorgeous woman". That's a very elaborate euphemism for getting busted beating off in the local park.
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Are you homeless? Because only homeless idiots masturbate in a park.
Like most people, I masturbate at home and masturbating there is not illegal.
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Are you homeless? Because only homeless idiots masturbate in a park.
Why me? It's not my "good friend" getting arrested.
If your not selling "paper" (Score:2)
How to get people to look at a web site?
Spin politics to get the ad count up everyday.
Saw this with the YouTube Atheist community (Score:3)
It reminds me of the guy who drew Bloom Country. He predicted there's be a formulaic Office Workers cartoon strip that took off like crazy and turned down an opportunity to write one. Not long after Dilbert came along and made Scott Adams a millionaire.
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Youtube atheist community? Seriously?
Wherefore?!
Re:Saw this with the YouTube Atheist community (Score:5, Insightful)
It reminds me of the guy who drew Bloom Country. He predicted there's be a formulaic Office Workers cartoon strip that took off like crazy and turned down an opportunity to write one. Not long after Dilbert came along and made Scott Adams a millionaire.
Just because the setting was "office" doesn't make that prescient. The early Dilbert (not what I think of as early, really, but compared to now) was of a pretty high standard. It's never going to hit the mark every day with daily strips but there was a lot of good stuff in it.
But there's only so many years something can run for before the quality slides. And it's a shame Scott Adams then went totally nutso.
The SJWs fired the first shot with "Atheism+" (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem was (and still is), the standard SJW platform does *not* blend well with skepticism and reasonable debate. It's dogma, and few SJW/progressive atheists I saw that did fei
A few more details on Atheism+... Elevatorgate (Score:2)
Anyway, using that page to refresh my memory, it's worth noting that Atheism+ apparently emerged seven years ago (2012), and w
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Without some form of balance,
Well, long story short I don't think we have that balance right now. And in an ideal world, I'd prefer for the biggest pundits to be actually open-minded and thoughtful enough to be largely outside the left-right spectrum, even if they did more frequently agree with one side than the othe
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I don't think calls
Good Journalism == Espionage (Score:1)
... journalism is a profession. You have to know how to write well. You have to fact-check. You have to know how to develop sources, often over years. You have to have specialised knowledge on a beat like disinformation or crime or birds.
Good journalism requires a lot of the same skills as espionage. Finding the facts, the sources, the story, and presenting it in a useful and understandable fashion. Disinformation has always been around, and while it might look like journalism to some it's not: it's meant to be plausible but wrong. Yes, we've had "yellow journalism" and many forms of slanted presentation over the years, but until the internet it was relatively easy to identify that based on the language used and the reputation of the publi
Poutrage/most fake news comes from MSM (Score:2)
Poutrage:
Much of this is blowing up a couple of Tweets from a couple of assholes into some mythical mass movement that must be torn down with breathless articles from HuffPo or RawStory, or with monetized Youtube videos. Shit like a black storm trooper in TFA (like Billie Dee Williams was invisible in Eps V and VI or something) or Ariel being played by a young black woman. The amount of poutrage is astronomically inflated from the source and thus far more annoying, assholish and obnoxious than the object
Criticizing the Internet ... (Score:2)
... sells just as well as hating on it.
Re: (Score:1)
Fuck shit retards.
Do you have anything not vulgar to add?
Why so angry?
Re: (Score:2)
For example, we've seen a couple of cases where bad actors will try to really hurt a publication by engaging in lengthy, frivolous lawsuits.
I think Newmark is talking about Gawker. Gawker was a website which was sued out of existence by Hulk Hogan after Gawker put clips of Hogan's sex tape and his racist comments online.
Incorrect. They were sued out of business after ignoring a direct court order.