Journalism is under tight deadlines. If the story is just to complex the time that the journalist needs to write the story isn’t used “productively”.
Data point: I knew a person who worked as a journalist for a newspaper. Each day they received from their boss a random topic to write about, and they had to write three or four articles within the day. There was no time to do any research, and there was no budget for travelling and seeing something firsthand.
That situation left only a few possible strategies: (1) Call a few relevant people by phone. Most of them will refuse to talk with you, because they have experience that in the past they told a journalist something and the journalist wrote something else using their name as a support. A few people will respond. Compile their answers into articles. (2) Know a few people willing to talk about this topic. Call them. (3) Use Google and steal information from other articles, especially the foreign ones. (4) Just invent the story, using any cliche you know. (5) Any combination of the above. For example write the story first, using the cliches you know, then call random people and try to get them agreeing with you, and then add their names to the article.
That explained a lot. Among other things, it explained why a person willing to talk with journalists about anything can get so much space in media. (Assuming they are compatible with common wisdom and don’t speak anything controversial.) For a journalist, such person is the best contact they could ever have.
Downvoted because it’s improperly sourced, second hand information, and in a comment about journalism no less. That is, “I knew a person who worked as a journalist for a newspaper”. Who did you know? What newspaper did they work at? Can you quote them directly rather than simply recalling and rephrasing what they said?
First is a person I know and consider trustworthy, but I don’t have their consent to publish their name. The newspaper was Pravda (second or third most selling newspaper in the country).
Second is more indirect, I worked for a company which provided some services for a few newspapers, so my colleagues had a lot of contact with journalists. The stories suggested that the journalists were paid poorly, overburdened with work, and usually quit burnt out after a few months.
The information I got from the first source is: The journalists have to write 3-4 articles during the day, about a topic they learn in the morning, and they mostly use phone and internet to create the texts. (Sometimes the newspaper has a policy that the journalist must sign half of articles with their real name, and half with some pen name, to not make it obvious to the readers how much articles one person writes daily.) Many people, especially scientists, refuse to communicate with journalists under these conditions. But there are some known, relatively high-status people, willing to give an opinion on almost any topic… and when the day is almost over and the journalist didn’t succeed to get information from anyone else, such a person can really save the day. (This is written from my memory.)
The part about the possible strategies is: From the first source, I got the descriptions (1) and (2); the former is a typical day, and the latter is the fallback option, when the former one fails, the day is getting over, and the boss is becoming impatient.
Unrelated to my sources, (3) a few journalists in Slovakia were fired a few years ago, because they repeatedly stole and translated material from foreign newspapers (for some reasons, Guardian was a popular victim). This was discovered when web discussions below articles became mainstream in Slovakia; some people made a sport of providing hyperlinks to the original articles.
The option (4) is what happened to me as a person interviewed by journalist, on two indepenent occasions. At the interview it was obvious that the story is already written, and I am only there as a name to put under the article.
The first case: I was a small child and I won a local mathematical olympiad. The journalist came to me with an idea of writing about a gifted child and computers. Was disappointed to hear that we don’t have a computer at home, and can’t afford one. The journalist asked me repeatedly whether because of my success my parents are planning to buy me a computer, and I repeatedly said no. The resulting article said that my parents are considering buying me a computer; although I never said anything like that. But that’s what the journalist wanted to write.
The second case happened a decade later: At some protest against some human rights abuse in Palestine, I decided to talk with a journalist about a paradox that when talking about Europe, the concept of “collective guilt” is not accepted, but when talking about people in Palestine, the same concept is used for them, and nobody discusses that. The journalist seemed interested and asked about my name. The only thing about this all in the resulting article was: “Student Viliam said that opressing Palestinians is bad.” At that moment I decided to never speak with a journalist again.
And that’s the information I built my model upon. Sorry, no references.
Disclaimer: I am not saying that all countries are like this, or even that all newspapers in my country are like this. But I also don’t believe that this all was just a random exception. Under some conditions, this is the equilibrium the system converges to.
I can also imagine that the reality is more complex than this, for example that the newspaper has a few high-status journalists who do serious work, and a few low-status journalists to provide the text to fill the rest of the pages; so this all only describes the work of the low-status ones.
Chapters 2-4 of Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News discuss how systemic constraints like those ChristianKl & Viliam_Bur mention lead to worse journalism. It mostly addresses the US & UK rather than Slovakia, but if anything this strengthens Viliam_Bur’s point. (Replying even though you’re at −4, fuck the troll toll.)
If you’re going to assume they’re lying, then they could make up whatever they liked for who they knew and what newspaper they worked at. And, frankly, being able to quote someone word for word often makes me more suspicious of someone lying.
I don’t see what more info you’d get out of their citing it really—at least in checkable terms.
Data point: I knew a person who worked as a journalist for a newspaper. Each day they received from their boss a random topic to write about, and they had to write three or four articles within the day. There was no time to do any research, and there was no budget for travelling and seeing something firsthand.
That situation left only a few possible strategies: (1) Call a few relevant people by phone. Most of them will refuse to talk with you, because they have experience that in the past they told a journalist something and the journalist wrote something else using their name as a support. A few people will respond. Compile their answers into articles. (2) Know a few people willing to talk about this topic. Call them. (3) Use Google and steal information from other articles, especially the foreign ones. (4) Just invent the story, using any cliche you know. (5) Any combination of the above. For example write the story first, using the cliches you know, then call random people and try to get them agreeing with you, and then add their names to the article.
That explained a lot. Among other things, it explained why a person willing to talk with journalists about anything can get so much space in media. (Assuming they are compatible with common wisdom and don’t speak anything controversial.) For a journalist, such person is the best contact they could ever have.
What country was this?
Downvoted because it’s improperly sourced, second hand information, and in a comment about journalism no less. That is, “I knew a person who worked as a journalist for a newspaper”. Who did you know? What newspaper did they work at? Can you quote them directly rather than simply recalling and rephrasing what they said?
I have two sources, both from Slovakia.
First is a person I know and consider trustworthy, but I don’t have their consent to publish their name. The newspaper was Pravda (second or third most selling newspaper in the country).
Second is more indirect, I worked for a company which provided some services for a few newspapers, so my colleagues had a lot of contact with journalists. The stories suggested that the journalists were paid poorly, overburdened with work, and usually quit burnt out after a few months.
The information I got from the first source is: The journalists have to write 3-4 articles during the day, about a topic they learn in the morning, and they mostly use phone and internet to create the texts. (Sometimes the newspaper has a policy that the journalist must sign half of articles with their real name, and half with some pen name, to not make it obvious to the readers how much articles one person writes daily.) Many people, especially scientists, refuse to communicate with journalists under these conditions. But there are some known, relatively high-status people, willing to give an opinion on almost any topic… and when the day is almost over and the journalist didn’t succeed to get information from anyone else, such a person can really save the day. (This is written from my memory.)
The part about the possible strategies is: From the first source, I got the descriptions (1) and (2); the former is a typical day, and the latter is the fallback option, when the former one fails, the day is getting over, and the boss is becoming impatient.
Unrelated to my sources, (3) a few journalists in Slovakia were fired a few years ago, because they repeatedly stole and translated material from foreign newspapers (for some reasons, Guardian was a popular victim). This was discovered when web discussions below articles became mainstream in Slovakia; some people made a sport of providing hyperlinks to the original articles.
The option (4) is what happened to me as a person interviewed by journalist, on two indepenent occasions. At the interview it was obvious that the story is already written, and I am only there as a name to put under the article.
The first case: I was a small child and I won a local mathematical olympiad. The journalist came to me with an idea of writing about a gifted child and computers. Was disappointed to hear that we don’t have a computer at home, and can’t afford one. The journalist asked me repeatedly whether because of my success my parents are planning to buy me a computer, and I repeatedly said no. The resulting article said that my parents are considering buying me a computer; although I never said anything like that. But that’s what the journalist wanted to write.
The second case happened a decade later: At some protest against some human rights abuse in Palestine, I decided to talk with a journalist about a paradox that when talking about Europe, the concept of “collective guilt” is not accepted, but when talking about people in Palestine, the same concept is used for them, and nobody discusses that. The journalist seemed interested and asked about my name. The only thing about this all in the resulting article was: “Student Viliam said that opressing Palestinians is bad.” At that moment I decided to never speak with a journalist again.
And that’s the information I built my model upon. Sorry, no references.
Disclaimer: I am not saying that all countries are like this, or even that all newspapers in my country are like this. But I also don’t believe that this all was just a random exception. Under some conditions, this is the equilibrium the system converges to.
I can also imagine that the reality is more complex than this, for example that the newspaper has a few high-status journalists who do serious work, and a few low-status journalists to provide the text to fill the rest of the pages; so this all only describes the work of the low-status ones.
Chapters 2-4 of Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News discuss how systemic constraints like those ChristianKl & Viliam_Bur mention lead to worse journalism. It mostly addresses the US & UK rather than Slovakia, but if anything this strengthens Viliam_Bur’s point. (Replying even though you’re at −4, fuck the troll toll.)
If you’re going to assume they’re lying, then they could make up whatever they liked for who they knew and what newspaper they worked at. And, frankly, being able to quote someone word for word often makes me more suspicious of someone lying.
I don’t see what more info you’d get out of their citing it really—at least in checkable terms.