Category: The Media

How desperate the media have become

Posted on by Brian Lee

I know, I know. Newsrooms are shrinking, reporters have more beats to cover, no more enterprise stories, more articles on the weather, more AP articles, etc. I get it. But sometimes, you can really see the desperation to generate a story at all.

On Nov. 19, Madison’s online newspaper, The Capital Times, wrote a story titled “Boys and Girls Club CEO, grocery store owner go undercover as homeless men in Madison.” But the Cap Times didn’t end there.

Three hours and 15 minutes later, the Cap Times implored readers to check out the story in an article called “In Case You Missed It.”

The next day, the paper published a follow-up piece titled, “Men’s expedition into homelessness in Madison sets off lively discussion on social media,” which other than a handful of paragraphs mentioning the Boys and Girls Club Facebook page, was a complete rehash of the original article.

But wait, there’s more!

The day after that, the Cap Times wrote how Yahoo! wrote about the same topic in an article titled, “Story of Boys & Girls Club CEO going undercover as homeless getting national attention.” That was immediately followed by a mention of the Yahoo! piece in another “In Case You Missed It” article.

Finally, on Nov. 24, the Cap Times wrote a story on how its homeless story was its most read story for the week.

Let’s recap: one real story, one story to tell you to read the story, one repeat of the original story disguised as something else, one story on another media outlet’s coverage, a reminder of that story and then a pat-yourself-on-the-back story. Six articles for just one story!

This, my friends, is an example of the sad state of the media today.

Poor editing skills by Reuters

Posted on by Brian Lee

I was appalled when I read a mistake-filled Reuters article that was written by Gerry Shih and Alexei Oreskovic, and edited by Jonathan Weber and Ken Wills. That’s at least four sets of eyes on this article on Twitter, yet we still have these errors:

The company is now on the verge of fulfilling the opportunity Costolo foresaw as it prepares for the most highly anticipated initial public offering since Facebook’s debut last May. The offering is expected to value Twitter at up to $15 billion and make its early investors, including Costolo, very wealthy indeed.

Actually, Facebook’s IPO was May 2012, but the sentence made it sound like May 2013.

Costolo was a comparative late-comer at Twitter, joining the company three years after it’s 2006 launch, but the company increasingly bears his imprint as it hurtles towards the IPO: deliberate in decision-making but aggressive in execution, savvy in its public relations and yet laser-focused on financial results.

Seriously? These professional writers still can’t figure out the difference between “it’s” and “its.”

“The founders consider Dick a co-founder, that’s how deep the connection is,” said Bijan Sabet, an investor at Spark Capital and a Twitter board member from 2008 to 2011. “He’s not this hired gun to run the company. He understands building out the business but also the product, strategy, vision.”

Here, the authors separated two independent clauses with only a comma. Since the sentence is a quotation, preventing them from adding an “and” after the comma, they should have used a semicolon.

I did find more errors, but I think you get the point. This terrible article illustrates one reason why professional journalism gets such a bad rap.

When reporters go out on a limb

Posted on by Brian Lee

LeBron James should have been the unanimous MVP this year, but he didn’t get the vote belonging to Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe.

Washburn spent an entire column to defend himself using flawed logic. For example, he stressed that without Carmelo Anthony (for whom Washburn voted), the Knicks would not have made the playoffs. Yet, the same argument could be made about Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, James Harden and the Rockets and so on.

I just wanted to show how easily a reporter can negatively affect someone. Of course, basketball is a trivial example. Think how many times reporters have revealed the names and addresses of victims of crime or written about leaked information of national security?

And then there are no repercussions. Reporters hardly ever apologize and usually don’t get fired for “doing their job,” so to speak, no matter how egregious the error or lack of common sense. In fact, I wonder how many reporters do this just to sell a few more newspapers? One comment to Washburn’s story nailed it:

“This is another writer/media person trying to make the story about them rather than the sport they are supposedly covering. And, again it works. Gary Washburn gets himslf [sic] (and the Boston Globe) some publicity by making an absolutley [sic] ridiculus [sic] pick for MVP. This is exactly why writers shouldn’t pick any of the awards in any sport. They are clearly unqualified and typically have self serving motives.”

You should read the other comments of Washburn’s article. I don’t recall seeing anyone defend him. He should have said, “I was wrong, I know I can’t do anything now to change my vote, and I’m sorry to LeBron James.”

But we all know that would never have happened.