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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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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End of conversation
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