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I left the industry recently, but before that I was a reporter covering business in the Silicon Valley for a regional newspaper for about 6 years, so I'd be happy to address questions about business and technology reporting as well as "life after journalism" type questions.
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Aug 21, 2014 21:09
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Baby Babbeh posted:I left the industry recently, but before that I was a reporter covering business in the Silicon Valley for a regional newspaper for about 6 years, so I'd be happy to address questions about business and technology reporting as well as "life after journalism" type questions. Also, why did you leave, and where did you go after?
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Aug 21, 2014 21:53
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FactsAreUseless posted:How close was your relationship with the businesses you regularly covered? Did you deal with a lot of the same contacts/PR people/whoever every time you did a story? How close were you to the companies you covered? Did you deal with a lot of the same contacts/PR people/whoever every time you did a story? It depended, but in general not particularly. That was largely an artifact of my beat — I spent most of my career covering startups, and the startup scene is always changing, with new companies entering and others imploding. I had a slightly closer relationship with their venture capital investors, since those people were more constant, and there were a few companies that had been around for a while that I had developed a good relationship with. Once I started covering more established companies I was dealing with the same PR contacts more, but even that was kind of changeable — folks move around a lot in Silicon Valley. Outside PR was generally worthless and I worked to go around them as quickly as possible in most cases. To talk more generally about access politics in the tech industry, it is a huge problem but really only at the highest levels. Startups are so starved for press generally that they can't afford to dictate terms, large tech companies run everything and have their own media channels so they basically don't care if anyone ever writes about them. That means the largest organizations basically pick and choose who they talk to — Apple, for example, is basically a black hole if your name isn't Walt Mossberg. It's very hard to get access for anything remotely critical, and access to top executives is generally difficult and takes months to set up. True "scoops" in the tech industry are rare, generally coming when a pissed off employee sends you something — with the exception of certain people like Kara Swisher who have been doing it for decades and have unusually good sources. It is the case generally that once you've done one or two stories about a company and you're more of a known quantity that people are willing to work with you, but they still play access games. I'd say covering tech is pretty similar to covering politics in that regard. Did you deal with a lot of the same contacts/PR people/whoever every time you did a story? The contacts I had that were the most stable were stock analysts. I knew which analysts covered which industries and which companies, so when I needed some outside verification of something I was hearing, a quote on an industry or just to sort of find out what had been happening, that's generally who I'd call. Also, why did you leave, and where did you go after? Short answer, I was just given too good an offer to pass up at a tech startup. I'm doing "content marketing" now, which is basically researching and writing blogs and whitepapers and the like to promote the company as a leader in its space. This is getting to be a fairly in-demand job description lately, because pretty much everybody has a blog which means every company needs a content strategy to help them stand out. It's not journalism, but it's closer to it than traditional PR work. Anecdotally, hearing from some people I know who run content teams and reporters who've made the jump, people who have journalism experience are WAY better at this than traditional marketing folks.
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Aug 22, 2014 19:09
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How are "missing white girl" stories treated behind the scenes? When a missing person story comes down the wire, do reporters look for pictures of the person before they decide to cover it? Are reporters as cynical about this type of story as the public seems to be?
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Aug 22, 2014 20:18
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Septic Knothead posted:How are "missing white girl" stories treated behind the scenes? When a missing person story comes down the wire, do reporters look for pictures of the person before they decide to cover it? Are reporters as cynical about this type of story as the public seems to be? The one I was involved with was our number one priority. Maybe because its our audience (military and family members) We were supplied a picture via the school an we made announcements on social media and radio constantly. At least twice an hour. From our point of view, we knew we were a good chance of helping that kid get found if he wasnt in a ditch somewhere. Everyone took it seriously and didnt joke about it. We were realistic though. Dude probably ran away for a few days and stayed with some friends Found him a few days later. Dude got lost and didnt have a charged cellphone or something. Anti climatic really
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Aug 22, 2014 20:34
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Septic Knothead posted:How are "missing white girl" stories treated behind the scenes? When a missing person story comes down the wire, do reporters look for pictures of the person before they decide to cover it? Are reporters as cynical about this type of story as the public seems to be? About 90% of the time both you (the media) and the cops have a solid feel that the kid is getting nailed by her boyfriend in the back of a minivan and will be home around 3am. You see the pic and the boy is wearing black lipstick with eight eyebrow rings - he's a runaway. I know it's a stereotype, but it's always loving true. Occasionally you get a for-reals kidnapping, and that's a big story. In my experience, it has more to do with timing than anything. Your kid goes missing while there's a wildfire threatening houses in your DMA, it'll never get coverage. Your kid goes missing on a Tuesday in the middle of a news cycle (like 10am-ish). In California, we're now sending text messages to every resident and paying millions of dollars to erect highway signs to find custody dispute kids that generally turn up in a day or two anyhow. This really throws the above rules out the window, and now every kid who was due home after school at 2:30 who isn't found by 3:15 into ZOMG WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN territory. In general, there is nobody more cynical than on-the-ground media people. You can't be soft and be in this business, you'll explode. You may read my eye-rolling from the undertones in this post. Not only do I have distaste for missing kid stories, even when the kid legitimately turns out to be brutally murdered (which, don't get me wrong, is sad), I hate the ensuing decades of naming useless laws after the kid.
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Aug 22, 2014 20:51
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What about the disproportionate coverage when the missing person is "19 Year Old Denise Robertson" vs "19 Year Old Keisha Jackson?" How do reporters view the heavier focus on the white girl?
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Aug 22, 2014 20:58
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Yeah, what a lot of people who aren't glued to police scanners don't realize is how often kids go missing, and how often its nothing. I mostly worked for print and mostly at weeklies, so it was less of a concern for us than it would be for broadcast people — we wouldn't even mention it unless a child had been missing for several days and it was pretty obviously more serious.
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Aug 22, 2014 21:02
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I'm a photog at an ABC affiliate in a fairly small market in one of the most violent small/medium cities in America. I've actually only been here about 3 months, starting as a PA but I quickly got my hands on some cameras and got outside. It might be the fact that I only just started but it's some of the most fun I've had working in my life. One of our reporters is also a recent grad and I've been going out to shoot packs with her lately and it's been a blast. That said, I already know I don't want to stick around - I'd rather get my experience and move on to other things. I certainly don't think I could be a producer. I'm a solid writer but I couldn't possibly do it all day long.Antifreeze Head posted:Just wait until your municipality switches over to digital police radios as then you won't have it at all! This recently happened and it's been a bit of a clusterfuck for us. Bio-Hazard posted:
I can speak to this - after some recent turnover the station has been going in the direction of more MMJs and drat, they just can't do it.
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Aug 23, 2014 03:09
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Kavingi posted:
A lot of times, it isn't that these individuals can't learn how to be good at everything, it's just that there are only a certain amount of hours in the day, especially at a small publication with daily deadlines. You hopefully can grip it just enough to be competent. There's a lot I'd love to learn how to do in Photoshop, but haven't had time at work and haven't had the energy to do it at home.
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Aug 23, 2014 08:00
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Septic Knothead posted:What about the disproportionate coverage when the missing person is "19 Year Old Denise Robertson" vs "19 Year Old Keisha Jackson?" How do reporters view the heavier focus on the white girl? If you're thinking that somebody calls the assignment desk and says their 12 year old girl is missing, our assignment editor takes the cigar from his mouth and growls "WELL, WHAT COLOR IS SHE??"... it's not like that. There are a million factors. Interesting, semi-related story... rewind to the beginning of the war in Iraq. My city's first casualty is reported. The worst job in news (especially at the time) is to walk up to the door and ask to talk to the family. We do it anyway. Turns out they're black folk. Turns out they want to talk. Set up in their livingroom and interview mom. She tells us about the kid. Finish the interview and ask to shoot some pictures. She produces a picture of the kid in about the 9th grade. I blow the dust off it and shoot it. Great. What else you got? Anything more recent? Nope. Nothing. Some baby pictures there in the hallway. This lady had a 25 year old in Iraq, and the only photo she had of him was in the 9th grade. I even asked if she could call somebody - girlfriend, brother, sister... who might have photos. Nope, nothing. That story was dead in 24 hours. Because it's teleVISION. It's not like we were like "eh, he's black, let's cover the waterskiing squirrel instead"... but because we had one. still. photo. Contrast this with a (theoretic) 25 year old white kid. Whose parents have albums of photos of him, and videotape from his graduation from boot camp. That story would live all week, and onto the following weeks. The missing kid stories sometimes go like that.
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Aug 23, 2014 08:43
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RC and Moon Pie posted:A lot of times, it isn't that these individuals can't learn how to be good at everything, it's just that there are only a certain amount of hours in the day, especially at a small publication with daily deadlines. You hopefully can grip it just enough to be competent. There's a lot I'd love to learn how to do in Photoshop, but haven't had time at work and haven't had the energy to do it at home. Oh I'm not trying to be a dick or disparage them, I fully understand how it feels to be in that position. I didn't realize how dickish that post came off at first.
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Aug 23, 2014 13:33
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Volmarias posted:Given the slow decline of print media, is there any hope for its salvation? Probably not, except for online. All media now competes in the same space online. There will always be subscription print media as long as people keep subscribing. Clamps McGraw posted:Can you tell me about "hate pieces" in tabloids? ... Basically, "write 700 words to piss off the lefties and get pagewviews." The description you give is pretty accurate, people will click a link just because the headline pisses them off. jacobs posted:How accurate is this quote: Sounds like someone lost a few too many battles inside the newsroom. "I'll write a book about this place someday, and tell everyone the TRUTH!" Septic Knothead posted:How are "missing white girl" stories treated behind the scenes? Are reporters as cynical about this type of story as the public seems to be? We usually just go with what the police tell us, since they get the reports and pass the verified ones on to us. There are a ton of missing children every year, we do probably one a week. Race isn't a factor, it's just another opportunity to do a missing person story. Baby Babbeh is correct. Kavingi posted:I'm a photog at an ABC affiliate in a fairly small market ... It might be the fact that I only just started but it's some of the most fun I've had working in my life ... I already know I don't want to stick around - I'd rather get my experience and move on to other things. Have fun while you can, it's not for everybody and I sure don't want to be hauling my gear around when I'm 50+, for sure. Baby Babbeh posted:I left the industry recently ... I'd be happy to address questions about business and technology reporting as well as "life after journalism" type questions. Life after journalism... Is it as good as they say it is??? Normal hours and decent pay??? Time to raise a family and enjoy life??? Everyone is just so happy after they get out...
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Aug 23, 2014 21:48
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I do not know a single full-time reporter who is not also a heavy drinker.
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Aug 24, 2014 01:02
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How right am I in getting angry at journalists letting politicians/other bigwigs dodge their interview questions?
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Aug 24, 2014 07:09
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Rich Peppiatt who used to work at the Daily Star recounted a story once where he was half way to interview some parents of a missing boy and then got a call when he was half way driving there from his editor. "Come back, he's black" It happens at the shittier tabloids.
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Aug 24, 2014 18:50
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nielsm posted:How right am I in getting angry at journalists letting politicians/other bigwigs dodge their interview questions? If the politico isn't going to answer, that's the way it is. In real life, you can't "demand" answers. If they are asked a question and dodge it, you know they are a shady politician. We did our job (asking the question), you have to do yours (realizing the guy is a slimeball). thehustler posted:"Come back, he's black"
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Aug 25, 2014 07:48
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photomikey posted:If you're expecting the journo to say, "no really, tell me the answer!" after he gets a non-answer to a question, and then the politico to break down and be honest, I think you might be asking for too much from the establishment. Possibly. But the Leveson Inquiry showed what they will sink to in great detail, so I'm inclined to believe it.
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Aug 25, 2014 13:58
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nielsm posted:How right am I in getting angry at journalists letting politicians/other bigwigs dodge their interview questions? Depends on the format/where/when/what they're asking. I produce a Meet the Press type show that involves local pols talking about stuff, and we do a lot of softball questions to make the pols look good. You're right to get angry at us, since we worked hard to make the only person crazier than Sarah Palin look good on TV, after she had a small breakdown and 5 hours in the editing booth later we managed to pull out 28 minutes of footage that made her look...better than she did, and we were doing it on purpose to try and revive her campaign a bit. You can definitely get angry at us, since we do it on purpose, and they dodge a question we edit it out, and move on to the next one. Stuff like press conferences though, you really have no control over what they say/don't say, since they're just going to call on someone else and skip over things they don't want to answer. You can't really drag an answer out of someone. One-on-One interviews, like when Brian Williams or Anderson Cooper or (insert-journalist-of-choice-here) can do a bit more to weedle an answer out of someone, but it's still difficult. At best if they refuse to answer something, you can an evasive non-answer, at worse, you piss them off and wind up uninvited to any future pressers/interviews/any sort of news event. You can't make someone answer something, short of torturing them, and we'll save that one for the CIA. Someone who does journalism journalism might be able to tell more about trying to extract answers. I run the backend of a TV station, and don't have any say in anything journalistic, I just edit the poo poo and toss it on the air and make sure it looks good/makes sure it gets advertisers. I'm the person the news guys come to with their tapes/SD cards/CF cards/whatever the hell they're using in their cameras and makes sure it gets ingested, edited, chyron'd etc and on the air. And then I make sure people watch it, advertisers buy ad space, and we stay on the air. Don't ever forget that your news media is controlled by advertising. outside of PBS/NPR, every station on the air is ruled by the almighty dollar, and their reporting will reflect that. For example, one of the local hospitals here buys a lot of ad space on one of the other stations/the local paper. You never see a hit piece on that hospital on that station, it's always pointing out the good things/new equipment/OMG SHE LIVED! stories that happen at that hospital. If something goes bad at the other hospital in town, you bet your rear end that they're there covering it live. It's the reverse with another station that gets a lot of ad money from the other hospital. We get a ton of money from conservative/religious right sources. You bet your rear end we don't run anything in our news stuff that supports anything left-wing, because that would piss off advertisers. (I do my best to sneak stuff in, but at the same time, I'm aware that I walk a fine line between "piss them off enough to keep them watching and keep them angry because angry people send more money to PACs that send more money to us to run advertising" and "piss them off so bad they simply stop watching")
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Aug 25, 2014 14:15
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Yeah. I realize you can't pull answers out of someone who doesn't want to answer. I guess what I'm looking for is just some acknowledgement from the journalist that yes, their question was not answered. If you ask about A, get an answer about Y, and then thanks the interviewee for answering the question, that just seems wrong. I guess what I'm looking for is just the phrase "Thank you for your time," rather than "Thank you for answering my questions." Edit: "I understand you are not able to talk about A today. Thank you for your time."
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Aug 25, 2014 14:27
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photomikey posted:If you're expecting the journo to say, "no really, tell me the answer!" after he gets a non-answer to a question, and then the politico to break down and be honest, I think you might be asking for too much from the establishment. But Jeremy Paxman (and other British interviewers) do exactly this, on national TV. Cultural differences?
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Aug 26, 2014 20:30
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So on British TV, a politician gives a bullshit non-answer, then the journalist calls them out on it, then the politician gives a satisfactory answer to the question? My 20 years in US broadcast media have shown me that there are some questions that some people won't answer. You can ask them anyway, and they can deflect, but asking again doesn't make them realize the error in their ways and then come clean - they just deflect again. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I ask again anyway, but my being argumentative doesn't help anybody. I just show them deflecting the question and you, the viewer, have to draw your own conclusions. I don't watch cable news anymore, but from the clips I see online, the Fox News / CNN / CNBC shows are basically people repeating the same question over and over and over again, if that's what you're looking for.
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Aug 26, 2014 20:40
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Recently saw an interesting thing happen. My brother is part of an China academic listserv, and one of the people on the listserv wrote a big ol complaint about a New York Times piece on China. The complaint was that in the NYT article they didn't distinguish between Han and Manchurian ethnicities and it was A Big Deal, and the reporter should have known better. The reporter, weirdly, actually responded, saying something along the lines of "I know the difference between Manchurian and Han. The readers of the NYT don't, and they don't care, and neither does my editor." How often do you think this type of thing happens? Where it looks like the reporter doesn't know what they're talking about, but it's largely because of editor constraints and who they're writing for? Or are they mostly just out of their depth because they're not specialists? Or are they just huge morons? Listening to science reporting on something like Marketplace makes me think they're just huge loving morons but I seriously hope they're not. edit: The Manchurian/Han distinction thing was somewhat important for the article.
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Aug 26, 2014 20:52
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sugar free jazz posted:Recently saw an interesting thing happen. My brother is part of an China academic listserv, and one of the people on the listserv wrote a big ol complaint about a New York Times piece on China. The complaint was that in the NYT article they didn't distinguish between Han and Manchurian ethnicities and it was A Big Deal, and the reporter should have known better. The reporter, weirdly, actually responded, saying something along the lines of "I know the difference between Manchurian and Han. The readers of the NYT don't, and they don't care, and neither does my editor." Speaking from my own experience, I'd say that most if not all news articles have these kinds of inaccuracies. It's partially a result of ignorance. There are instances where a reporter writing a story will have been covering related issues for many years and thus will have about the same level of understanding as a subject matter expert, but that's not the norm. More commonly, news breaks and a reporter has a couple hours to become conversant enough in the topic by speaking to experts that they can produce a story summing up what's happened with just enough context for give a reader a basic understanding of events. This is even more common today when news organizations are smaller than they've ever been — with far fewer reporters working to produce the same output, there's just less ability to specialize, and that leads to what from the outside look like careless mistakes. But there's another reason as well which is probably even more important — audience. Assuming you're writing for a general focus publication (as opposed to a specialist publication like a trade magazine or scientific journal), you're writing for the broadest possible audience. That means that you have to assume most people who are reading your story have: A. No prior knowledge about what you're writing about B. Only mild interest in what you're writing about C. Limited time to commit to your story D. Average intelligence and limited post secondary education Those constraints, coupled with the fact that you have either limited space or limited time (Newspapers have 500 words, maybe, and broadcast journalists have maybe 2 minutes), really limit the depth to which you can go. Since you're assuming no prior knowledge and only basic education, you have to spend time defining the specialist terms you're bound to encounter and you have to think up analogies you can use to get across unfamiliar concepts. You must introduce every speaker you quote and explain their relationship to the story and why they're credible. You have to spend a couple paragraphs grabbing attention and selling the reader on why they should care about what you're about to tell them, since you can't assume they already care enough to read. When you're done with all that, it's sometimes a wonder that you have space to say what happened at all. To make matters worse, I've always found that there's a kind of inverse relationship between nuance and understandability. Often the more fully your story explores the minutae of what you're writing about, the harder it is for a reader coming at it with no special knowledge to grok, because they'll be constantly running into contradictory information, edge cases, and difficult vocabulary. And that's even before you consider that such a story will probably be too dry to capture the reader's imagination and about 5 times too long to occupy their limited attention span — scientific and academic papers are exactingly precise in their language and generally correct in every minor detail, but nobody reads them. It's also true that the first edit is often where a lot of the nuance is lost. One of the main functions of an editor is to let you know where your story is confusing — unsurprisingly, those tend to be the parts where you explore something technical or esoteric in more detail. A good editor finds a way to leave it in and make it understandable, but not all editors are that good and all editors are coming at the story from a position of ignorance because they haven't talked to the sources and don't know the issue as well as the reporter. Facing deadline pressure and a story that's probably too long to fit anyway, most succumb to the temptation to just take it out. Really good writers can abstract away the complexity that would be confusing to the reader while leaving accuracy more or less intact, but that's a rare skill. Honestly, I think that's one of the main differences between an average reporter and a truly great one. tl;dr: News often seems inaccurate to experts due to a number of factors including reporter expertise and space concerns, but the most important reason is that it's not written for experts. It's written for average people who know nothing about the topic, and when you're writing for someone who doesn't know and doesn't care, understandability trumps nuance and "interesting" trumps "accurate." Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 22:01
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Bio-Hazard posted:
Not going to lie, man, it's pretty rad. Working in tech I basically do a third of the work I did as a reporter for 60 percent more pay, and I have better benefits and free lunch every day. I don't regret my time in journalism in the slightest — I learned an incredible amount about the world and about myself as a person, and when it was good it was the most fun I ever had at work. But those highs came with some pretty spectacular lows, and they've gotten a lot rarer as the industry slouches toward the digital future, whatever that may be. I think the days where normal people can have a career long-term as a reporter are over, if they ever existed at all. It's fine when you're young and hungry, but at a certain point you start to have other concerns like family and relationships and you start to need to sleep more. Your prospects long term are basically become an editor, get the gently caress out or get famous enough that you can write lovely business books and live off of speaker's fees.
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Aug 27, 2014 00:36
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Baby Babbeh posted:I think the days where normal people can have a career long-term as a reporter are over, if they ever existed at all. It's fine when you're young and hungry, but at a certain point you start to have other concerns like family and relationships and you start to need to sleep more. Your prospects long term are basically become an editor, get the gently caress out or get famous enough that you can write lovely business books and live off of speaker's fees.
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Aug 27, 2014 01:49
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Baby Babbeh posted:Speaking from my own experience, I'd say that most if not all news articles have these kinds of inaccuracies. It's partially a result of ignorance. There are instances where a reporter writing a story will have been covering related issues for many years and thus will have about the same level of understanding as a subject matter expert, but that's not the norm. More commonly, news breaks and a reporter has a couple hours to become conversant enough in the topic by speaking to experts that they can produce a story summing up what's happened with just enough context for give a reader a basic understanding of events. This is pretty much exactly it. One common thread that ties most J school graduates together is the ability to write authoritatively on pretty much any subject. Some reporters I have come across are rather uninformed, particularly those that work in television. But they can write (and speak) with confidence about pretty much anything, so they succeed at that they do. In some ways their ignorance probably helps them out -- if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know to second guess yourself. I've had to write a story with pretty much no understanding about a subject, probably everyone who has ever worked in a newsroom has. I had never heard of tailings ponds until the local government changed the regulations concerning them, but I was sure able to write about it and take it to air within 20 minutes. I doubt there was anyone covering that story that really even knew was a tailings pond was until that very moment. And then I didn't have to give them another thought for years until there was something that came across the wire about a tailings pond that sprung a leak and now a whole bunch of people might get heavy metal poisoning. And the bit about the audience not really knowing what is right or wrong either pretty much means I will never ever have to know why a tailings pond is needed either. Apparently they are, and it sounds pretty bad if one springs a leak because people might get sick. And at that point, nobody really cares that mines need them, or why they need them, or really just how common tailings ponds are. Anyone in the mining sector that really cares about the issue is just going to hear a tiny bit about it in the popular media, and then they'll go on to a more specialized source. It is only when something a bit more ordinary gets incorrectly reported that people really take notice. This is a great example:  Lots of people don't know poo poo about guns and bullets, including at least the AFP reporter that originally covered this story. His or her editor didn't know any better, nor really did anyone in the AFP system that might have saw this before it went out. If you don't know what is wrong about this picture, then you don't see anything wrong. But if you know anyone who knows much of anything about guns (which is a way bigger group of people than those who are aware of tailings ponds), you know that the AFP reporter got hoodwinked because the only way those bullets could have hit that woman's house and looked like that is if someone threw them.
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Aug 27, 2014 04:56
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Lest you think I'm being too negative, I think most of these errors are relatively minor — its the shade of meaning that's off, rather than the total substance. Like a good example from business reporting is how we talk about the cloud. Cloud, if it's defined at all, is generally used to mean software that's being delivered through the internet rather than running on a local machine. And that's true — but to actually really be cloud software it has to be running in a virtualized environment, which means it's running on a kind of simulated hardware device that's created in memory by software running on a server, which can hold a nearly infinite number of virtual devices. Most software as a service is at least partially virtualized, because it lets you scale up by adding more virtual machines when there's a lot of users and scale back when there isn't. And there's a lot of different cloud schemes, which are more or less elastic and feature greater or lesser virtualization, and there's benefits and drawbacks to each. So if I'm writing about a technology company that's offering users access to its app through the internet, I could dig deep and tell you that they're running it on Rackspace in a partially virtualized environment and actually it could take days to provision more servers, and in some cases it will fail over to another service and there's a virtual content delivery network from Cloudflare in-between the end user and the service to protect from DDoS attacks. But because the majority of people reading my article don't know what any of those words mean, I'll choose to define it by the question that's probably most salient to them: "Do I have to install this thing to use it?" An expert might look at it and say that I'm wrong, and the company is really not cloud at all, but for the average reader, who reads "cloud" as "internet" its good enough.
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Aug 28, 2014 01:49
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Classic Jeremy Paxman clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KHMO14KuJk That's from another show looking at TV moments and they keep a count of all the times he asks the same question. It's a classic of British television. He really is one of a kind. I'm sad he's left Newsnight now.
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Aug 28, 2014 10:01
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Another public radio goon? I don't know why, but I thought I was the only one (I'm actually posting while hosting Weekend Edition...) I've got about four years experience as a reporter, mostly on the political side. Yes, it's frustrating to know someone's lying to your face for most of your day and yes, the press corps hightails it to the bar across the street after the legislature recesses every night.
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Aug 30, 2014 16:49
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Baby Babbeh posted:An expert might look at it and say that I'm wrong, and the company is really not cloud at all, but for the average reader, who reads "cloud" as "internet" its good enough. That's what people mean when they say the media makes you stupid, though. Find a way to say "you don't install it on your iDevice" that isn't the term for a different thing.
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Sep 3, 2014 17:28
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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It's probably more accurate to say that people ARE stupid and the media writes down to their level, but you'll get no argument from me on that point. The problem is that when you write for a mass audience, as opposed to a small specialized one, you're mostly stuck with the lexicon people are using when they talk generally about a subject. Cloud is actually a great example of this. We used to call what's now called "cloud" "Software-as-a-Service" or SaaS, which is more accurate description of what's happening from a end user standpoint — the software is a service being delivered to you from the internet rather than a discrete thing residing on your hard drive. But at a certain point the marketing folk realized this term didn't really resonate. It even sounds boring, and your choice for using it is between clunky hyphens or an incomprehensible acronym. So they appropriated the sexier sounding but conceptually amorphous term "cloud" instead, and suddenly that was how every SaaS company described itself. And where does that leave you, as a writer? You could stick to your guns and keep writing about SaaS companies, but your readers don't want to read about SaaS companies, they want to hear about this sexy new cloud thing everyone's talking about. Write that story and most likely no one will read it and the ones that do will think "I though that was called cloud?" Probably what you do is you vacillate for a bit, you describe the company as a cloud company but also explain what that means and mention its the same thing as what you used to call SaaS. And probably your editor shortens that to cloud for the headline, because it takes up less space to write than Software-as-a-Service and nobody wants to use an acronym in a headline if they can help it. And that reinforces the term, because most people won't read more than the headline anyway. So eventually you reach a point where you think, "everyone knows what I mean when I say cloud, so I can just say cloud and shave a few sentences out of this story that's already three paragraphs too long to fit the space I've been allocated." And here we are. I think it's unfortunate. In a perfect world readers would be very engaged with the news, tolerant of shades of gray and willing to stick with you even through difficult material. But that's not the world we live in — in reality most readers are only marginally engaged with the news, come at it with preconceived ideas and will abandon it the instant it becomes challenging or confusing. What that means, again, is that understandability and strict accuracy are often at odds with one another when you write about a specialized topic. Someone writing a research paper has the luxury of erring entirely on the side of accuracy, because they're not expecting anyone outside of a very, very small group of people to read what they write. But when you're expected to bring enough eyeballs to your work to make it lucrative to sell ads against it that's not a luxury that you have. You settle for what the news often is: basically accurate in broad strokes, generally wrong in one or two specifics, but immediately understandable to anyone who picks it up no matter who they are and what their background is.
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Sep 3, 2014 23:57
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Baby Babbeh posted:I think it's unfortunate. In a perfect world readers would be very engaged with the news, tolerant of shades of gray and willing to stick with you even through difficult material. But that's not the world we live in — in reality most readers are only marginally engaged with the news, come at it with preconceived ideas and will abandon it the instant it becomes challenging or confusing. We really have to start addressing the "how to understand media" problem early on. Fake edit: "quotation marks"
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Sep 4, 2014 11:32
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I've got a question. I work for a health center in a major city. We advertise with a few of the local weekly neighborhood papers, and I like to write PRs and submit them as articles about big things that happen (the HHS Secretary coming to visit on National Health Center Week). The problem is they rarely get published. I can't remember a single story that was printed, and all I get is a few photos with a caption every six months or so. Meanwhile, one of the other community health centers has two or three pieces weekly in it. Any reason for the deep throat special the other health center is getting? Should I be submitting a dozen things weekly so they pick one or two? Usually I send in one thing every two weeks. Should I place bigger advertisements? Send them at different times? The distribution date is every Thursday, so things are in on Tuesday, with the printing on Wednesday. Talk to the editor (it's a local enough paper we vaguely know each other, and he knows our ED intimately)? I'm feeling so put out, I don't want to bother with advertising anymore because we're not getting any earned media out of it.
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Sep 4, 2014 11:54
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What do news anchors on "6 o'clock news" programs actually do, aside from reading a teleprompter? I'm assuming that they're journalists who have worked their way up, but at that point I assume that they don't do their own research anymore.
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Sep 4, 2014 12:33
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my darling feet posted:I've got a question. Editorial is where you pitch a story, and if it's a decent story, the paper comes out to cover it. The middle ground is where you buy $ worth of ad space and the competing health center buys $$$$$ worth of ad space, and so when you both submit a story, they run the competition's story, because they don't want to piss them off. TL;DR: spend more money in advertising or come up with better stories. Volmarias posted:What do news anchors on "6 o'clock news" programs actually do, aside from reading a teleprompter? I'm assuming that they're journalists who have worked their way up, but at that point I assume that they don't do their own research anymore. In this day and age it's exhausting being a TV anchor, Often you're anchoring a 4pm and 6pm show, then the 11pm show. There are multiple promo shoots for each show (the :05 spots you see during programming, i.e. "how your drinking water can kill you - tonight at 6."), there are news updates leading up to the show, you can't cold read the whole show so you're expected to have read the entire show through, much of which isn't written until a half hour before the show. You need to know the material well enough to banter if there's a question and enough to wing it if the prompter goes out or if news breaks. Anchors often write a story or two for each show. There are 100 people behind the scenes who make the news happen, but 50% of the show comes out of your mouth, so even though 99 other people are responsible for the accuracy, YOU are the one who gets the angry letters and relieved of your duties if it's really bad. You are the face of several community service arms (9cares, kids backpack drive, Earth8, whatever), plus you are emceeing various local events constantly and judging coloring contests and essay contests, for which you may have to read and rank 50 essays on why my dad is the mostest disabled soldier in market #235. Evening anchors (4/6/11pm) often come in at 3, and it's a loving sprint getting the 4 and 6pm news on, then shooting promos, then eating dinner, by the time all that is over it's 8 and the 11pm is coming at you like a freight train. I don't mean to get all "first world problems", but being an anchor is like any other job. It's not one huge thing you have to tackle everyday, but a million 5 minute tasks do add up.
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Sep 4, 2014 16:56
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photomikey posted:I don't mean to get all "first world problems", but being an anchor is like any other job. It's not one huge thing you have to tackle everyday, but a million 5 minute tasks do add up. Thanks, I appreciate that! I don't think that anchors just come in for an hour and then leave, I was just curious what their job actually entails at that point.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:38
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I have another question. Are journalists explicitly aware of their role as an agent of memory? Like, their role in creating and maintaining narratives for current and past events? How much of that is allowed to be personal when writing stories? Is there just so little space and time that there's just no way to put a personal spin on things? Does the organization, through the editing staff, mostly control narratives of events? Is it controlled through the hiring process, which I suppose would look like very homogenous views of writing staff? Does it totally not matter because most reports are "Mrs Lawsons Dog Barking Until Late" or "Hotdog Eating Contest Saturday At Six?"
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Sep 4, 2014 20:40
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my darling feet posted:I've got a question. Advertising and Editorial are two separate departments that don't talk to each other. Advertising and Editorial are two separate departments that don't talk to each other. ADVERTISING AND EDITORIAL ARE TWO SEPARATE DEPARTMENTS THAT DON'T TALK TO EACH OTHER. If the main reason you buy ads is that you think it will get news stories written about you, you're wasting your money. Sorry to belabor the point, but this is the most common misconception about how a newsroom works and it leads to a lot of frustration on both sides. At most reputable news organizations there's what's called a "Chinese wall" between editorial and advertising, in that the organization works hard to separate the two departments and ensure they have little contact with one another. A big organization might put them in different buildings, or on different floors. At my last paper we were a smaller staff so advertising was on the opposite side of the office and we'd interact occasionally in the break room or the elevator. I still didn't know all their names and the only time there was ever an advertising issue in editorial it was when they'd sold an ad to a sponsor on the same page that we'd coincidentally written about that sponsor. What happened then was we either didn't run the story or we moved it to another part of the paper so it didn't look like sponsored content. I knew some of who the major advertisers were in a vague way (construction companies and law firms, for the most part) but I didn't pay any attention to how much advertising they were buying or where. If I got a phone call from someone who mentioned that they bought ads, all that did was make me angry and reinforce my resolve to never, ever write about them if I could help it. (Most reporters find suggestions of pay-for-play highly insulting) This isn't to say that editorial is completely unmoved by advertising, just that it's not as mercantile as you think it is. Buying more ads won't result in more or more favorable coverage, because the advertising department usually doesn't know what's being written before it hits news stands and news decisions are made without their input. Where the advertiser advantage mostly manifests is with negative coverage — if a story was going to negatively affect a major advertiser, it'd get more editorial scrutiny to be sure everything was supportable and editors would be more conservative about cutting things out if they weren't ironclad. If it was supportable the story would still run, but it probably wouldn't be as extreme as it would be otherwise, and you can be drat sure there'd be a gameplan for what to tell the advertiser when the inevitable angry phone call came. Also, regarding press releases, you're thinking about them wrong. Except for the skeeviest of online content mills, nobody just passively reprints press releases in the paper. What happens is that if the story is interesting, it's assigned to a reporter, who will do their own research and then write their own piece, possibly (probably) reusing some of the information in your release. This takes effort, and time, both of which are in short supply at a news organization, so only the most interesting pitches get written about. The best way to think about a press release is that it's a heads up to a news org that something has happened or will happen that they might want to write about. They're under no obligation to write about it, and they're certainly under no obligation to print the release verbatim. Even if its a release pitching a contributed article and they bite, there's still no obligation to print it if it doesn't meet quality standards and they will probably edit for length and style if they do. Okay, now that the rant's out of the way, here's what you should do if you really want more publicity. Notice this is harder than just spamming press releases. Take the time to meet with people at the paper in-person What story gets printed depends on the often amorphous "news judgment" of the journalists writing it, but one of the factors that's weighed is who the story is coming from and how reputable that source is. That takes trust, and trust is built through relationships. So the first step to coverage is to get to be on a first name basis with the person covering you. What you should do is find out who the beat reporter is at your local paper that most often covers health centers and invite them out for coffee. At a larger paper there's probably a dedicated healthcare reporter, at a smaller one it might not be a dedicated job title. Still, usually each reporter has a few topics they specialize in, and it shouldn't be hard to notice the trend in coverage. Reporters generally are happy to meet with people in the community, because that's where their sources come from. I say you should get coffee because lunch is usually too big a commitment — there might not be time in their schedule and its harder to talk when you're eating anyway. You might be tempted to reach out to the editor you know instead, but a reporter is actually a better choice if you want to get covered. Editors assign stories but it's not really a top down process — what happens is that there's a regular meeting where the reporter pitches a bunch of possible stories they're working on and the editor tells them where to focus their time. So your best bet is to be in the pool of stories that the reporter pitches in the first place. Either way, make it clear at this first meeting that you're just introducing yourself and you don't expect them to write anything out of it. (They might anyway, if it goes well) Keep the actual meeting pretty casual — tell them about what's happening at your organization but don't pitch them heavily on it, and chat about things that are happening more generally in your industry/the local community. Gossip a little. Reporters love that poo poo. Ask them what stories they're working on, and if its anything you or someone you know has expertise in, offer to help or to make introductions. What you're pitching here is you: you want to seem knowledgeable about your industry, personable and trustworthy. Those are the sorts of people reporters start to think of as sources, and if you're a source you can expect to get calls when they need a quote or just need help with a story they're working on. Coincidentally, when that sort of person reaches out with news about something that's happening at their organization, it gets treated VERY differently from the rest of the pack. Contact them often, and not just when you want something, and not just with a press release Once you have introduced yourself to someone at the paper, they should be your primary contact for sending your press releases. But more than that, you should just check in with them every once in a while to see what they're working on and if it's anything you can help with. Once you're on speaking terms, it's okay to just drop them a quick phone call. Trade news tips — let them know what you're hearing is happening in your industry and they will tell you what they hear. If its something that you don't want printed, you can tell them its off the record beforehand and they will honor that request. (You should know, if you're talking to a reporter it's all on the record unless you request otherwise ahead of time). Be strategic about your pitches Given the low hit rate on press releases, it might seem like a good idea to spam every minor bit of news coming out of your health center in hopes that one of them sticks, but that's probably not the best approach, because then you look like a spammer. Instead, you want to only be sending your best stuff, the stuff that's most likely to get printed. A good minimum bar is to look at each story you pitch and ask yourself "would this be interesting to anyone who has never even heard of my health center before?" So like Obama visiting it qualifies, the new MRI machine, probably not so much. Be helpful Adopt the attitude that it's not what the reporter can do for you, but what you can do for them, and you'll see more success. Journalists these days are VERY busy, and they don't have enough time or resources to get to everything. So one of the most beneficial things you can do when you're trying to get coverage is to make every effort to make their job easier. For every release, have a list of three sources they can talk to and offer to set up interviews for them. (Obviously ask those people first, don't promise interviews you can't deliver) Offer supporting information, photographs, and data. If you're having an event, set aside a quiet space for them where they can do interviews. If you can make it seem like less work, they're more likely to do it, and they'll appreciate you for making it easy for them. Also, a story with the sources already accounted for is a lot easier to pitch to an editor When you send a release, follow up If you don't hear back in a few days, follow up. The most appropriate way is a short email saying, hey did you see this release and do you want to do anything with it? A phone call is even better, but only if you have a particularly good relationship with the reporter or your news is particularly dynamite. Reporters are busy, and they literally get hundreds of pitches a day. It's very possible that they missed your release, so don't assume that if you get no response its because they aren't interested. Don't be annoying about it, though. One call is fine, four or five is not. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 21:33
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Another note on anchoring: Being talent is difficult. The skills needed to be good at it are things that most people don't even realize exist, because when you do it right nobody notices (which is the point). You have to practice how you breathe, how you speak, how you move, and you really only have one chance to get things right. And you're constantly scrutinized on a minute level. The hours are better than being a reporter, but I've never known anyone who did it who didn't eventually burn out and move onto something else.
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Sep 4, 2014 22:56
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