BusinessWeek and Slashdot get context wrong, writes Zawodnyblogs and podcasting, search engines — by TDavid @ 12:11 pm PST
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A clear and present hazard in the ever changing scoop-it, serve-it fast online news world is not being thorough enough in the reporting to get the actual context and discussion. Tabloids thrive on twisting what was said or meant to often insane extremes, responsible journalists and publications do not — or at least should not. It’s how they come out with some of those ridiculous shocker headlines. Well, that, and the fact that they pay their share of lawsuits because they know in advance that the story and headline are 99% fiction.
This is especially important and relevant when attributing quotes, meaning and context to something that was never suggested like the brief, but ardent exchange I had with Jeremy Zawodny on Yahoo’s software installation practices a couple weeks ago. Jeremy revisited the situation yesterday when he discovered his words had been twisted:
Big shock, huh? Slashdot, known for their world-class editorial standards, cited the recent BusinessWeek story about Yahoo and decided that I was complaining about Yahoo! supporting adware.Of course, I wasn’t. Neither site bothered to link to my blog post about it (for fear their readers would form their own opinions, perhaps?) or the surrounding context–the two stories I quoted heavily in my own post.
Yeah, this blog didn’t get linked on this situation by BusinessWeek or Slashdot either. I can see Slashdot passing us by because they are usually just a small italicized paragraph and the context usually comes from the comments (sometimes hilarious comments, BTW, if you have time to read through them), but the BusinessWeek piece is pretty long and only offers this part of the story to base their Yahoo tangent:
Around the same time, bloggers started griping about new Yahoo software downloads that change the preferences on users’ PCs. Pretty soon, even a Yahoo employee was blogging about it. In early September, Yahoo engineer Jeremy D. Zawodny sounded off on his blog
See, we bloggers will link to news sources like BusinessWeek but why don’t they link back in greater numbers to us? This is the web and links provide readers with everything they need to decide for themselves what the story is really about. Good job, Jeremy.
Bad job, BusinessWeek.
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MSM really just has a one-way street when it comes to linkbacks. One of Jason Calacanis’ posts proved that where Paidcontent scooped stories way before WSJ, but WSJ gave no credit. Of course, I deal with this too with some local news, but what can you do? MSM doesn’t always play nice.
Comment by darkmoon — September 22, 2005 @ 12:59 pm PST
What can you do? Two things come to mind actually.
One, notify the publication. Complain. This might seem lame, but readers are important. They have a voice and if they speak in large enough volume and numbers the publication must listen. I went to BusinessWeek and noticed they have a commenting system. I bookmarked and plan to return to that site and register. If I see this happen again, I’ll likely leave a comment complaining about it there. I’m assuming those comments are read by the writer of the piece. If not by them, hopefully somebody in charge is reading.
Vote with your feet. BusinessWeek just dropped to a much lower reading priority for me.I’ll now look for other sources besides them for similar stories to link in the future. As you know, a lot of stories are repeated across the wire and a choice can be made who/which/what stories to show attribution. In the case of which one picked it up off the wire first doesn’t usually interest me as much as who had the best perspective on the news. Often times it isn’t the MSM reporter, it’s a blogger from some corner of the world.
I don’t blame Slashdot because they are dealing on a high volume scale of posts with submitted entries and the editors there do not add links. Heck, they won’t even change the title. I understand their system and sometimes it benefits and sometimes it doesn’t. In the /. case, it’s not about /. so much as it is about those who submit the stories and who they choose to link. And also their system, like Fark, Digg, etc., relies more upon the community commenting than the brief and often incomplete summary itself.
Comment by TDavid — September 23, 2005 @ 5:16 am PST