dublin students wikipedia experiment (1 Viewer)

[broken arm]

it's not much use if your peers are dicks.

 

[MDR]

Should a journalist not at least cite wikipedia as a source?

 

[Froog]

how about citing youtubes?

in response to the proposed budget cuts, one youtube user left a video of a cat falling off a table while he shook a load of mentos in a coke bottle, to which other users said "just like the economy lol" and later "cats r homoz just like brian cowen lol. another user was asked about wheter the economy would improve, to which he replied with a video of him splaying his buttcheeks apart repeatly with his butthole seeming to mouth the word "hope".

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

it would've taken a week to write a feature, ring various people, go to the library, travel to different places, then a team of fact checkers and sub editors would pour over the copy, maybe even a legal department

lots of people still put in a lot of work to make there copy clean and here in the office there are often discussion on things like this... but you'd be amazed how quickly a fiction like this can be logged and seem as acurate as fact when you check it on the web (which is actually interesting, maybe that's the dudes point?) why would anyone suspect a proper sounding quote like that from some obscure composer to be a lie?

yr mans project just sounds like carefully putting a banana skin on the stairs and pointing at someone who slips on it for not being able to walk down stairs

Hold on, newspapers like the Guardian can't Lexis Nexis some Maurice Jarre interviews or something?
Fact-checking is dead because it takes too long?
It's okay to attribute quotes to someone just because they sound plausible?
I don't agree.
Wikipedia is just a fairly well-moderated message board.
News sources should be held to a higher standard.

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

Should a journalist not at least cite wikipedia as a source?

Fucking bingo.

 

[UTV]

most of the press is largely edited by the advertisers anyways, its not like super valu or tesco as sponsors of most publications care a lot if some composer did or didnt saying something about stuff, they are much more concerned about the chicken being clearly visible to entice the fans of obscure composers to go comfort eating chicken from tesco deli while mourning their hero. if you guyz really care, stage a boycott of everything those papers advertise untill such time that the advertisers force journalists to cross check everything they write.

 

[egg_]

News sources should be held to a higher standard.

By who?

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

By who?

By everyone involved.

 

[Froog]

most of the press is largely edited by the advertisers anyways, its not like super valu or tesco as sponsors of most publications care a lot if some composer did or didnt saying something about stuff, they are much more concerned about the chicken being clearly visible to entice the fans of obscure composers to go comfort eating chicken from tesco deli while mourning their hero. if you guyz really care, stage a boycott of everything those papers advertise untill such time that the advertisers force journalists to cross check everything they write.

 

[UTV]

this isnt the horn thread.

 

[Froog]

this isnt the horn thread.

it isn't the wackjob thread either.

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

it isn't the wackjob thread either.

You sure about that?

 

[Froog]

not entirely.

 

[egg_]

By everyone involved

Well, y'know, I agree with you, but I expect it's getting harder and harder to maintain a culture of journalistic integrity within a newspaper. They're pretty squeezed on cost, so even if the staff really really want to do an amazing job they have to crank out the words too fast to allow them to do proper research - and once the culture is lost it's probably never coming back

Never mind. Newspapers are dying anyway. Read this today, there's some interesting thoughts within
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

 

[UTV]

it isn't the wackjob thread either.

what is whackjob about explaining how print media works>?

 

[Froog]

what is whackjob about explaining how print media works>?

suggesting that advertisers control the editing of a newspaper?

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

Well, y'know, I agree with you, but I expect it's getting harder and harder to maintain a culture of journalistic integrity within a newspaper. They're pretty squeezed on cost, so even if the staff really really want to do an amazing job they have to crank out the words too fast to allow them to do proper research - and once the culture is lost it's probably never coming back

Never mind. Newspapers are dying anyway. Read this today, there's some interesting thoughts within
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

There's still a right way and a wrong way.

I'm halfway through that blog posting. Good read.
Print is dead. RIP.

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

....

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.


With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

 

[Mormon Nailer]

Never mind. Newspapers are dying anyway. Read this today, there's some interesting thoughts within
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Interesting link.

Especially this.

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

It seems obvious in retrospect. I don't think I've seen it articulated in any of the newspaper apocalypse discussions before.

 

[UTV]

suggesting that advertisers control the editing of a newspaper?

advertisers control on average 75% of the income of newspapers as a general rule. this money is spent on space, front page, back page and middle being most expensive. the space left over from ads is what journo's have to work with. not counting feature writing, for example if theres a feature on weddings, they've sold ad's to maybe 15-20 wedding related business, dress makers, cakes and hotels etc. then there is an expectancy to have literature along with these ads to give the feature some weight. over all this might occupy a few pages, and occupy a journalist for half a day to piece together something about weddings. so basically journo's have to spend a lot of their time writing features to please the advertisers. this has sort of evolved more recently into a vague load of shit called 'lifestyle', where advertisers can fling any product at a lifestyle magazine that involves, well living. soooo... i'd consider when most writers are spending hours on features every week to satisfy the financial needs of the paper/mag, they are edited in the sense of only having half a week to do a weeks real journalism. cool tin foil hat pic by the way.