Conversation

I’m kinda sick of the news media trying to manage expectations or even perceptions. Beyond a baseline of not inducing panic or extreme complacency, that’s not your damn job. It’s a stupid mission to take on that doesn’t benefit either you or the news consumer. It just adds noise.
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Managing expectations is for politicians and business leaders who are actually expected to do things. Your job is to subject those attempts to manage perceptions and expectations to critical scrutiny for readers who want a check-and-balance to gaslighting. Not a nanny media.
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I mean, a business has production targets say, so it has reason to manage expectations. If it will only ship a million widgets instead of 10 million because of Covid, yeah it should get out in front og that and manage customer expectations and warn them about upcoming shortages.
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Your job is to take a hard look at their factories and operations and either say it checks out or warn about potential shenanigans. A mayor has reason to manage case count and fatality expectations. Your job us to sanity check them and check for motives like upcoming elections.
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When you instead take on the mission of random cherry-picked experts to declare that “the recovery could take months or even years” you’re not treating such claims as potential news to investigate. You’re just amplifying some entity’s attempts to manage expectations.
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And while we are at it, opinions are not news simply because you put them in the news section rather than the editorial section. If it’s an amateur vox populi opinion, either do a proper survey or bracket it as a sample opinion. If it’s an expert, let another expert comment.
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And you’re not in the business of judging abstruse dialectics either. If 99 experts say 1 thing and 1 says the opposite, that’s not reason to weight both equally. If your writer understands the subject deeply enough to argue why that 1 person is worth listening to, it’s an op-ed.
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News reporting is also not about “telling the story” (and I know this has been a big debate within journalism). Let the magazines do that. Or out it in your magazine section. News reporting is also not about “explaining” a la Vox. It’s about questioning the explanations.
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Journalism is the one kind of writing I *know* I cannot do. The one time I tried it was such high effort I decided never to try again. So as an essayist/opinionator, when I look at a piece of “news” and go “I could have written that” it means it is not journalism.
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The *only* difference between the writing I do as a blogger/“newsletter” writer and much of supposed “news” is that I don’t bother to call up a few easily accessible people desperate for the spotlight to comment. If you aren’t quoting reluctant-to-talk people it ain’t news.
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Access journalism isn’t news either. It is extended PR based on inter-institutional mutual complicity. The old definition is still the best: journalism is printing something someone powerful does not want you to print, everything else is PR. If you can’t live up to that...
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...there’s really no good reason for your existence as an industry. Blogs/newsletters can do your job, more cheaply, and much better in 90% of cases where expertise matters. This would be unfortunate. Because actual news reporting is something we *cannot* do and needs doing.
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