I just realized that I'm going to be in transit when the US election results are announced. I'm going to land in Delhi and start asking people who the American president is. How weird.
I don't often blog about news and media, although back in college I briefly ran a blog that tracked international media bias. The blog did well, but the project involved reading some 30+ newspapers daily, which was a lot easier when I didn't have a full-time job. That said, I often feel like I should maybe introduce the topic again, if only because it's what I know and love.
For those are even tangentially involved in the news industry, I find the Nieman Lab's "Week in Review" - a summary doc that sums up all the major media developments of the week - to be totally invaluable. It's a somewhat think-y take on what's going on in the world of news. It's also one of the few blogs I know that manages to successfully integrate useful aggregation and thought-provoking analysis. (Why is that mix so hard to achieve?)
This week's "Week in Review" is almost all about how news orgs responded to Hurricane Sandy. A random hedge fund analyst apparently deliberately posted misleading info about the hurricane to Twitter, and the falsehoods were picked up by several news orgs and reprinted as fact.
How embarrassing.
The incident provoked a lot of journalistic handwringing (articles linked above) over the value of Twitter, and whether the service is really just a tower of lies built on an edifice of vanity, etc, etc. The real problem, of course, is not Twitter at all, but how newspapers treat facts and truth.
The world's best newspapers and news-sites do not strive to be error-free, they strive to be error-rare. This may seem like a meaningless distinction but it comes to the fore in times of crisis, as well as nowadays when there are about 8000+ blogs on the Internet dedicated to putting Big Media under a very exacting lens.
I don't know if newspapers or news-sites mess up more often than they used to, or if they just get caught a lot more often than they used to, and I have yet to see anyone attempt to answer this question with data. Maybe it doesn't matter, but the question then becomes less about messing up, and more about an acceptable mess-up "ratio." How many corrections, for example, should the New York Times be allowed per week? A naive reader might say "0", realistically, a number like "20" would be pretty damn impressive relative to the number of facts they report. I'm not trying to apologize for journalistic malpractice, I'm just pointing out that newsgathering is an extremely complicated and challenging process that has never been foolproof. To say that today's journalists get facts wrong because of Twitter, and therefore newspapers all suck, ignores the underlying reality that journalists have always gotten facts wrong, and yet the NYT remains a more accurate source of news than Twitter. (Or does it? What is Twitter's so-called correction ratio? Can we even figure this out?)
Anyway, "Week in Review" then goes on to address Nate Silver's election predictions. In addition to being one of my weird celebrity crushes, Nate Silver has apparently been causing all kinds of fracas by essentially staking his job on the prediction that Obama will win the US election. The pundits are all pissed off, which has not deterred Nate, who apparently recently offered an open bet on the outcome. (In the highly nerdy world of modern election prediction, I gather a "bet" is equivalent to telling the other guy to show up with pistols at dawn)
Over on Twitter, I see that the NYT has chosen to play up the controversy, even running the tagline "Nate Silver knows something the pundits don't" on their app. This claim is highly dubious, unless by "something" they mean "advanced statistics." Nonetheless, since people a) vote irrationally and b) base their actions on expectations of the future, there is the very real question in here of whether our views of Nate's projections might impact the very outcome he's trying to predict. (In other words: if everyone thinks Nate Silver knows how the election will go, will that belief alter people's voting behavior?)
Finally, two interesting newsbits at the end: namely, that people will pay for news if they view it as financially necessary (what exactly does this mean?) and Europe will see an increase in paid content on tablets and smartphones. Putting these two together, companies that are interested in selling content should clearly a) be selling the fact that their info is financially necessary (trade news?) and b) provide their content on mobile devices, perhaps even exclusively on mobile devices. Anyone who has followed WSJ's recent attempts in this space, Bloomberg's many forays, or Politico Pro might see this formula at work, with varying levels of success. (Unfortunately, that seems to consign the sweeping general interest stories of yesteryear to the realm of public interest, ie, nonprofit journalism - but then, that's a trend we've been seeing for a while. Then again, a content producer could argue that every story merely needs to find its niche. The standout success of a company like NewsCred could prove one hypothesis or the other, but we'd have to look more closely at exactly what they're licensing to whom in order to know.)
I don't often blog about news and media, although back in college I briefly ran a blog that tracked international media bias. The blog did well, but the project involved reading some 30+ newspapers daily, which was a lot easier when I didn't have a full-time job. That said, I often feel like I should maybe introduce the topic again, if only because it's what I know and love.
For those are even tangentially involved in the news industry, I find the Nieman Lab's "Week in Review" - a summary doc that sums up all the major media developments of the week - to be totally invaluable. It's a somewhat think-y take on what's going on in the world of news. It's also one of the few blogs I know that manages to successfully integrate useful aggregation and thought-provoking analysis. (Why is that mix so hard to achieve?)
This week's "Week in Review" is almost all about how news orgs responded to Hurricane Sandy. A random hedge fund analyst apparently deliberately posted misleading info about the hurricane to Twitter, and the falsehoods were picked up by several news orgs and reprinted as fact.
How embarrassing.
The incident provoked a lot of journalistic handwringing (articles linked above) over the value of Twitter, and whether the service is really just a tower of lies built on an edifice of vanity, etc, etc. The real problem, of course, is not Twitter at all, but how newspapers treat facts and truth.
The world's best newspapers and news-sites do not strive to be error-free, they strive to be error-rare. This may seem like a meaningless distinction but it comes to the fore in times of crisis, as well as nowadays when there are about 8000+ blogs on the Internet dedicated to putting Big Media under a very exacting lens.
I don't know if newspapers or news-sites mess up more often than they used to, or if they just get caught a lot more often than they used to, and I have yet to see anyone attempt to answer this question with data. Maybe it doesn't matter, but the question then becomes less about messing up, and more about an acceptable mess-up "ratio." How many corrections, for example, should the New York Times be allowed per week? A naive reader might say "0", realistically, a number like "20" would be pretty damn impressive relative to the number of facts they report. I'm not trying to apologize for journalistic malpractice, I'm just pointing out that newsgathering is an extremely complicated and challenging process that has never been foolproof. To say that today's journalists get facts wrong because of Twitter, and therefore newspapers all suck, ignores the underlying reality that journalists have always gotten facts wrong, and yet the NYT remains a more accurate source of news than Twitter. (Or does it? What is Twitter's so-called correction ratio? Can we even figure this out?)
Anyway, "Week in Review" then goes on to address Nate Silver's election predictions. In addition to being one of my weird celebrity crushes, Nate Silver has apparently been causing all kinds of fracas by essentially staking his job on the prediction that Obama will win the US election. The pundits are all pissed off, which has not deterred Nate, who apparently recently offered an open bet on the outcome. (In the highly nerdy world of modern election prediction, I gather a "bet" is equivalent to telling the other guy to show up with pistols at dawn)
Over on Twitter, I see that the NYT has chosen to play up the controversy, even running the tagline "Nate Silver knows something the pundits don't" on their app. This claim is highly dubious, unless by "something" they mean "advanced statistics." Nonetheless, since people a) vote irrationally and b) base their actions on expectations of the future, there is the very real question in here of whether our views of Nate's projections might impact the very outcome he's trying to predict. (In other words: if everyone thinks Nate Silver knows how the election will go, will that belief alter people's voting behavior?)
Finally, two interesting newsbits at the end: namely, that people will pay for news if they view it as financially necessary (what exactly does this mean?) and Europe will see an increase in paid content on tablets and smartphones. Putting these two together, companies that are interested in selling content should clearly a) be selling the fact that their info is financially necessary (trade news?) and b) provide their content on mobile devices, perhaps even exclusively on mobile devices. Anyone who has followed WSJ's recent attempts in this space, Bloomberg's many forays, or Politico Pro might see this formula at work, with varying levels of success. (Unfortunately, that seems to consign the sweeping general interest stories of yesteryear to the realm of public interest, ie, nonprofit journalism - but then, that's a trend we've been seeing for a while. Then again, a content producer could argue that every story merely needs to find its niche. The standout success of a company like NewsCred could prove one hypothesis or the other, but we'd have to look more closely at exactly what they're licensing to whom in order to know.)
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