
New York Times' Reddit Piece Shows Dangers of Internet Journalism - ColinWright
http://techraptor.net/content/new-york-times-reddit-piece-shows-dangers-of-internet-journalism
======
danso
I've believed since newsdiffs.org (mentioned in the OP) was launched that an
in-house diff-tracker/displayer for the New York Times would be both a win in
transparency, accuracy, and the company's bottom-line. The first two are
mostly self-evident...in terms of improving the bottom-line...well, I often go
to the NYT for breaking news. For a given event, they'll often have a main
story which they update throughout the day. The obvious problem is that if
I've read it once, I have to re-read the entire story throughout the day, and
mentally parse out the updated bits.

So why not have, for _every_ story, a "History" link, or even a _feed_ of
latest changes, so that readers who re-visit a story can quickly see the
atomic updates? For my own reading habits, this would cement the NYT has a
place to go to for developing stories...the transparency/accuracy bit are just
icing on the cake.

This issue of having an in-house Newsdiffs was brought up by the public editor
back when Jill Abramson was still editor:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26pubed.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26pubed.html)

Here's what she said:

> _Right now, tracking changes is not a priority at The Times. As Ms. Abramson
> told me, it’s unrealistic to preserve an “immutable, permanent record of
> everything we have done.”_

I can't speak for her true motives or intentions...but part of the problem
here is technical ignorance. Her perception seems to have been that tracking
changes would have been too much of a burden -- and she is justified in
thinking this if she has never worked with something that uses a diff-like
program...and in my experience, this includes most _news people...in a
newsroom, editing and re-editing stories and supplying reasons (i.e. as in a
correction) is a very manual process. If a newsroom is using WordPress, sure,
they know of the concept of article versions..._ but they don't really grok
the ability for machines to create timestamped diffs _.

However, if Ms. Abramson was familiar with the kind of system that Github (or
Wikipedia, for that matter) uses, she would see that keeping an immutable,
permanent record is actually quite easy for machines to do. So to create a
inhouse change-log-per-article would be quite easy, technically, and with some
interface work, it'd be a very welcome feature to more than a few readers,
IMO.

_ edit: In terms of "most news people" not knowing diff...I'm basing this on
anecdotal experience with non-programming investigative journalists who, among
all journalists, have the most to benefit from understanding the implications
of an efficient document diff, but I haven't worked with any who demonstrated
that grasp. A common scenario is having two versions of some important
document and wanting to see every change made. A diff would not be perfect,
but it doesn't have to be, it just needs to _triage_ possible changes to
further investigate.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Inability to keep an immutable record of what's been published disqualifies
nyt from its claim of being "the paper of record".

~~~
brudgers
Not if the print edition is considered the record. The analogy would be
eventual consistency in exchange for higher availability: the tradeoff is the
occasional stale read.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I just don't agree. It's not as though this isn't a solved problem. And this
isn't just a stale read, it's a bait and switch.

~~~
brudgers
It becomes bait and switch via a presumption that the editorial direction
wrought by the changes is improper. It's not if one presumes that the
additional context makes for better journalism: then the changes are
improvement. This appears to be the belief _The New York Times_ 's editors.

~~~
leereeves
Switching a neutral article for an opinion piece would bother me even if I
agreed with the opinion.

~~~
tptacek
I read this comment and was moved to summarize every graf in the piece to
check whether it was an opinion piece:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891)

Spoiler: I don't think "it's an opinion piece" is a colorable argument.

~~~
shawn-butler
It's called parajournalism. "Opinion piece" has a clearly defined meaning in
journalism and is an entirely different genre.

Parajournalism seems to be journalism — “the collection and dissemination of
current news” — but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having
it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the
atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the
aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers.[0]

Your bullet list summary reveals little but your own bias/agenda and adds
little to the conversation. We have the actual diff and can read for ourselves
which is sort of the point. The diff link was provided in the source article:
[http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015...](http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-
pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html)

I hope Margaret Sullivan looks into this. Seems appropriate.

0:
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/aug/26/parajou...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/aug/26/parajournalism-
or-tom-wolfe-his-magic-writing-mach/)

~~~
tptacek
People level this charge, or charges just like it, at every news story they
don't like. Nerds are going to get a rude awakening if they think they're
going to cow the Times (or the WSJ editorial board, for that matter) over
"bias" in their newsrooms; these publications have been at the center of the
real-world culture war for decades.

------
clamprecht
I think a lesson everyone should have in life is witnessing something first-
hand in real life, and then reading about it in the media, and seeing how
incredibly inaccurate media articles are. Anytime I read an article about a
subject I actually have first-hand knowledge of, it reaffirms the lesson.

~~~
jpmattia
> _I think a lesson everyone should have in life is witnessing something
> first-hand in real life, and then reading about it in the media,_

Even better: Saying something to a reporter, and then reading what you
supposedly said within quotation marks. (Although perhaps my data is old and
things have gotten better since adequate interview-recording equipment is now
on every smartphone.)

~~~
_red
Yes, trying to give any sort of nuanced answer to a reporter is almost
hopeless.

For instance if you say: "Plan ABC is good, however the specific concerns are
X, Y, and Z. If care is not taken in how these issued are addressed it will
likely be a very expensive failure".

The article will appear as: PLAN HAS BROAD SUPPORT. _red says, "Plan ABC is
good".

~~~
jpmattia
Or if the writer is in a different mood: PLAN IS NOT GOOD. _red said "The
unaddressed issues in this plan will likely make it a _very_ expensive
failure!"

------
rory096
I was hoping someone would write about how bad this article was. (Shocked to
see it's the _same_ one as the pretty good piece from earlier.)

The worst part to me was the article quoting _Mitch Kapor_ to back up its
implicit support of internet censorship:

>...charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on
the web...

>Mitch Kapor, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that
Reddit users were predominantly male and 18 to 29 years old.

>“In my view, her job was made more difficult because as a woman, she was
particularly subject to the abuse stemming from the pockets of toxic misogyny
in the Reddit ecosystem,” said Mr. Kapor, now a partner at Kapor Capital.

~~~
notcensorship
It is not censorship to say that a private entity has the right to choose who
gets kicked out of their dinner party.

I keep hoping that somebody will write about the difference between censorship
and private parties choosing not to support and/or tolerate certain behaviors.
It shouldn't be necessary, but there's a generation of people so incredibly
entitled and so incredibly insane that they actually need a primer on reality.

~~~
rory096
Sure it is. It's just not freedom of speech.

> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other
> information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive,
> politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media
> outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship)

------
declan
I worked as a journalist for over a decade -- CBS, Time, CNET, Wired, etc. --
before founding [https://recent.io/](https://recent.io/) and every news
organization I can think of updates articles after publication.

This practice predates the Internet by decades; wire services called updates
"writethrus." Updated copy would be labeled internally for editors as 2nd-lede
writethru, 3rd-lede writethru, with perhaps some details about what was
changed or added, with those internal notes typically not being published for
readers. So east coast papers would print a different version of the story
than later-deadline west coast papers. The Washington Post did this in print
form, with stories in the early "bulldog" edition often modified and expanded
before appearing in the final edition. News has always been a snapshot in
time.

There is significant pressure on reporters to post news quickly to capitalize
on social sharing and search -- even if the quick first post is one or two
paragraphs with little review by editors -- and update their articles quickly.
This was the official policy in at least one newsroom where I worked. That can
and does lead to inaccuracies and hasty reporting, though errors do tend to be
corrected quickly. But the linked article does not accuse the NYT of factual
errors.

It is true that it would be near-trivial for news organizations to have a
history tab appear on each article that shows older versions -- I've suggested
this and other features before, like providing people quoted in the article an
automatic right of reply in a text field underneath the story. The reason we
don't see history tabs is probably a combination of legal risk (imagine that a
green reporter writes that John Doe was convicted of murder, and John Doe was
the prosecutor, not the defendant), little demand from readers, embarrassment
about errors in early versions, and newspaper-era newsroom thinking.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
This was not a simple update. This was a rewrite that changed the format and
the content - from a factual report to an opinion piece chastising the evil
white men of SV, all while managing to put a positive spin on a humiliating
trial.

This may not be new in the dishonorable world of journalism, but it's the
first time many of us outsiders get to look behind the curtain. We kind of
suspected how the sausage is made, but actually seeing it is still shocking.

~~~
magicalist
This complaint and others in this thread all seem to be that you don't like
the new content of the article and have nothing to do with the article being
updated.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Is that really what you understood from what I wrote?

------
vonklaus
People simply choose the facts they want to hear. On balance, the news
industry is rapidly declining and is not rewarded for objective and insightful
well researched pieces.

 _People choose the facts they want_

Then they choose where to read the facts they agree with. Feminist blogs and
news agencies were quick to highlight a woman being blasted out of tech for
her gender and highlighting other related stories of abuse on reddit and in
tech, MRA blogs post about how a woman was promoted on gender and her attack
on free speech in pursuit of a biased agenda, and some fell in the middle.

Virtually none of these stories generated revenue from consumers directly
paying subscription fees. It is ad traffic from people rushing to confirm
their own bias.

~~~
tptacek
"Feminist news agencies".

~~~
vonklaus
> "Feminist _blogs_ and News Agencies"

Is what I said. I don't understand what you are implying though.

~~~
tptacek
That your belief that there are entire news agencies corrupted by feminism is
revealing.

~~~
ssalazar
> Feminist (blogs and news agencies)

> (Feminist blogs) and (news agencies)

That you assumed one of two equally appropriate interpretations of this
(admittedly awkward) phrasing and jumped to conclusions is even more
revealing.

~~~
tptacek
You're right! I didn't read his response to my comment very carefully; I
missed the italicization, and thus his point. And: yep, that's pretty
revealing about me, too.

------
jondubois
I had read the "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0..." article. I remember
being surprised that misogyny was mentioned since this issue had nothing to do
with gender.

And they even attacked Reddit users themselves - Essentially calling them
sexist. It was obvious that this article was politically motivated - There is
some corruption happening there.

Journalistic integrity is dead. There is a financial or political motive
behind every article you read. I don't trust anything I read online anymore.
Maybe Reddit itself is the only place which still has some degree of
credibility left. Maybe it's only a matter of time though before moderators
start using their powers for personal gain.

------
snowwrestler
"Dangers" seems like a strong word to me. This blog post is strong on
technical analysis, but light on substantive analysis. It tells us exactly how
many words are common between the first and last piece, but doesn't say
whether any factual errors or omissions occurred between the first and last
piece. We know that facts and analysis were added, but is that a "danger?"

The undercurrent in the blog post, and I predict an undercurrent here, is that
reporting on issues of gender is not appropriate for a story about a tech
company. The Times article went from basically a transmission of the official
line from Reddit, to a more in-depth story of the background and implications.
This is presented, implicitly, as a bad thing. I don't necessarily agree that
it is.

The Clinton story had the opposite problem--there were factual inaccuracies in
the first version because of the rush to print. I agree that the rush to be
first is usually pointless and potentially harmful.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I don't get that angle at all.

Issues of gender are perfectly relevant in tech. But the issue wasn't gender -
it was basic competence and cultural fit.

IMO Reddit would be absolutely fine with a good female CEO. But Pao wasn't a
good Reddit CEO, she was a terrible Reddit CEO. Her gender is incidental to
that.

So when journalists try to frame the narrative as "cellar-dwelling young male
mouthbreathers vs a shocked and innocent victim of disgusting sexism" \-
that's heavy-handed editorialising at best, and plain bullshit at worst.

Now - there's always been a thick and disgusting stream of bullshit running
through trad media. (See also, Fox News.)

But that's a problem with the old journalistic model, which was (is...) based
on selling opinion-shaping to advertisers, sponsors, and media owners.

Pretending the Internet is _worse_ than that seems very self-indulgent.

It's also a rather panicked attempt to undermine the effectiveness of Internet
communities as opinion-forming media machines in their own right. The machines
happen to self-assemble rather than being engineered in a top-down way like
trad media, and they're certainly more open than they believe to external
influence.

Even so. The newsies aren't just losing the ad sale and eyeball space, they're
also losing the traditional op-ed space to spontaneous community narratives.

If you're an editor, that's a serious problem. If you lose both eyeballs and
PR leverage, you really have no reason to exist at all.

~~~
pervycreeper
>If you're an editor, that's a serious problem. If you lose both eyeballs and
PR leverage, you really have no reason to exist at all.

Well, one can still be useful by becoming a toady for elite power interests by
promulgating certain cultural narratives.

------
rectang
Publishers who wish to rein in the excesses of editors and journalists who
abuse updates could establish a policy of linking to a change history which
shows all the iterations of a specific article.

The temptation to make questionable edits would be curbed because evidence
would be immediately available, enabling punishing critiques.

------
dekhn
It looks to me like they published the original article as breaking news, then
changed it to be similar to what is going to, or was printed, in the physical
edition of the newspaper.

I would strongly prefer the two articles be posted in their entirety at
different (permanent) URIs, but I'm guessing this has already been debated and
decided at the Times in favor of what they did.

------
brudgers
For context in regards to journalism, the linked article offers "related"
content. Looking at what TechRaptor believes to be relevant, recently
TechRaptor in their editorial _Reddit Banhammer_ [1] took the position:

 _CEO Ellen Pao of popular social media site Reddit seems to have more up her
sleeve after a failed gender discrimination lawsuit. After new anti-harassment
terms have been laid down, subreddits have mysteriously vanished. Of the
subreddits that have been banned, /r/fatpeoplehate was among the largest. For
those readers unfamiliar with what a subreddit is, think of them like mini
communities._

 _One might think that we’re better off without bile aimed solely at a
targeted group, but something doesn’t sit well with me._

The phrase "up her sleeve" has no positive connotation in this context. More
importantly, the same history of alleged gender discrimination that the linked
article claims is irrelevant to _The New York Times_ 's reporting forms an
important part of TechRaptor's position regarding her actions in _Reddit
Banhammer_. Indeed it ends with the conspiracy suggesting:

 _How do you readers feel about Reddit’s censorship with the banning of
certain subreddits and would you agree they were justified? Or is this part of
something bigger?_

TechRaptor's position appears to more about _The New York Times_ 's
interpretation of events than about the relevance of the facts about Ms. Pao's
history when interpreting events.

[1]: techraptor.net/content/reddit-banhammer-crack

------
brudgers
As someone who frequently rewrites, revises, and deletes their online
comments, to me the article's changes just look like part of the writing
process in a world of realtime publishing. _The New York Times_ did not have a
front page story ready within minutes of the news breaking, and unlike CNN,
they didn't publish random tweets about the event as news: there's better and
worse.

Maybe newspapers need git repositories...with no ability to rebase of course.

~~~
pron
But why not add the new story as a separate analysis piece, as the NYT often
does? What did they gain by changing the original?

~~~
oldmanjay
There is a very clear movement in journalism to create the narrative that
Ellen Pao is a feminist hero. Apparently the NYT is in that cabal.

~~~
pron
Please stop.

------
guelo
I don't understand what this post is implying. If the original article was
neutral and information driven then the changes aren't a cover up, maybe you
could call it a cover down? The people that read the original article and
missed the updates are better off. So what's nefarious about it?

~~~
tptacek
According to 'yzzxy, "TechRaptor" is a GamerGate spin-off site. So the
subtextual nefariousness might be what you think it is: a bunch of people who
don't like it when people write about gender discrimination making special
pleading arguments about how the Internet should be covered by press outlets.

~~~
Karunamon
Seeing you, of all people, peddling this genetic fallacy claptrap is rather
discouraging.

Any such "subtextual nefariousness" is in the mind of the reader.

~~~
Globrazu
It's funny because it isn't even true, TechRaptor as a Tech reporting site has
existed since early 2013, here is a Web Archive from about a year before
"GamerGate" started:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20131124114156/http://techraptor....](http://web.archive.org/web/20131124114156/http://techraptor.net/)

In fact it was founded by Rutledge Daugette in March 2013, over a year before
"GamerGate" started in August 2014. So apparently the site was "set up by evil
GamerGaters" over a year and a half before it ever existed in prescient
foreknowledge and expectation.

What this should tell you both about said claim and the people making it I
would like to leave up to you.

~~~
tptacek
You know, my message board nerd instincts tell me I should attempt a grasping
litigation of this point, attempting to establish for my faction the notion
that TechRaptor is in fact a GG spinoff. But, you're right: I did some
research, and while they are beloved of GamerGaters and the KotakuInAction
crowd, that doesn't make them GamerGaters.

I retract the implication I created upthread that TechRaptor's story is weird
because it's a GamerGate product. I'm back to "it's weird because I don't know
why".

------
usaphp
Same thing happens with reporting on Qatar death toll of building stadiums for
the World Cup in 2022, they have used a total number of deaths of immigrants
in Qatar instead of those who build stadiums ( their overall death rate is on
par with other counties even UK and USA), they have edited [1] the article
since then but the original impression has been made and now people are
throwing invalid "facts" everywhere blaming Qatar of slave workers deaths for
building stadium.

[1] -
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/27/a...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/27/a-body-
count-in-qatar-illustrates-the-consequences-of-fifa-corruption/)

~~~
MoOmer
Slave labor in Qatar and Dubai is real. Some of the living conditions
literally have a sewage trough running right through the run-down and horrible
housing complexes. Forced to shit where you eat, have our passport taken away,
work unpaid, have no where to turn to for help, and be beaten if you don't
meet standards every day.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-
qatars...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-
cup-slaves)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm)

~~~
usaphp
You should see how some Mexicans live in USA or Africans in UK, not much
different from how those mentioned in your quoted article live in Qatar, these
people decided to do it themselves.

~~~
tptacek
There are 800,000 Mexicans in Chicago, and the neighborhoods in Chicago that
are dominated by them are nice. I don't know what you're trying to imply about
American Mexican immigrants, but if it's what it sounds like you're implying,
please educate yourself.

~~~
usaphp
I used to work at construction sites in Brooklyn where mexicans were living 10
people a room in horrible conditions in Brighton Beach, so those "nice"
neighborhoods that you see in Chicago are just a face of it, try going inside
the actual houses...Looking at them from your office or just by driving by
will not obviously show a real picture, so please educate yourself.

~~~
tptacek
Your comment shouldn't be grey. I didn't downvote you. I assumed, unfairly,
that you were being casually racist (or something; "racist" isn't the right
term). Sorry about that.

------
ender7
If you, like me, or tptacek [1], were confused why this is a big deal, that's
because it's not. It's common practice for online articles to be changed after
they are published, especially as new information comes in. If the article
originally contained factually incorrect information that was later corrected
that would be one thing, but that's not the case with this article; new
information and context was added.

TechRaptor, the site that hosts the article, is strongly associated with the
GamerGate community, and that is the source of this concern of this new non-
existent "danger". Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to
be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens. In this case, the NYT
article was modified to include context that TechRaptor author didn't like.
However, it doesn't look good to say "no, this totally wasn't about the fact
that Ellen Pao was a woman" because that's easily disprovable: there are a
trillion and a half Reddit threads out there displaying some of the nastiest
sexist invective you've seen in a long time, all targeted at Ellen Pao.
Instead, TechRaptor attempts to attack the article via a sidechannel
discreditation. It attacks an unrelated feature of the article (that it was
modified after it was published), which casts a pall over the entire thing,
effectively undermining the main argument simply by association.

There is a ton of talk in this discussion thread about how the NYT article is
"biased" or trying to present an "opinion". This seems to me like just another
way of disagreeing with the argument without seeming like you're disagreeing
with it. Claiming that this should be reported on like any other CEO being
fired is not a cry for journalistic integrity, it's a request to willfully
ignore the very, very special context that this firing took place in. The
behavior of the Reddit community during this process, a behavior that was
blatantly sexist and clearly occurred at an outsized volume and level of
rancor _because Ellen Pao was a woman_ , cannot and should not be ignored. To
do so would be, well, unethical.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891)

~~~
Ralfp
> Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of
> GamerGate's most popular smoke screens.

This is very unfair and uninformed statement to make about GG.

Most important thing to know about GG is that there are many images of GG
circulating around. For some people GG is internet hate campaign. For others
its political movement. For others its protest of trends on game scene. For
others its outrage about reporting on poor releases or cliques in gaming
media. Finally there are people who are just exploiting whole thing for
internet fame they can capitalise from down the lane.

So quite obviously everybody finds the thing he/she seeks in GG, and so we
have number of people attacking other people in different ways under different
pretenses, like "IGN sold out!" or "GooberGaters chased girl out of her
house!" naturally followed by "they didn't, they display game ads because they
are gaming site" or "girl didn't run anywere, reporting her escape off her
house's sofa all the time" retorts.

The greatest tragedy here is that there's whole lot of people with binary
perception amounting to "with us or against us" who can't tolerate the tought
that there may be valid points raised by other side, and thus dismissing (or
more often flaming) either Adrian Chmielarz or Anita Sarkesian voices simply
because they are on _wrong side_.

~~~
ender7
I sympathize with your plea for us to move beyond labels, but that doesn't
change the nature of this TechRaptor piece.

This _is_ a smoke screen and it _is_ being used in the same old way to
obliquely discredit an argument that a member of the GG community doesn't
like. And the argument being discredited is, _once again_ , about the status
of women in tech and on the Internet. Far from being an "unfair"
characterization -- it's depressingly apt here.

------
istvan__
Thanks for sharing, next time somebody tells me news are not fabricated I just
pull this up! :)

------
eli
Probably should have just been a second article, though I could understand why
they might not want two very similar articles covering a lot of the same
ground. I assume only the latter version ran in print. The first version
should probably have just stuck around as a web-only piece that links to the
newer one. Be interesting to see what the Ombudsman has to say.

------
thomasjames
For actual journalism on the internet, it is worth going to shared common
sources. I almost always rely on Reuters and AP. Since they are cited so often
by downstream media, which is a major part of their business model, their
content is--by its very nature--somewhat static. I have also generally found
their writing to be less biased, with the exception of Reuters being
inherently pro-finance and globalization (again, due to their specialized
business model). In terms of more immutable print media, back n the early
2000s, I was also a firm believer in that the ridiculously low word count
limits and easier barrier to reader entry encouraged at the Metro (the free
public transportation newspaper) left whatever was able to make it through
less biased. This again is on the basis that bias would add too much
complexity to stories whose sole purpose was to impart the basics of widely
agreed upon fact (cf. Simple English Wikipedia).

------
pessimizer
"Associated Press caused a major uproar when they reported Hilary Clinton was
running a homebrew email server from her home. This story was updated numerous
times throughout the day with archive sites not catching all of it, though
ZDNet has a very good run down of the situation with screenshots of the
original. By the end of the day the story was about the Benghazi email probe
instead of the original story about running a homebrew email _that was
essentially disproven once people looked into it._ "

That story was not only not disproven, but not even contested.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/hillary-clinton-says-she-did-
op...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/hillary-clinton-says-she-did-operate-a-
private-server/)

------
tptacek
I'm not clear why I'm supposed to be alarmed by this.

The update neither changes nor removes any of the substantive material from
the original story (look carefully). It adds additional material, and fleshes
some of the previous material out.

It seems like standard practice at newspapers to get a first take on a story
and then flesh it out later. It's _certainly_ standard practice at The New
York Times, as even a casual look at NewsDiffs.org will show you: all sorts of
pieces are effectively rewritten multiple times between their quick-take
online version and the final print version. The Times never posts correction
notices when that happens; they post them when they get something _wrong_.

 _Later_

A thread running through this controversy is that the new NYT story is an
"opinion piece". Let's analyze it, graf by graf. This list is numbered by
graf; the summaries are my own (you could dispute them if you wanted).

1\. _Pao is a hero to many online for her gender equality fight, but was
ousted by people online as well_. This is mostly beyond dispute, except for
the presumption that the Reddit mob actually did oust her, which all the
principals in the story deny. That interpretation _favors_ the Reddit mob.

2\. _Pao 's resignation was abrupt and happened amidst a torrent of misogynist
drama, renewing concerns about SV sexism_. It's indisputable that her
resignation was abrupt. It's indisputable that the story has generated concern
about online sexism. Some people may not appreciate that concern, but that
doesn't make its existence not a fact.

3\. _There is a debate about online invective, particularly around gender
issues. Calls for Pao 's ouster focused on her failed KPCB lawsuit._ First
point: indisputable (see: GamerGate). Second point: indisputable (see:
petition for her ouster). Second point particularly interesting because the
suit has no obvious connection with Reddit.

4\. _Pao 's lawsuit revealed a culture that prized machismo._ This is the
closest the article comes to opening up a salient in the debate. I happen to
agree that the trial proceedings and community response did that, but
reasonable people could disagree. It would be hard to argue that the Times
simply _made this up_ , though.

5\. _Pao 's popularity amongst Redditors was influenced by the lawsuit_.
Again: indisputable; the petition for her ouster _leads off with it_.

6: _A direct quote from Reddit 's chairman about Pao asserting that misogyny
payed a role_. Reported story is reported.

7: _Pao 's unpopularity generated a petition, and lots of ugly comments_.
Nobody disputes this.

8: _A direct quote from Pao 's resignation letter_. Reported story is
reported.

9: _A direct quote from Pao, and background on Reddit._ Reported story: still
being reported!

10: _A direct quote from Mitch Kapor on the demographics of Reddit_. Still
more reporting. Three quotes in this story so far, two from the story's
principals, one from an extremely well-known person in the industry.

11: _Direct quote from Kapor about gender issues on Reddit_. Kapor is
corroborating points raised earlier in the article.

12: _Many subreddits went on strike over the firing of Victoria_.
Indisputable, and also the event that precipitated the story.

13: _Pao posted an apology over her mismanagement of the site that was
somewhat broad in scope_. Indisputable fact, directly relevant to the core
issue of the story.

14: _Pao 's ouster is a setback, after losing a lawsuit and turning down a
lucrative settlement_. Indisputable fact.

15: _Kleiner 's side of the story is that Pao was a bad investor_. That is
indeed their side of the story. The Times does not rebut it.

16: _Pao owes a large amount of money, which the judge believes she 's capable
of paying_. Still more facts.

17: _Pao is unclear on how she 's going to proceed with appeals_. Still more
facts.

18: _If Pao succeeded in her appeal, the legal showdown between Pao and KPCB
could recur._ Factual, and relevant to the story: Pao's suit was, again, in
the lede graf of the petition for her ouster, and it could happen again!

19: _Huffman is the new Reddit CEO and part time at Hipmunk_. Indisputable
facts.

20: _Huffman and Ohanian started Reddit_. Indisputable facts.

21: _Reddit is a private company with 50MM in funding_. More undisputed facts.

22: _Pao is remaining as an advisor, looking forward to getting more sleep_.

I'll go ahead and say it: by no reasonable definition is this an "opinion
piece".

~~~
exstudent2
You should be concerned because:

1\. the rewrites weren't noted in the article, thus undermining the
authoritativeness of ALL NYT pieces.

2\. They added a bunch of opinion to what was a fairly neutral piece.

~~~
tptacek
Again: it is not standard practice at the NYT to note rewrites between quick
takes and final versions. If you spend even a few minutes on NewsDiffs.org,
you're going to see that this happens all the time.

This is important because the "TechRaptor" story doesn't concern itself with
the NYT's standard practice --- in fact, it doesn't even seem to be aware of
the practice. Instead, it takes a commonplace and uses it as a fig leaf to
suggest that the NYT is distinctively bad at covering tech.

Reasonable people can argue that it's bad that the NYT posts quick takes and
then substantially rewritten final stories. If they make that argument, they
should acknowledge that it happens constantly.

Reasonable people can argue that the NYT sucks at covering tech. If they make
that argument, they should not make quick takes the fulcrum of their argument.

~~~
egocodedinsol
> it is not standard practice at the NYT to note rewrites between quick takes
> and final versions. ... they should acknowledge that it happens constantly.

I thought this was the point of the article?

~~~
tptacek
No, it is not. The article's claim is more specific. In essence, what it says
is that the Times does not provide a "git blame" for all their articles, and
for that reason, it is bad at covering technology.

~~~
egocodedinsol
hmm, I didn't read it as a piece about nyt covering tech, but about covering
news posted on the internet, with the ability to rapidly update and change
articles without providing a record. E.g. they gave an example of the AP and
spoke of journalism generally. I guess both examples, nyt/reddit, AP/email had
an element of tech in them.

Fwiw, this shouldn't be construed as an endorsement of the article.

------
gambler
The fact that they deleted the original version, rather than added or appended
the new one is very telling. People worked on writing and editing it and that
work got thrown away. "Hey, Mike, sorry." Why do you think that is?

You know, in the age of hypertext and search engines you would think that news
would become more focused on actual events and facts. (Because anyone who
cares could follow the links and do searches to get background information.)

Instead, everyone races to push forward more "analysis" and "context". We get
"news" articles that pull in unrelated issues, do everything possible to frame
the facts, and use emotionally loaded language wherever possible.

~~~
trop
The Times (as of 2008) was explicit that they had two stages for online
publication (see
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/washington/11askthetimes.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/washington/11askthetimes.html?pagewanted=all)).

The "Continuous News Desk" correspondent quickly write an article, in
consultation with reporters. But the final draft of the article -- for print
publication -- could be entirely different and with a different byline. I'm
wondering if the techraptor reporter is noticing not a conspiracy to
editorialize, but rather the difference between the breaking news story (just-
the-facts) and a semi-considered story (context).

------
sireat
No matter what the subject matter this does seem like a questionable practice.

Why not make a new article if it is that different? Is there a URL shortage at
NYT?

Or was it a case of one commit, another commit and yet another commit and then
you have a whole new article?

------
redml
All that these professional victims do is drown out the voices of the actual
victims.

------
revelation
That was the same article?! I was just reading that and though it was some
kind of editorial followup.

That NewsDiff link seems like a case for Margaret Sullivan. I can already
picture the appeasement article in my head.

~~~
jbuzbee
Seems like a reportable issue to me. Margaret Sullivan's page is here:

[http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/](http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/)

------
nraynaud
There are two convenient fact omissions when talking about sexism and racism
towards Pao: the fact that the fired employee was female too. And the fact
that Pao is of asian origins and that Asians are traditionally over-
represented in SV and not traditional victims of racism in technology.

Those facts made the case for a racist and sexist crowd a bit too nuanced for
a front page.

(Or maybe Asians and Indians are officially not counting now? They were
getting too much in the way of the simply racist technoworld narrative?)

~~~
notahacker
Regardless of whether the article's editorial stance is a bit kind to Pao, I
think the fact that numerous racist comments were directed towards her is a
lot more pertinent to the story than the number of Asians working in SV...

~~~
nraynaud
in a world where storytelling and example is more important than statistics
and hard numbers, this story will be used in the future as an example instead
of an exception.

------
pixelmonkey
"This is a challenge that journalism faces today -- how to fairly update and
keep stories current while informing readers as best we can."

I work in and around the media industry, and I don't think most publishers see
this as a "challenge" \-- they have other things to worry about (like how to
survive post-print, how to operate in an Internet ecosystem with
Google/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube, etc.)

Instead, I see a lot of excitement around the ability of journalists to update
their work after they publish it -- one of the few upsides, in fact, of the
Internet, from their standpoint. Just as Wikipedia articles get better over
time, some important pieces of journalism do, too -- with the guidance of new
information or challenges to the original writing.

But look, the Internet isn't print. You can publish something at a URL, then
change that URL's content. That's not a crime and it isn't worrying -- it's
built-in to the medium.

Just like nothing makes the moment of publication special, nothing makes the
moment of re-publication or re-writing special.

The New Yorker did a nice piece on the Internet archive, who is trying to
"solve" this problem by periodically archiving the web. They pointed out that
when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, he considered the idea of versioning, but
ultimately discarded it.

    
    
        In 1989, at CERN, the European Particle Physics 
        Laboratory, in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee, an English
        computer scientist, proposed a hypertext transfer 
        protocol (HTTP) to link pages on what he called 
        the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee toyed with the 
        idea of a time axis for his protocol, too. One 
        reason it was never developed was the preference 
        for the most up-to-date information: a bias against 
        obsolescence. But the chief reason was the premium 
        placed on ease of use. “We were so young then, and 
        the Web was so young,” Berners-Lee told me. “I was 
        trying to get it to go. Preservation was not a 
        priority. But we’re getting older now.”
    

You can read the full story here:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb)

I think ultimately having a strong and well-supported Internet Archive (if you
care, donate: [http://archive.org/donate/](http://archive.org/donate/)) is the
best possible solution to this "problem". As long as we can go back and see
how content evolved over time, we'll be able to study the changes.

And no, media companies are not going to embed Git into their news stories --
most of their visitors don't even know what Git or version control is. And
most probably have never even clicked the "revision history" tab in Wikipedia.

~~~
penrod
Quite. Who cares whether the NYT revised the article? The more salient
criticism is that the article is a deeply lazy and tendentious exercise in
using insinuation to push a predetermined narrative.

------
harmonicon
site is not accessible to me, google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:techrap...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:techraptor.net/content/new-
york-times-reddit-piece-shows-dangers-of-internet-journalism)

------
pcrh
I wonder how much the stability of the URL influences this sort of editing. If
traffic is coming in via a site such as reddit, a new article with a new URL
might not get as much traffic as an edited version of the original article.

~~~
ihsw
Internet popularity should not take precedent over journalistic integrity.

~~~
pcrh
I was commenting on the motivation to edit existing articles rather than
posting new articles, or even just pulling the original article.

------
Lerc
Technically this should be quite easy to fix. Each story gets a git
repositiory. URLs denote the state at the time of view. A visitor to the URL
gets a small header giving them the ability to read the article as shared or
the most recent version. The full commit history should be accessible.

The reasons for not doing this would be mostly non-technical. Face-saving and
risk of liability would seriously inhibit implementation.

------
mayneack
NewsBlur (newsblur.com) automatically diffs everything I think. Mostly just
grammar updates.

------
anon3_
Who here didn't know anything about entrenched sexism in SV until codes of
conduct, angry twitter mobs and odd journalism articles such as this post came
about?

------
mahouse
This is interesting, since the piece by Mike Isaac was already _very_
liberally biased.

------
zobzu
News are corrupted as fuck, internet makes this worse. Rewrites, frequency,
amount, lies, anything goes if you can get +1 view

------
yzzxy
NOTE: Techraptor is a site set up by Gamergaters to talk about games and tech
news without reprecussions from people who find their views exclusive of
progressives, minorities, feminists, and LGBTQ folks. They call this "ethical
journalism" because they claim to not receive kickbacks or have special
relationships with their journalistic subjects, as they perceive their
ideological enemies do.

The quality of journalism is low in my experience, notable moments include the
point where writers believed "death of the author"[0] referred to authors
dying out as a profession.

[0] A major concept in contemperary literature concerning authorial importance
after a work is published, see _Rereading Barthes and Nabokov_ by Zadie Smith
for a good intro

~~~
scrollaway
What I'm seeing is a news piece citing sources I can independently verify.

This is _really_ damning:
[http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015...](http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-
pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html)

Did "gamergaters" (whatever that means...) set up newsdiffs too? Oh wait,
googling it brings me to a git repository created in 2012, years before
"gamergate" was a word on the internet.

So, I click that link, and I see exactly what the article talks about. A
neutral piece on a CEO stepping down completely rewritten to push for a "look
at how they're mistreating that poor female CEO" agenda. A solid article,
turned into opinion mediatrash.

And you're making an ad hominem argument about the website because of who
created it.

Quick sidenote (and if this gets me downvoted, have the decency to reply;
blind downvotes with no discussion breed censorship)... As someone who is pro-
women in tech, pro- women in general, pro- minorities, and even as an activist
at times, I am finding it _really fucking hard_ these days to be pro
_feminism_ when the agenda consists of _lying to people to get into the
spotlight_.

I can't ever support a cause where this crap happens all the time. Where the
facts aren't good enough to push the agenda.

Are there really not enough stories of opressed women that you have to find
Ellen Pao, a _CEO_ (which already almost nobody can relate to) in the middle
of extremely controversial _fraudulent lawsuits_ , that is accused of being
out of touch with its own userbase? And people try to make readers relate to
_her_?

There's so much shit to be outraged at in the world. Why fabricate?

Edit: Yep. Downvoted without discussion. Brilliant. We're really encouraging
debates here...

~~~
istvan__
"Edit: Yep. Downvoted without discussion. Brilliant. We're really encouraging
debates here..."

Common practice here nowadays. You have to be ready to take a hit in your
karma if you bring up a viewpoint that is not widely accepted here. Kind of
makes me sad.

Anyways back to your points, this is exactly right. Ellen Pao fired Victoria
for no good reason and NYT conclusion -> she is hated because she is a female.
I can't find words to describe this level of hypocrisy. I am pretty sure that
there are people who disliked her due to sheer misogyny but 200.000 people
signed that petition. You don't need to be extremely good with math to
understand that those people cannot just all be like that.

Anyways, I agree with you that fabricating things like this article is
extremely bad, btw. this is what Chomsky calls manufacturing consent, and he
is damn right about it.

