- Gigaom, Thursday, July 5, 2012 12:45 PM
Two think pieces examine how recent journalistic slip-ups -- like CNN and Fox inaccurately reporting the results of the Supreme Court healthcare ruling -- reflect the current state of media news
companies.
Former reporter Paul Wilson blames the healthcare goof on the media cult of "immediacy before accuracy" and the "deadline is now." He examines how these two beliefs are getting newspapers in trouble. "Whether realizing it or not, the
news media is now focused on breaking news by a matter [of] seconds instead of working toward goals that are actually worthy of their duty to the public," he writes.
Then there's the
discovery that Journatic, a Chicago-based startup handling local news coverage for newspapers all over the country, was using fake bylines, "allegedly to disguise the fact that they were compiled by
non-residents,..." writes Matthew Ingram. He debates the seriousness of such a mistake, and concludes that "at the end of the day, centralized and partly-automated production of that sort of generic
content is likely a reality for newspapers — or even fully-automated
production, from services like Narrative Science, which generates sports stories, business stories and an increasing range of other content using algorithms instead of human reporters and
editors."
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