[bombcar]

My new game is watching when something online doesn’t interview people directly but simply reports on what someone on Twitter or Reddit said (and half the time they do have a picture and a name it’s a Twitter user they contacted).

The world outside the internet is getting wider and wider it seems.

[majormajor]

I've started not considering it "news" if your article consists just of idle online chatter. If no action is being taken, there's a good chance it's not anything more than background noise of the "people will always talk about SOMETHING" type.

[robmerki]

Good observation. It's the purest form of intellectual laziness.

[abathur]

This is a low effort "gotcha" way of dismissing the work of real humans who are struggling to meet newsroom deadlines and productivity schedules as their industry gets picked over by vulture capital in the wake of online news, craigslist/social/app classifieds, and social/search ads hoovering up most of their revenue streams.

(I agree these are cheap, fluff news--but it's hard to judge most individual reporters when you know the ground financial truth of the industry. Even at pretty venerable publications people are having to hustle hard for salaries that few people with programming jobs in the same city would even entertain. People at smaller legacy news outlets are working for schoolteacher wages or worse without the benefits or job security.)

[bigDinosaur]

Reposting reddit comments is hardly work. If that style of journalism vanished nobody would care. People who find themselves doing that should consider a different career. I wouldn't be surprised if the attrition rates for the industry are very high.

[abathur]

Sure--but getting clicks is (~now) part of their job.

[bigDinosaur]

I'm aware. I have no respect for that at all. I'd rather many of those people literally get paid to do nothing than generate clickbait. What a sorry state for a profession that allegedly aspires to speak truth to power. In my mind it's like doctors who have sunk to pushing vitamin water supplements on personal-brand style websites.

[abathur]

You do realize the reporters didn't go to journalism school because they dream of churning out clickbait for a living, yeah? I'm sure the vast majority of them would rather be paid to do nothing than to generate clickbait, too. (Or, you know, be paid to challenge the powerful.)

In 2003--my freshman year in college--I worked for the online desk at my hometown newspaper. I worked overnight. Once the print paper was ready, I reviewed and massaged automatically-converted copies of the for-print layout to ensure they were ready to publish online and manually pulled them from the quark files if they weren't. Our online desk was in one corner of a cavernous newsroom with scores and scores of desks, between the compositor and the sports desk.

There were more sports reporters working the desk next to me in 2003 than the total number of reporters left at the entire paper now. The industry is a husk.