

If engineers were journalists - kumarski
http://gatech.tumblr.com/post/35926696549/if-engineers-and-scientists-were-journalists

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jamesjporter
The problem with 6 is that often the PDF of a research article is behind the
paywall of the journal that published it. I agree that news organizations
often do a horrible job of citing their sources for science coverage though;
they could at least link to the journal's webpage for the abstract.

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kumarski
Good point.

If the author used the article, they have access to it, as well as the
bibliography of that article.

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alanctgardner2
All writing would be presented in a dry, dull list format.

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kumarski
I think there's a chance for a compromise. A chance for journalists to have an
engineer's quantitative veracity coupled with qualitative polish. I would cite
Christopher Hitchens as an example.

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alanctgardner2
I meant this specifically as a dig at this article. Personally, I've really
enjoyed everything Randall Munroe has ever written; they're educational and
relatively accurate, but they have a charm that a lot of writing lacks. Never
read Hitchens or Feynman, but my understanding is that many technical people
can also write quite well.

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goostavos
Feynman is one of those writers who's voice comes clearly through the text.
All of his writing carries a very specific rhythm with it. Surely You're
Joking Mr. Feynman is an absolutely fantastic read -- doubly so if you have
any interest in the history of the Manhattan Project. It's usually painted as
a completely serious affair, so reading feynman's account of goofing around
with security and trying to sneak codes to his wife brought a very human side
to the history. I highly recommend all of his writings.

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wam
Hmm. Stay away from words that carry connotations? That's what words _do_.
Narrative journalism exists because we are storytellers, culturally if not
innately.

Producing tools that help analyze and interpret media narratives is a good
idea, but it's also a hard problem that doesn't show signs of being eased by
crowdsourcing or noun/verb extraction. Fact-checking has already been
completely politicized: What's bare fact to one person is obvious bias to
another. You can certainly classify bias and hyperbole from your point of
view. But even in peer-reviewed scientific publications you find bitter fights
over "theory-loaded" paradigm biases.

Alongside this I'd like to know what you think journalists do well?

Edit: For a sociolinguistic perspective, see Lakoff (both of them). On the
representation of "fact," Ian Hacking has an excellent book, "Representing and
Intervening" which looks at Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc.

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kumarski
Maybe my protest is more against eye-grabbing-headlines than connotation...

Now that you've put it that way, the word journalist might be too broad in its
definition. I think there are good and bad journalists with different positive
skill sets.

I wrote the blog post after seeing too many scientific topics where
journalists were inaccurate. This doesn't represent all journalists.

I think photo and video journalists do a particularly good job of news
casting. Sometimes their content becomes described inaccurately. The napalm
girl photo of Vietnam is a good example of this.

Thanks for the comment. Just checked out the book.

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rflrob
I'm not---and never have been---a journalist, but this piece is assuming that
journalists are, by and large, happy with the state of reportage today. Yes,
it would be great if you could exhaustively fact check every piece, or
carefully and skeptically examine every assumption and statement a source
makes, but when your editor is breathing down your neck because the presses
are running, and you still haven't turned in your article, standards slip. I
suspect that many (though not all) of these points are things that get taught
over and over in journalism school, but there are eventually quality and
quantity trade-offs, and if there's little incentive for the extra quantum of
quality, then it's only rational that quality would win out.

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kumarski
I could see how the writing would indicate that.

We can't exhaustively fact check our pieces, but we can at least link to our
sources. Maybe false information is the cost of doing business in high speed
journalism?

Thanks for the comment.

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tristan_louis
Strikes me as what most journalist learn and try to do. Don't confuse pundits
with journalists.

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kumarski
It's hard to differentiate between the two.

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rohern
I would subscribe to a news organization that met these standards. Startup!

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kumarski
There's lots of news organizations that believe in these standards. It is
difficult to meet them. It might be incredibly boring as well.

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af3
OFFTOP: gatech sounds like georgia tech ;)

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kumarski
Yes, I go to Georgia Tech.

