Journalism is crap

[Snarky]

Modern journalism is circling the drain.  Whatever happened to reporters like Olivia Starr?

 

I just read a short article with the attention grabbing title "‘Star Wars’ fans left spooked as they realize a memorable Han Solo line didn’t actually happen"

 

It was short, 5 paragraphs.  NEVER mentioned the line.  Makes you want to beat somebody to death with an Olympia.

[Oubliette_Red]

 

 

Propaganda or Resistance infiltrators pulling back the veil?

 

[Frostbiter]

If I were as amazed, baffled, bewildered, stunned, or shocked as much as news article said I would be I'd probably be some kind of idiot.

[Nurvus]

Gotta get those clicks!

[Lines]

I wrote a reply to this thread. What happened next will shock you!

 

Read more

[Snarky]

3 minutes ago, Lines said:

I wrote a reply to this thread. What happened next will shock you!

 

Read more

Damn you.  I tried clicking on that three times before I got it.

 

*shakes old vampire fist at comp screen!

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, Snarky said:

Modern journalism is circling the drain.

 

First article you've read since 1882, I see.

[Snarky]

2 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

First article you've read since 1882, I see.

I read that modern journalism really took off due to....Jack the Ripper!   For the first time in history a good percentage of the populace could read (Victorian era Londoners) and they could not get enough stories about Jack.  So the little broadsheets became very popular, along with their ads.  Tabloid journalism launched it all.  

[Lines]

18 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Damn you.  I tried clicking on that three times before I got it.

 

*shakes old vampire fist at comp screen!

 

It was an unrelated instruction. I think you should read more, man.

[Techwright]

2 hours ago, Snarky said:

I read that modern journalism really took off due to....Jack the Ripper!   For the first time in history a good percentage of the populace could read (Victorian era Londoners) and they could not get enough stories about Jack.  So the little broadsheets became very popular, along with their ads.  Tabloid journalism launched it all.  

probably also caused severe shortages for fish and chip shops and animal rescue societies.

 

 

[lemming]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

Damn you.  I tried clicking on that three times before I got it.

 

*shakes old vampire fist at comp screen!

This simple trick will keep you slim

[InvaderStych]

The Number One Sign You Have A Snake in Your Kitchen

 

 

 

Yes, that is the real headline of a real "article."

 

 

[lemming]

12 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:

The Number One Sign You Have A Snake in Your Kitchen

 

 

Yes, that is the real headline of a real "article."

 

 

 

[Xiddo]

6 hours ago, Lines said:

I wrote a reply to this thread. What happened next will shock you!

 

Read more

 

I used to work in the team running the social accounts for one of the big news orgs. The accuracy of this stings.

[Clave Dark 5]

There's journalism, which isn't much practiced these days because it's not cheap and doesn't generate huge profits, and then there's clickbaiting, which both sounds like some other kind of "baiting" and rightly so, and is the equivalent of internet farming.

 

Don't mistake the one for the other.

[Snarky]

I had a roommate that worked as a copy editor for a newspaper.  One of their co workers intentionally wrote odd headlines to get people to read the stories.  

[Cancrusher]

Astrophysics articles are the worst.  The headline is always some click-bait hyperbole:  SCIENTISTS STRUGGLE TO EXPLAIN STRANGE, ALIEN, SIGNAL!

 

*Me, rushing to click excitedly on article*  

 

Oh, yeah... it's another gamma-ray burst from a pulsar.  🤦‍♂️

[battlewraith]

1 hour ago, Cancrusher said:

Astrophysics articles are the worst.

 

Click bait popular science stories are especially painful. I guess it's the combination of being hopeful/excited about new discoveries and the naive assumption that stories based on empirical research (particularly physics) would be somehow less prone to being utter bullshit.

[Oklahoman]

[Xiddo]

8 minutes ago, Oklahoman said:

If they move this topic too then @Snarky is gonna go feral.

[Frostbiter]

"Local vampire found living in a tree. You won't believe what his neighbors have to say."

[Mopery]

[Mike Morbid]

In the late 90s I took a two-year journalism course in community college. One of the first things the instructor told us is that it was a dying field and we would have a very tough time pursuing a career in it. I was thinking "What a great time to tell us! Not like that would have been useful to know before we committed to this!"

[MistressOhm]

So, as a Liberal Arts graduate (talk about a dearth of job opportunities!) I learned something fairly quickly after graduation.

 

A degree in journalism doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a reporter or copy editor.  But, the skillset of research and objective writing is incredibly invaluable in jobs where you need to communicate between teams of people. 

 

One of my jobs with The Telco was a technical instructor.  What this entailed was, reading the documentation from the teams developing new stuff (be it DSL Internet or video streaming applications) and not only understanding as much nuance as I could, but also distilling all of that down into simple, demonstrable concepts that I could teach to a class.  It required a 'bridge' from understanding something highly technical to communicating that same thing in layman's terms.

 

The same can be said for journalism - not only do you have the skills to gather as much information about a topic at hand as you can, exploring it from multiple sources and angles, but also presenting it in a way that A Random Stranger could read it, and understand from what you had written, what the issue is.  That's a skill that isn't limited to selling newspapers or driving clicks to a website.

[Cancrusher]

Interesting.  Maybe journalism will eventually be named information communication sciences, or some such.  @Mike Morbid I shudder to think of journalism actually DYING, though- especially with the huge amount of disinformation on the web, today. 

 

We need good, reliable journalism now, more than ever.