Archive for news

Journalism takes time.

April 17, 2013 news No comments

I know the news is frustrating you right now. I get it. You want to know what’s going on and you want to know it right this second. But you have caused the very problem you complain about.

By demanding news nownownow you force news orgs to work faster than they can verify – because if they don’t you look away and pay attention to the ones that will serve you hot ‘n fresh news faster, even if it’s wrong.

You reward the folks who give in and then blame everyone for giving in.

It does not work both ways.

News takes time. Truth takes time to verify. Either you reward people who take their time and od it right, or you give in to the panic and hard dick that makes you need to know everything this very second.

One of those will get you better journalism and news. The other will get you sores from chafing.

So stop rewarding people for making the situation worse, stop thinking the problem doesn’t start with you and end in reduced journalism, and start fighting for better journalism – because I promise you this: journalists want to do better, work harder and deliver sounder reports.

Let them. Encourage them. Reward them. Please.

Or keep whining about it and railing when faster doesn’t mean better and why can’t you just have everything you want.

Your move, Internet.

Newsroom

June 24, 2012 humor, idea file, news, tv No comments

I like Sorkin. Well. I like his dialogue. Sometimes I like his plots. Some of his characters I enjoy. But I do love his cadence, the feel, I adore it. I am not as enamored of the man. Not by half. With his new show NEWSROOM starting tonight I wanted to get this out.

See the show is about, basically, how we have to re-elevate the news to a thing of glory. A bastion for smarts and truth and all that. And I agree. But Sorkin seems to think this can only happen on TV Network News. I disagree.

But to disagree with Sorkin, I wanted to do it on his terms. With a script.

INT. Hallway – Night.

Kevin and Lisa walk down the dimly lit hallway together, moving quickly. Kevin shuffles papers in his hands as he moves, almost as if he was searching for a cosmic order to put them in, a higher purpose in the relationship of one paper to the next. Lisa hugs a clipboard to her chest as if it were a security blanket.

KEVIN
It’s time to take back the truth.

LISA
And we’re the people to do it?
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Write. Play. Repeat. (the live show)

May 4, 2012 awesome!, news, NY Life, writing 8 comments

I love writing. You know what else I’ve found I kinda love? Being up on a stage and telling stories to an audience, in person. It’s not something I almost ever get to do. Luckily, my good friend Juliana Finch (Singer, songwriter, smart person) has let me share a stage with her before.

We want to do it again.

Please note a few things about that poster:

THING NUMBER ONE: The time and date are not filled in.

THING NUMBER TWO: The show’s audio will be recorded and released on the internet.

These are both important. The show would take place in Atlanta. In June. We’re thinking June 22nd, it’s a Friday. But we have to book a venue. And when you book a venue for a strange show like ours, they like to know people will be coming.

Right now we don’t know if anyone wants to come to our show. Seriously, this is a problem. We really wanna do this, but we need to know if people are interested. It’s 2+ hours of Juliana singing and me telling stories and both of us discussing, with each other and the people around us (that’s you) the creative process.

HINT: The creative process often includes cookies.

This show will make us no money. Actually we’re gonna lose a lot of money doing it. I mean, to be perfectly honest with you – we will each lose decent money. There’s travel, set-up, time… it’s not the cheapest thing in the world. And we still want to do it. Because we love it and we thing you’ll love it. But you need to let us know that you want to see it, that you’re interested in our brand of madness.

As for why the recorded audio part is important, well… partly because even if you aren’t there you will get to hear the show! But also because this could be the start of something bigger. But it can’t be if we don’t do it.

We’re not asking for money. We’re not asking for anything other than people who are interested simply tell us they are interested. That’s all. If you are in the Atlanta area, or will be in late June and want to see a show that doesn’t come around often (we did the last one 2 years ago, lord) – just let us know.

Validate our existences, people! We’re needy artists! C’mon!

…ahem. I mean… You know… Whatever. We’re cool either way. No big deal.

…we love you…

Life As You Know It Is Over

March 6, 2012 news No comments

I am often fascinated by what passes for an acceptable headline these days. Yeah, look, I get it, everyone is putting up articles and getting paid by the page view. They need our eyeballs to keep going and they’ll use any tactic they can to get that deeply needed click.

There are hundreds of links going by every day. You scroll past them, get told about them by friends, and so on. Something needs to make an article stand out. There has to be a difference.

Now you could argue that the best difference is because it is being produced/written by someone with a track record you’ve heard of and/or respect. That’s the best case, but a lot of people don’t want to or can’t afford to take that sort of time. So they resort to shortcuts. Misleading titles and promises of deep thoughts are the most common.

I just saw, for example, a link that said “Print is dead” and promised a graph to explain why it would never come back. The article (and graph) were on “print advertising” which is not the same thing at all. But one of those generates more clicks than the other.

This has been going on for decades, of course. I mean, who hasn’t seen the nightly news pull one of those “Could Your Cat Cause You To Die In A Chainsaw Fire? And What Does That Even Mean? FIND OUT NEXT!” stories? But somehow it feels like we should be above this. Don’t people tend to hate most media these days? So to damn them with one hand while picking their pocket with the other is just… shameful.

I like to think we have a responsibility as readers and content creators to be a bit more honest these days. So if you constantly share links, and share their overblown fear-click attempts at headlines – I will stop paying attention to you. Be honest. And if you provide content and use those same fear-click attempts I will stop reading you and passing along your work.

I think you should do the same. We all should.

Less hyperbole, more thinking.

FREE SPERM FROM THE INTERNETS!

January 13, 2012 news, wtf?! 3 comments

Turns out there’s a small but growing movement of finding sperm donors on Craigslist.

Now look. Fertility clinics are expensive. I get that. It’s fucked up and a rough bit of business. But turning to guys offering free sperm on Craigslist isn’t going to ever be the way to go. Come on!

I don’t tend to trust things on Craigslist if I’m expected to pay for them. Think of how many times you get someone offering a good deal who has wrapped a brick in a box, or some shit like that. And that’s for money! Think of what they do for freesies!

Free couch – with a side of Ebola.

Free guitar – licked by Satan.

Free shoes – cut off a hobo by seller.

So now let us consider what could possibly ever in the world go wrong with free sperm from the internet. Christ. Just listen to that phrase:

Hey, want some sperm provided by the internet, free of charge?

If you read that and thought “Yes, yes I do,” I have nothing else to say to you. Please exit through the padded room.

Because, seriously, what the ever-loving fuck! Would you let some stranger impregnate you? Because that’s what you’re doing. This isn’t even with the basic screening for health issues and generally whack-a-doodle-doo the fertility clinics do. This is just finding a stranger and going “Put one in me!” Sure this way you don’t have to have sex with that stranger, it isn’t like they’re offering to inseminate you the old fashioned way. They aren’t kooks, they’re just offering a free alternative to fertility clinics.

Back alley sperm donors. Wait, no, that sounds worse yet.

This shit is an episode of some SVU/ DVR/TBA/NBA/DERP/CSI show waiting to happen. Ripped, drippingly, from the headlines!

(Thanks to Gina for pointing this all out and to Cafemom for the clips)

Social media and the News.

September 23, 2011 brainmeats, news One comment

Please stop and think before you reroute information. Every time you ReTweet and rebroadcast a bit of data you are publishing information further and further out there. Everyone who gets your feed will see it and then if they push it, and so on. You have a responsibility to your own reputation to be careful.

I’m not talking “stop spreading that bad joke” no. I mean “stop spreading false news.” I’ve seen this done time and time again. Someone makes an assertation, in 140 characters of less. There is no wiggle room in it, it is just “This is bad and happening!” and it gets picked up. An hour later there are a million copies of it in the wind – except they’re all wrong. Because that bad thing didn’t happen, didn’t happen that way and so on.

Now the person who first said it didn’t mean anything. They probably weren’t trying to spread false news around, they were just wrong. They didn’t think. And then the same down the chain, including you, as the news spreads and spreads. It’s still bullshit and false information and possibly damaging to a brand or person, but hey (and yes damaging brands sounds like “who cares” but if you help scream at companies you rely on and make it harder for them to be able to do the things you like and call them out for things they didn’t even do – why would you think they will listen in the future – all you do it hurt yourself). It spreads.

It spreads because no one stops and thinks. Or they spread it because they “didn’t think it was right” and wanted to push it out as a way of asking, I guess. Though all that does is make the statement until someone stops you to tell you that you’re wrong, which sounds like something that could be dealt with through asking.

And frankly the number of people who ever spread the correct news after being wrong is minimal.

These are bad and dangerous habits. They ensure that, the more you do this, the less you will be trusted. It’s a crying wolf situation. If I can’t trust, for a second, that you check damming news you push out, I will simply refuse to believe you at all. At which point, the more you do it the more you become noise. Noise gets shut off, by everyone, after a while.

If you want to communicate, communicate. But if you also spread information, respect the information and do ten seconds of legwork. If something feels off, don’t just push it along the chain. Stop and ask and check. And yeah, sometimes no matter what mistakes are made. It’s natural. It’s human. I am not saying never be wrong, I’m saying minimize it if possible. And if you read this and decide “Pfft, fuck you, why should I care if I’m wrong?” then please, for the love of god, vanish from my sight. Do us both the favor.

But this is also why “social media” will not replace actual journalists. There is fact checking, there are editors, there is a reason all news isn’t instant. It’s because they have to care about being right as much as they do being there at all. And when they don’t they either get fired or become jokes.

If you intend to push news around – guess what – same standards hold. Get used to it.

The economy, in simplistic terms.

August 11, 2011 humor, news No comments

The other day I checked in on money.cnn first thing, looking for a number for a friend, and caught one of their overnight articles. These days we have an enforced 24 hour news cycle, and websites had better come up with fresh content as often as possible if they want to keep readers. Which means that sometimes, to be nice about it, you find articles that are realistically just filler.

Now the headline on this article (the link vanished and I couldn’t find it to link here) was something along the lines of The Next Recession Will Be Worse Than The Last One. The lede went on to tell us that, well, you read the headline.

So far, so good. Except the fucking thing went one. It kept saying the same basic stuff though – how another recession will be worse because we’re at a lower place than we were when the last one started.

Which is when I realized the entire article just kept saying the same thing, over and over again:

Small numbers are smaller than big numbers because they are numbers that are smaller. Bigger numbers are bigger, but smaller numbers happen to not be as big. And if smaller numbers get smaller then they will be even smaller than those bigger numbers which the original numbers are smaller than. If smaller numbers get smaller, while bigger numbers are still bigger then the smaller numbers will get smaller, as compared to the bigger numbers. If, however, the bigger numbers get smaller then those numbers will now be smaller numbers. Furthermore, smaller numbers are smaller and bigger numbers are bigger. This is because smaller numbers are not bigger and bigger numbers are not smaller. But smaller numbers could get even smaller, which would lead the smaller numbers to seem to be bigger numbers when compared to the even smaller numbers, but those are all smaller than the bigger numbers which are bigger by virtue of being bigger and not smaller. But keep the following in mind at all times! Smaller numbers may be bigger numbers which were once bigger but are now smaller, and at some point may become bigger again, making them bigger numbers not smaller numbers, depending on when you look at them, and if they are bigger or smaller then the other numbers which may be big or small, depending on what numbers you choose to look at it.
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Twitter broke the news?

May 2, 2011 brainmeats, idea file, news 2 comments

Last night the whole Osama bin Laden news broke. All across Twitter the news was being reported. Get this: They happened to be right. However, calling it the “future of news” is a scary concept because when you look at what actually happened you start to see a troubling pattern.

The NYT Blog had a solid bit dissecting exactly how the news got to Twitter.

All right, it went like this:

  • The President says he is going to give an address at 10:30PM EST. (He ended up not speaking until well after 11)
  • Twitter starts to make jokes and guesses. This is what Twitter is good at.
  • Keith Urbahn, Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff tweets: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.” and follows it quickly with “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.”
  • Twitter decides this is true and starts to spread the news.
  • When it turns out they were right, Twitter users declare that they “broke the story.”

Notice how there was no verification. No checking of facts. One guy in a spot to maybe have heard but, honestly, maybe not, said something which even he expressed as possibly not true. Based on that, and that alone, Twitter users around the globe decided they had broken a story.

No, they got lucky. I’m not saying that Twitter isn’t great and a useful tool for spreading information, because it is. But it is also a very good tool for spreading false information. Twitter, oddly, doesn’t get the credit for breaking stories when it claims different people are dead every other week. Oh, that’s because it’s wrong.
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Toy Yoda

April 9, 2011 news 4 comments

From the screwed up news dept:

New York Times to roll out own death-knell

March 17, 2011 news, wtf?! 8 comments

This comes, of course, via the New York Times website:

The New York Times rolled out a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 a month in a bet that readers would pay for news they have grown accustomed to getting free.

Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.

Well, they’re kind of right. I mean I know I don’t read 20 articles a month at the Times. You know why? They want me to have a login to read the news. So I see a headline, google a very similar headline and read an AP feed of the same story. And now the Times wants to drive people like me further away in an effort to remain viable.

Wait, what?! They want to charge me… to read… the news? Is that even done anymore?

The old gray lady has gone senile at last it would seem. These kooky motherfuckers want me to pay to read more of their news when their competitors are offering it to me for free. Next thing you know they’ll raise the price of their print edition because it is doing badly against the newer free dailies and they figger that their “loyal customers” won’t budge and they aren’t getting new customers anyway.
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