You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
[…] everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated […]
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.
No, you can do those tasks at any point. I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.
This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.
[…] I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.
The only impracticality that I can currently see is the example that you gave earlier [1]
[…] I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media […]
But just because it may not be practical for an average person to verify a source in all cases doesn’t feel like a valid argument for why sources (that the news outlet has already verified) shouldn’t be provided. Say a news article is reporting on a claim that an interviewee made in an interview that they conducted. Say that the interview interview footage is posted on its own. If the news article is commenting on a claim being made by the interviewee, is there any reason why the interview shouldn’t simply be directly cited? It would remove a lot of burden from the reader if all they have to do is click on the link to the video and scrub to the timestamp to hear the claim for themselves. Yes it would be impractical for each reader to contact the interviewee for themselves to verify that the interviewee did actually say that; however, I think that it sometimes is less about a skepticism of reality, but more a skepticism of reporting bias.
The tool for that purpose is normally the use of quotation marks. Large news outlets rarely make up quotes out of whole cloth. That is not just bad praxis, but entirely unnecessary to skew coverage, if they are enforcing a particular perspective for whatever reason.
Look, I do think that large journalistic outlets are a bit stuck on old newpaper composition practices and hyperlinking and multimedia tools are underused. Specifically, news sites tend to be very reluctant to use external links for a number of reasons, including the fact that they want to keep you inside their publication to serve you ads, so external links are not a beneficial business practice.
That said, you are very fixated on a problem that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t make up the bulk of the issue you’re trying to fix. There are plenty of instances where a quote that sounds bad is used out of context, and in most cases the in-context quote is widely available. The outrage machine is fed in opinion pieces, live TV debate and online chatter. There is no need to misquote in an article for that, and there is no evidence of the mitigating value of having a link to a different article. Which, incidentally, may not even be available for free distribution in the first place.
[…] This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.
It’s a wip 😜 I think it’s still a good idea, but it depends on how it’s done. I agree that I may be fragmenting a bit too much. I need to work on maintaining context. I think it’s also important to never fork the conversation if one branch depends on the other branch. That’s the issue that’s happened here, I think.
No, it’s an argument against some of the proposed remedies.
The step you’re skipping over is that citing a claim by itself doesn’t do much to guarantee its veracity if the reader of the citation isn’t willing to get in touch with the source of the citation and verify its content. Citations aren’t magical. As you’re using them in this conversation they are merely a tool for a peer review to be able to verify a bunch of precedent information without having to include it all in the same place every time.
The difference between journalistic information and peer review in science is that news are supposed to have gone through a journalistic verification process first, which the reader trusts based on the previous operation of the news outlet. A paper is presented to go through peer review and published after it has gone through that process.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist […]
Err, could you clarify this? By definition doesn’t the action of doing journalism make one a journalist? For example, Merriam-Webster defines the noun “journalist” as “a person engaged in journalism” [1]. This would follow logically [2]: If one is engaged in journalism, then they are a journalist; one is engaged in journalism; therefore, they are a journalist.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
I agree.
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.
No, you can do those tasks at any point. I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.
This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.
The only impracticality that I can currently see is the example that you gave earlier [1]
But just because it may not be practical for an average person to verify a source in all cases doesn’t feel like a valid argument for why sources (that the news outlet has already verified) shouldn’t be provided. Say a news article is reporting on a claim that an interviewee made in an interview that they conducted. Say that the interview interview footage is posted on its own. If the news article is commenting on a claim being made by the interviewee, is there any reason why the interview shouldn’t simply be directly cited? It would remove a lot of burden from the reader if all they have to do is click on the link to the video and scrub to the timestamp to hear the claim for themselves. Yes it would be impractical for each reader to contact the interviewee for themselves to verify that the interviewee did actually say that; however, I think that it sometimes is less about a skepticism of reality, but more a skepticism of reporting bias.
References
The tool for that purpose is normally the use of quotation marks. Large news outlets rarely make up quotes out of whole cloth. That is not just bad praxis, but entirely unnecessary to skew coverage, if they are enforcing a particular perspective for whatever reason.
Look, I do think that large journalistic outlets are a bit stuck on old newpaper composition practices and hyperlinking and multimedia tools are underused. Specifically, news sites tend to be very reluctant to use external links for a number of reasons, including the fact that they want to keep you inside their publication to serve you ads, so external links are not a beneficial business practice.
That said, you are very fixated on a problem that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t make up the bulk of the issue you’re trying to fix. There are plenty of instances where a quote that sounds bad is used out of context, and in most cases the in-context quote is widely available. The outrage machine is fed in opinion pieces, live TV debate and online chatter. There is no need to misquote in an article for that, and there is no evidence of the mitigating value of having a link to a different article. Which, incidentally, may not even be available for free distribution in the first place.
It’s a wip 😜 I think it’s still a good idea, but it depends on how it’s done. I agree that I may be fragmenting a bit too much. I need to work on maintaining context. I think it’s also important to never fork the conversation if one branch depends on the other branch. That’s the issue that’s happened here, I think.
I agree, but I don’t think that that’s a valid argument in defense of a journalist not citing their claims.
No, it’s an argument against some of the proposed remedies.
The step you’re skipping over is that citing a claim by itself doesn’t do much to guarantee its veracity if the reader of the citation isn’t willing to get in touch with the source of the citation and verify its content. Citations aren’t magical. As you’re using them in this conversation they are merely a tool for a peer review to be able to verify a bunch of precedent information without having to include it all in the same place every time.
The difference between journalistic information and peer review in science is that news are supposed to have gone through a journalistic verification process first, which the reader trusts based on the previous operation of the news outlet. A paper is presented to go through peer review and published after it has gone through that process.
Err, could you clarify this? By definition doesn’t the action of doing journalism make one a journalist? For example, Merriam-Webster defines the noun “journalist” as “a person engaged in journalism” [1]. This would follow logically [2]: If one is engaged in journalism, then they are a journalist; one is engaged in journalism; therefore, they are a journalist.
References
Working as in “being paid to do the work”.
I’ll spare you the dictionary definition. As we’ve established, you can source that yourself.