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From Slashdot News Story | Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates

Re:Evolve or die….. (Score:5, Insightful)

by jmorris42 (1458) * <jmorris@@@beau…org> on Wednesday October 28, @08:58PM (#29905043)
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The problem is, newspapers isn’t being replaced by anything superior.

No you, like almost everyone in the legacy media, miss the root of the problem. The overhead of dead tree distribution is a problem for newspapers. But it isn’t THE problem. Otherwise the other parts of the legacy media such as the big three network newscasts wouldn’t be suffering the same decline. Hollywood is having trouble selling both movie tickets and DVDs, the music industry is declining. Network television has been in decline for decades. The Internet isn’t the problem. It’s the content, stupid!

People are dropping newspaper subscriptions because there is nothing in them anymore that can’t be read online. If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven’t picked one up lately and actually read it. It’s all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip and what doesn’t fit into one of above categories it is probably inaccurate anyway. And that damnation is even before bringing up the political bias that has become so blatant the blind can now see it. But even worse than the lies, distortions and faked news is what they leave out of the news because it doesn’t fit their prefab storylines

Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn’t just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater. If you asked a doctor about medical coverage he would give you just as many horror stories. Mass media always had the problem of trying to dumb down stories for a mass audience, but years of budget slashing and general decline in overall education means it is now semi-literate reporters reporting for morons.

Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print? If they aren’t even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story? And unlike most bloggers, they don’t even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.

And it isn’t the Internet or piracy that is killing Hollywood, it is the fact that have been pumping out crap for years.

Re:Evolve or die….. (Score:4, Insightful)

by internic (453511) on Thursday October 29, @12:21AM (#29906559)

If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven’t picked one up lately and actually read it. It’s all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip

What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called “torture memos”, or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, or the neglect of injured veterans at the VA? That was reporting all done by print newspapers during recent years that is not just press release or opinion piece or gossip. I often hear a refrain like the one I’ve quoted above from would-be critics of the “mainstream media”, but it simply isn’t true. And, as far as I can see, there are few people (if any) in the “new media” doing that sort of very crucial work. I will certainly grant, though, that newspapers have featured more and more opinion, rumors, etc. over time, presumably because it’s cheap and people seem to like it.

Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn’t just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater.

[citation needed]?
People in the general population have differing levels of familiarity with different subjects. For example, your average American is much more likely to know a significant amount about history than mathematics or, say, astronomy. This non-uniformity will be even more pronounced in specialized group, like people in a particular profession. The bottom line is that there will be certain sorts of topics that journalists are likely to be more familiar with and others they’re unlikely to know much about. Absent some compelling evidence, it doesn’t make much sense to assume that the rate of errors in one particular topic transfer over to all topics. Given that journalism is usually lumped with the “liberal arts” and journalism degree programs send to stress those sorts of topics, it’s probably reasonable to assume that a journalist is less likely to have a good basis for understanding tech than, say, politics and law.

Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print?

But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don’t have a perfect record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that’s fallacious reasoning. The question you’d have to answer is how their accuracy and journalistic standards compare to blogs (or whatever alternative you’re talking about). Clearly, this would take some work to examine.

If they aren’t even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story?

Isn’t fact checker a distinct function from copy editor at a newspaper? If so, then it’s entirely possible that one can be under-resourced and not the other. Besides which, I’d imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.

And unlike most bloggers, they don’t even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.

Again, [citation needed]. I’ve seen all sorts of radically mistaken stuff online. Sometimes corrections are posted, and sometime not. TV seems to be totally abysmal on this front.

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