All the news that's fit to promote...
Going further with the New Yorker article, the quotes shown below tell us what passes for "new journalism" today. Mostly it is algorithm driven, based on highly partisan views of politics, and follows no morality except valorization of as much profitability as can be generated. Its all worthless, in other words. But what would you expect considering the ultimate source of this new model of how newspaper should be structured? Everything is intended to make life easier for the Cultural Marxists and libertarians of Silicon Valley and its outliers. Meanwhile "old school" journalism retrenches and retrenches again, its minions unable to conceive of many other way of operating except the ways they have been trained -at city desks around the country. It is regarded as a success when a 250,000 circulation ]newspaper "only" falls to 150,000. Some papers struggle on even when, in this example, decline to 80,000 or even 35,000. No-one knows what in the hell they are doing, in other words. Especially not the "major" TV networks, with their mix of weather report news, and school shooting news, and hate Donal Trump news, mixed with literally tons of human interest fluff and tear jerk stories. The Chicago Daily Bugle has no interest in any of these models of news. The mission of the Bugle is first and foremost education. But please do not mistake how the Bugle uses that word with how others employ it. This means something like "lifelong learning," or learning for practical purposes, or learning what you really need to know about current politics in order to make decent decisions about who to vote for. But it also means openness to learning about subjects that really interest most people, starting with sex. That is, about s--e-x, put it all "out there," with really good visuals, and with a lot of well written but with a sense of humor commentary by analysts who actually have studied the literature of sexuality. That is, make it sexy AND make it classy. This is not porn, it is erotic art. And erotic analysis. As for politics, hit both major parties repeatedly, every day, and hit them hard. This is a paper for the 40% of Americans who are Independents. Expose the fallacies of both Left and Right, show how thoughtless both the Democrats and the Republicans really are, how unoriginal, how short-sighted and narrow-minded each is, and to hell with protecting any sacred cows. The idea is to make hamburger out of sacred cows. The Bugle, as much a possible, will defend and "stick up for" religion. The paper is pro-religion even if, by "religion," what is meant is something like Comparative Religion, or open-mindedness about religion, or no sacred cows in religion, either. This is a paper for people who like to think about religion and who think that questioning their own ideas is a good thing, not an evil. "Religion" manifestly does NOT mean devotionalism as understood here, it is not about anyone's "prayer life" or other such content. This does mean religion as source of motivation, as guide to morality, as inspiration for excellence. But expect a lot of criticism of both the Religious Right and the Religious Left. This is a paper not only for political Independents but for religious free spirits of any denomination or persuasion. It is intended for all those people who surveys have identified as "spiritual but unaffiliated" as well as all those people in more usual religious groups who think that it is good to explore the world of religious ideas. And a lot of attention will be given to religious start-ups of many kinds including New Age religions. The paper will be critical of Islam as a matter of policy. However, it will publish news stories about persecution of people of all faiths around the world, whether the persecutions are carried out by Muslims or Hindus or anyone else. The paper will be uncompromisingly anti-homosexual. The paper will be uncompromisingly pro-evolution. The paper will be uncompromisingly anti-gender-feminist The paper will be uncompromisingly pro-women's rights, but keeping in mind that rights will not always be the same for men and women because of the truths of sociobiology. The paper will be uncompromisingly pro-civil rights The paper will be uncompromisingly anti-the SPLC and its "take" on what is or is not "hate" and decidedly opposed to the view that black people can do no wrong or that Hispanics can do no wrong and that white people are always wrong. To hell with Political Correctness, in other words and to hell with the current version of multi-culturalism. However, the paper will always seek to recognize black or Hispanic achievement. Under no circumstances will anti-Semitism be tolerated. I will admit to one bias, however, I am, as a rule, pro-Asian. I am also, as a rule, very pro-American Indian. I mean, duh, they were here first. But I recognize that Asians or American Indians can sometimes be idiots. The paper will be uncompromisingly pro-business The paper will be uncompromisingly opposed to businesses that price gouge (like Apple), that are guilty of use of overseas sweatshops (like Nike), and so forth. However, my pledge is that if a business genuinely reforms, its accomplishments will receive feature article recognition and a good deal of praise. And although I have a negative view of abortion the paper recognizes that an absolutist view of the issue is unjustified and that there are legitimate classes of exceptions. The paper will always strive to be as controversial as hell. This includes coverage of the visual arts, or especially of the visual arts. The paper will make the most of humor -but always in good taste. . The paper will be as truthful as humanly possible and will seek to become the gold standard in truth telling, the place to turn to if you want the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will admit any mistakes we make. The paper will try to make a lot of money, however, if you want to get rich from the Bugle forget it. Some limit of profits, say around 12 % annually, is the goal. Anything above that will be re-invested in the paper -for purposes like expansion, like better coverage of under-represented issues, and so forth. And it would be nice if, at some point, the paper could underwrite a foundation that helps colleges and other schools in ways that are consistent with the values expressed here. Everything possible should be done to make the Bugle into a very attractive presence on the Web. This means a thorough re-examination of everything that is found on the best news / information sites available, This includes Times New Roman for all text in all stories, and an all out war against Ariel fonts. Dammit, it is crucial that you should be able to read the paper and enjoy the experience And to hell with the view that if Silicon Valley likes Ariel that is all you need to know, I detest Ariel fonts for any kind of text. It is horrible, the worst possible text font. Indeed, the Bugle, while in no way is it anti-computer, will be as critical toward Silicon Valley as facts warrant, which as things are, is a great deal. The paper will rip apart AOL especially, and seek to ruin life for Tim Armstrong who has ruined my life with everything wrong that AOL has done under his leadership. The paper will always provide useful news about computers and software to its readers. This should give you the idea Billy Rojas Editor-in-Chief and Dictator for Life of the Chicago Daily Bugle :-) ------------------------------------------------------- ...“Raw buzz is automatically published the moment it is detected by our algorithm,” and “the future of the industry is advertising as content.” Facebook launched its News Feed in 2006. In 2008, Peretti mused on Facebook, “Thinking about the economics of the news business.” The company added its Like button in 2009. Peretti set likability as BuzzFeed’s goal, and, to perfect the instruments for measuring it, he enlisted partners, including the Times and the Guardian, to share their data with him in exchange for his reports on their metrics. Lists were liked. Hating people was liked. And it turned out that news, which is full of people who hate other people, can be crammed into lists. Chartbeat, a “content intelligence” company founded in 2009, launched a feature called Newsbeat in 2011. Chartbeat offers real-time Web analytics, displaying a constantly updated report on Web traffic that tells editors what stories people are reading and what stories they’re skipping. The Post winnowed out reporters based on their Chartbeat numbers. At the offices of Gawker, the Chartbeat dashboard was displayed on a giant screen. In 2011, Peretti launched BuzzFeed News, hiring a thirty-five-year-old Politico journalist, Ben Smith, as its editor-in-chief. Smith asked for a “scoop-a-day” from his reporters, who, he told Abramson, had little interest in the rules of journalism: “They didn’t even know what rules they were breaking.” In 2012, BuzzFeed introduced three new one-click ways for readers to respond to stories, beyond “liking” them—LOL, OMG, and WTF—and ran lists like “10 Reasons Everyone Should Be Furious About Trayvon Martin’s Murder,” in which, as Abramson explains, BuzzFeed “simply lifted what it needed from reports published elsewhere, repackaged the information, and presented it in a way that emphasized sentiment and celebrity.” BuzzFeed makes a distinction between BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News, just as newspapers and magazines draw distinctions between their print and their digital editions. These distinctions are lost on most readers. BuzzFeed News covered the Trayvon Martin story, but its information, like BuzzFeed’s, came from Reuters and the Associated Press. Even as news organizations were pruning reporters and editors, Facebook was pruning its users’ news, with the commercially appealing but ethically indefensible idea that people should see only the news they want to see. In 2013, Silicon Valley began reading its own online newspaper, the Information, its high-priced subscription peddled to the information élite, following the motto “Quality stories breed quality subscribers.” Facebook’s goal, Zuckerberg explained in 2014, was to “build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.” Ripples at Facebook create tsunamis in newsrooms. The ambitious news site Mic relied on Facebook to reach an audience through a video program called Mic Dispatch, on Facebook Watch; last fall, after Facebook suggested that it would drop the program, Mic collapsed. Every time Facebook News tweaks its algorithm—tweaks made for commercial, not editorial, reasons—news organizations drown in the undertow. An automated Facebook feature called Trending Topics, introduced in 2014, turned out to mainly identify junk as trends, and so “news curators,” who tended to be recent college graduates, were given a new, manual mandate, “massage the algorithm,” which meant deciding, themselves, which stories mattered. The fake news that roiled the 2016 election? A lot of that was stuff on Trending Topics. (Last year, Facebook discontinued the feature.) BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites—including, at this point, those of most major news organizations—makes money by way of “native advertising,” ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they’re not. At BuzzFeed, they’re in the same font as every other story. BuzzFeed’s native-advertising bounty meant that BuzzFeed News had money to pay reporters and editors, and it began producing some very good and very serious reporting, real news having become something of a luxury good. By 2014, BuzzFeed employed a hundred and fifty journalists, including many foreign correspondents. It was obsessed with Donald Trump’s rumored Presidential bid, and followed him on what it called the “fake campaign trail” as early as January, 2014. “It used to be the New York Times, now it’s BuzzFeed,” Trump said, wistfully. “The world has changed.” At the time, Steve Bannon was stumping for Trump on Breitbart. Left or right, a Trump Presidency was just the sort of story that could rack up the LOLs, OMGs, and WTFs. It still is. In March, 2014, the Times produced an Innovation Report, announcing that the newspaper had fallen behind in “the art and science of getting our journalism to readers,” a field led by BuzzFeed. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times doing things like running native ads. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed purged from its Web site more than four thousand of its early stories. “It’s stuff made at a time when people were really not thinking of themselves as doing journalism,” Ben Smith explained. Not long afterward, the Times began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
