Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

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2 yr. ago

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In all honesty, I don't make use of federation (and I'm aware of the irony in this specific case). I like this little corner of the internet. While .world would provide wider exposure, I'm about 25 years past going for the widest possible audience when it comes to things other than news.

Beehaw is not a place to have pointless arguments. But moving to ad hominems that are grammatically incorrect isn't a great look. You're beeing needlessly aggressive. I'm done here.

Not sure who this "Hurst" guy is.

Like, seriously, if you're going to cite someone, at least spell their name correctly.

I'm going to try to be civil here. You clearly know nothing about the journalistic process. What is a "custom cover"?

Yeah, at the corporate level, things are fucked up. But it certainly isn't Conde Nast leading the charge. That ship has sailed. But dear god, figure out how to properly capitalize things!

You got pushback, much of it from me, on your prior post because griefposting isn't really what I'm on Beehaw for.

Also, know your audience. People are here because we already know Reddit is a shitshow. I'm not sure what you're attempting to do by posting twice in rapid succession. Ars and ProPublica have different standards and metrics, which is actually the sign of a thriving journalism community.

Having your feelings hurt by people disagreeing with you suggests little online exposure. But you're frankly talking about an industry you have no knowledge of.

If nothing else, this belongs in Chat, not Technology.

This is the work of the alcohol lobby. This shit's happening in Texas as well as at the federal level. They want us beating our wives instead of having a relaxing evening.

If you still think Meta is providing a service, there are likely mental crisis lines locally. I don't understand why anyone uses any of their platforms.

That misses the whole part of the article.

I can launch into a tirade using Southern English, but I choose not to. Nana was English (you'll note that I sometimes don't lump it into the UK), so when I was up in Seattle visiting, I heard "aluminium" a lot.

"Here's," as my college roommate would say, "this about that." It's inconsistent with other elements on the periodic table, sure. We don't speak of "sodum" or any such nonsense. Caesesum would be a terrible idea to throw into a lake.

It's just customary. We don't have the same size pints, either, but no one's up in arms.

Chocolate and peanut butter.

I'm relatively certain David Warner played Adronicus at some point.

You have not truly experienced Shakespeare until you've heard it in the original Klingon.

While I largely agree with graf 2, graf 1 does a fair amount of question-begging.

Not to beat a dead horse, but for those using Reddit for news, it's undeniable that media literacy has not been imparted. The theatre and IE comparisons fall flat because you can always just go to the website. Reddit has no monopoly here.

If one uses Reddit as though it's an RSS feed, well, that's not an Advance problem. Not trying to victim-blame here, but come on. It's not a site for serious news. I've not been subscribed to any of the news subs in years because it's people sharing shoddily written stories and then having useless debates that ignore the central thesis.

It's fine for entertainment, but entertainment is not news. "Look at that cute cat" is the target demo, not, say, "I'd like to know about the latest developments in the Ukraine war." It's akin to going to Harbor Freight for ice cream. You can't blame the tool store for not selling food.

Ah, publicly funded news. Which the junta is trying to eviscerate.

I've honestly been pushing for the death of corporate journalism, as we're past the point where it can be rebuilt. Under this structure, there is no path forward, especially given the widespread fealty revealed last fall by LAT and WaPo.

We have a thriving propaganda community within journalism, but that's, uh ... not the goal here. It's not as though boots-on-the-ground reporters want to be doing this, but fucked-up motivators lead to fucked-up results in any industry.

But hey, a few more mergers can fix that before it's revealed as a house of cards, causing mass layoffs while executives sip mojitos.

I hate this timeline.

I probably read a few of your articles, unless you were covering Arch. Not sure if that was yet a thing at the time of the Digg fiasco.

It's sad that those were the incentive structures, but I find it unsurprising. By my final years in a newsroom, reporters had quotas for social-media posts. Guess what you're not doing when you need to tweet eight times a day? Actual reporting.

One might say, "OK, but it doesn't take that much time out of your day," which I'll grant, but it takes you out of the flow. If you're thinking about your next tweet, you aren't thinking about what other source you need to talk to that would solidify the story.

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases. Longform is still going strong (e.g. Ars, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic), and I'm relatively certain Ars has cost me way more than just the subscription. I learned about Factorio on there, and a few weeks later, I got my life back.

This particular setup is small potatoes. You want to talk monopoly? Gannett is a far better target (NB: I used to work for Gannett).

Sure, Conde Nast has a high MAU count, but they're still producing quality journalism. And I fail to see how putting a finger on the scale -- driving readers to good stories -- is really a problem.

Given current trends in journalism overall, this is corporate overreach, to be sure, but this is a competition for eyeballs that goes all the way back to Twitter and Facebook killing local journalism by training readers to not click through to the original sources, thereby depriving them of ad revenue.

This is simply advocating for further erosion of the industry. Case in point: Gannett was already, 10 years ago, producing generic wire pages for scores of local outlets. One guy in Austin (Adam) read the AP News Digest, and without so much as a budget meeting, we were replicating it nationwide, just cutting stories (usually badly, since the business model at the hub was to hire new grads and pay them shit until they burned out) to fit each paper's ad stack.

Algorithms Being Manipulated is in no way unique to Advance. This is a red herring. Journalism is in crisis, and any way to keep the lights on is fair game.

Yeah, I realized after submitting that I'd written in majority idiom, which wasn't my intent.

Having poured more idiom into three short grafs than at any time in my history of writing, I felt the need to come back and revisit other things.

Before I get to the issues with the title,

They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.

... oh, no! Gannett and Sinclair will be marginally affected. News outlets have already been dying for decades. The solution to this is certainly not killing more of them.

But as an editor, that title really grinds my gears.

If you want to go upstyle, that's fine. But commit to it. As it stands, this is a bunch of Random Caps, making it look more like a Trump tweet. Why is "their" lowercased?

"YSK" -- already something that should never be used when making a breathless pronouncement -- is serving zero function here. Then we have the ... interesting style choice of a comma set solid with a trailing ellipsis, followed by no period on "etc."

I mention all of this not to be mean, but rather to show what decades in news editing turns one into. And decreased traffic to those sites would endanger editors before reporters. Readers have been lamenting the decline in editing since the buyouts began in earnest back in the aughts, but it's a vicious cycle.

Less revenue, fewer editors.

I'd hazard a guess that, on Beehaw at least, users are aware of Advance's holdings. Anyone who's been following, for example, Ars' coverage of Reddit has seen the disclaimer at the bottom of every story.

So, this is not news but rather, "Look what I ran into on Wikipedia!" Cool. If I posted every Wikipedia story I ran into, I'd likely get a vacation.

It's important to remember that people can do excellent work for shitty corporate overlords. Pointing at Ars (literally my only paid subscription) and other properties still committing quality journalism under increasingly fraught circumstances is tone deaf.

But more to the point, who the fuck is still getting "news" off Reddit? The goal here should be getting people to stop using Reddit (admittedly, I'm still on there for niche topics), not to punish the journalists toiling to create the stories that get linked there by marketing.

Shilling on Reddit is of course not a great look, but boycotting these publications will only hurt journalists.

The C-suite can always get nice golden parachutes when things go downhill, while writers and editors get a pittance if anything when layoffs and buyouts come down the pike.

Should corporations be able to have their fingers in so many pies? No. But the horses are gone, so debating the barn door is irrelevant.

Carlin had a great bit about people against abortion. In contrast, the folks in those photos look like people fun to hang out with.

Fascists hate facts. Simple as that.

Now that corporate media are kowtowing, gotta get rid of those pesky public broadcasters. It's absurd to think of any other country where this shit would fly. Killing, say, the BBC would not go over well.