Grilling is cool. TLDR is I'm a copywriter turned comms consultant. I work mostly with tech companies. My interest in journalism review came just from years of diving into stories on topics I knew and finding them grotesquely misrepresented. This then kicked up a gear when I wrote about Elon Musk and the Thai cave rescue in 2018 and had a bunch of newspapers/journalists shit on my work. I wrote an exhaustive rebuttal to all their points (and offered them money for any mistakes they could find) and they just didn't read it. I came to realize that they have the privilege of just never having to engage with criticism no matter how rendered. So I started my substack to effectively pre-publish chapters of a book I'm writing with a list of examples of really bad journalism from top outlets. Then going to segue from that to my own journalism-esque platform to put my money where my mouth is a far as building a news org with better incentives and more accountability.
> building a news org with better incentives and more accountability
Interesting. How do you envision changing incentives and accountability?
> I came to realize that they have the privilege of just never having to engage with criticism no matter how rendered.
I think the journalists and news publications receive and address enormous amounts of criticism. I see it all the time. Realistically, they can't address all of it, and yes it's very annoying to be ignored. (But if they wrote about me in particular, got it wrong, and ignored my response, that would be especially infuriating.)
> I wrote about Elon Musk and the Thai cave rescue in 2018
I notice the OP article effectively, if not explicitly, sides with Musk (and others) against ProPublica. Is there a connection?
> How do you envision changing incentives and accountability?
I'm writing a piece about that on Thursday actually. TLDR is a mix of paying for corrections (really just "more correct information flow") and maintaining a super readable changelog. Also a different reader premise. We'll try to present stories almost in the form of Wikipedia, if each page were managed by a really engaging writer with a good grasp of the subject, who was being fed high-quality feedback.
> Realistically, they can't address all of it, and yes it's very annoying to be ignored.
I've written about this pretty extensively, and IMO while I'm sympathetic about all the Twitter hate that some of them get, journalism let go of its public editors for a reason. And it's next to impossible to get a staff editor to seriously review anything no matter how you approach. Their whole culture is "ship and move on" at a deep level. And that kinda-maybe made sense in the paper distro days. But it doesn't really serve the reader now compared to what a truly native digital solution could look like.
> I notice the OP article effectively, if not explicitly, sides with Musk (and others) against ProPublica.
I side with him sometimes, and sometimes I don't. And sometimes where I do I still have a lot to criticize. I ultimately just try to call balls and strikes (with the correction policy keeping me honest). But as a rule, I think tech journalism is pretty poisoned against rich entrepreneurs now, and that the major corrective work in the info market is explaining how they're getting misrepresented, and why.
Bug bounties for news - great idea. Many eyes make bugs shallow, and news is more 'open source' than code in one respect: it's much more easily and broadly comprehensible.
> We'll try to present stories almost in the form of Wikipedia, if each page were managed by a really engaging writer with a good grasp of the subject, who was being fed high-quality feedback.
Yes! I've thought about that: News sites are still newspapers printed on the web: Articles are generally static. Beyond a few corrections and additions, they don't take advantage of the new medium.
So a Wikipedia-style, continuously updated article would be great. Using the current static articles, if I want to learn about an issue I have to track down and read lots of articles which contain much redundant content. Wikipedia is not reliable. Why isn't there an article from a reliable source with the current state of things?
The one drawback is that readers need a way to learn what changed since their last visit - whether that was an hour ago, yesterday, or a month ago. I'm not re-reading the whole thing and trying to divine the differences. Diffs are too hard to read. A micro-blog of updates is my first approximation solution: Edit it to reconcile updates-of-updates and to prioritize them (a minor correction should be listed behind major new information). 'Here's what happened since you left: ...'
> Their whole culture is "ship and move on" at a deep level. And that kinda-maybe made sense in the paper distro days. But it doesn't really serve the reader now compared to what a truly native digital solution could look like.
I agree, and that's another element I would like to see added: A feedback loop with readers, like any blog would have. The NY Times has the potential to be the forum of real experts and leaders. Imagine an international relations article with comments from former ambassadors, people with direct experience of the immediate situation, even prominent leaders, along with high-quality public comments (higher than anything else on the web - serious comments only); add to that responses from the authors and editor, and appropriate updates to the story. That would be as valuable as the article itself, and the NYT would become the leading forum, arguably the only serious one, on the Internet.
The NYT (and other publications) do themselves a great disservice by allowing comments that are beneath the quality of the article, diluting the content on their sites. If they provided a high-quality, serious discussion forum, experts and leaders may think it's worth their time to participate - and may feel compelled or be left out of the debate.
> public editors
I paid attention to the NY Times' public editors. IME and IIRC, they weren't practicing journalism, they were more like unempowered customer service: They would report information that fell into their laps, not seek and investigate it, and they accepted responses from NY Times' employees in the same way - 'the editor didn't respond', and that was it. I don't miss them.
Maybe it's just too hard to do it politically within the organization. The news organizations do have plenty of outside critics; it's arguably redundant to have an internal one.
> rich entrepreneurs
Hmmm ... hardly victims. Arguably the most powerful people in the world right now. The trend of protecting the rights of the powerful is a bit bizarre to me. The people who need help aren't on Facebook's board.
They didn’t engage with your criticism. Resist the temptation to extrapolate that to conclusions beyond yourself. The idea that as a profession journalists don’t engage with criticism is so demonstrably false it’s absurd. The entire editorial process is engaging with criticism, and it very often comes from outside the newsroom. On a story of this magnitude, that criticism is invited as a matter of policy before publishing (it’s called red teaming). Quite often, that process leads to rereporting, sometimes by another group.
You seem to have emotionally reacted to criticism of your own work (which is par for journalism) by declaring that journalism doesn’t get it and needs to be “saved” (from who?). I’m concerned by your personification of a bad experience and the malevolence you’re ascribing to an entire profession as a result, while on the way to sticking your fingers in the same pie. You are coming across as an unreliable narrator in several ways. Even beyond that, you’re going up against ProPublica, not Daily Mail, and it’s very clear from your piece (which I read end to end) that you dove into it in bad faith looking for your intended outcome.
It is this comment alone that convinces me you will fail, because you don’t understand why you weren’t engaged and why a lengthy rebuttal to incoming was a waste of your time. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder based on writing about Elon and the Thai thing and not having it go as you’d like which, in the grand scheme of things, matters precisely zero. That you offered money to those journalists as part of that process simply reassures me that you were blocked in their email because that is a fucking stupid thing to do, and I wish that were more apparent to you. You did dumb things by your own account. That almost certainly wasn’t personal — it’s just that money and its involvement in journalism is extremely sensitive for very, very obvious reasons.
fyi: The commenter says below, in a dead comment, "The best part is that I made up that I’m a journalist just to screw with you .... I’m a product manager at a FAANG, dude, and I screw around on this forum for fun."
Thank you for being marked legitimate by dang and using that privilege to level content-free, snarky replies that address absolutely none of the feedback you directly asked for in this thread!
Now who isn’t engaging with criticism, again? Literally a journalist showed up to engage with you while you’re banging on that we don’t, so, your reaction here kinda speaks for itself and explains a lot more than you think. Good luck with your news startup.
If you actually have substantive criticisms (that don't devolve to "I can clairvoyantly intuit your intent and thus know you to be an unreliable narrator even though I'm not going to be concrete/specific anywhere"), I'm happy to hear them! I've written extensively on this topic. My archive is full of specific examples you can adjudicate (many of which were brought to journalists by people who were not me). Earn yourself some correction bucks if you spot any overstatements! But your argument here was abstract, meanspirited, and not a meaningful attempt to take any specifics in my argument seriously. Hence why I screencapped it and intend to use it in my collection of journalists doing exactly that (i.e., reflexively dismissing concerns without any demonstrated curiosity or engagement with the meat of any of my proffered examples).
EDIT: Fixed two typos. (Also note what edit marks are what people use to avoid changing what they wrote after the fact!)
