Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

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

---

Read more

Posts

746

Comments

2,023

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

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.

I've been incarcerated, as has my college roommate. My immediate family consists only of my parents, but in his case, he has two siblings in addition to his parents. So that's six people from only two examples.

Somewhat pointless without all cables supporting those features, though.

And if some of the forest burns, two birds, one stone.

Working on it. You'd be surprised how many people in other states fail to follow through.

It's Texas. People get killed for no reason at all.

Friendly reminder that trying to kill people in Boulder does fuck-all for the Gaza situation.

CPAC: Where you go if you want to spew vitriol.

Of course the whole thing was a sham. But it is important to see what's happening now in the states through that lens.

None of my classmates had anything good to say in Germany about ... well, anything from that era. In fact, anyone who did was ostracized.

I fear this is where we're headed.

Let's not pretend Tusk did much for the average Pole. This is merely another example of leaders talking about the importance of democracy while things go to shit at the ground level.

I have another example, but it trumps this.

Let's not forget the NSDAP. This is scarcely news.

It is an indictment of our educational system that, at 45, I was unaware the UK had a civil war. I obviously knew about Cromwell, and of course we have the fifth of November, but this is the first I'm hearing of this.

Anecdotally, I've found that the larger issue is one that is not historically unique: people not following through on what they say they will do. This, sadly, does not include Trump and his junta.

Ironically, I say this sitting in an air-conditioned hotel room paid for by a complete stranger. We never even exchanged names as I met her at the top of the stairs and she handed me the keycard.

This was the result of meeting someone off Reddit who founded Street Medics via the burner community, then started inviting me to Discord servers including Together We Stand, where I posted a rather lengthy plea for help.

Community is still out there; it's just hard to find (he reached out several months after my post), and sitting around using ChatGPT all day is not how one goes about it. When systems fail us, the solution is not a retreat into isolation, but rather further work into finding those with whom we share values.

And make no mistake: The system has failed. Ah, to go back to the halcyon days of believing the bullshit that if things aren't going well, it's entirely my fault. Victim-blaming has become a bedrock of our society.

But this also happens writ small. Abusive partners who feel emboldened by the fracturing of societal norms ... if it's hard to find someone new, it's easier to stay with what you know.

What we can't do is give up on believing people can be good just because many aren't. Confirmation bias is a bitch.

Bibi is essentially going the route of "Hitler didn't do enough." Setting aside the moist, dripping historical irony, which cannot be understated, this is what evil looks like.

You can't use the Holocaust as a foundational tenet while also trying to exterminate "others." It doesn't work that way.