
Mission Motors didn't close because of Apple - jseliger
http://www.asphaltandrubber.com/oped/mission-motors-apple-bullshit-story/
======
austenallred
The problem is this: The person who wrote that article for Reuters didn't know
_anything_ about Mission Motors. The reporter had to hit her quota by mostly
packaging up and rewording Apple press releases because she has to pump out
_n_ articles per day. Otherwise Reuters starts to lose money on her and she
gets fired.

Expertise and research take time, and therefore are expensive. Reuters can't
afford to pay someone to have deep expertise. So she gets pitched on something
and pushes it out without much thought, it gets some clicks, and no one cares.

Almost every time I read a piece in the mainstream media about something I
understand really well I'm baffled at how badly the press machine we've set up
(and inexplicably trust) can butcher it. Then I think about that experience
the next time I read about something I don't know much about.

In the age of the Internet (with the monetization of the Internet) the
structure of traditional news is fundamentally flawed.

~~~
snowwrestler
In the good old days, there were just a few news operations. Each had the
resources and time to do thorough vetting and deep reporting of each story.

Today, there has been an explosion of news outlets, but each one has little
time or resources to do deep reporting. But because there are so many, they
are highly incentivized to attack each other's stories, to gain traffic.

I'm not sure that one way is worse than the other, from the audience
perspective. Today's news cycle is in some ways more transparent--the first
take goes public, then the fact check goes public, then the second take goes
public, then the second fact check, etc. And it's all discussed in detail
between anyone who's interested--like here on HN, or on Facebook, Twitter,
blogs, etc.

Let's call it a transition from a monolithic "wait until correct" model to a
distributed "eventually correct" model.

That said, it may be corrosive to the reputation of news operations in
general, because they are so frequently publicly challenged and wrong.

~~~
austenallred
I think reputation matters far less than people think it does in the news
industry.

Buzzfeed consistently does as much traffic as all local newspapers combined.

Maybe in the longterm it all evens out, but right now traffic is traffic.

------
yalogin
Does it matter even if it closed down because of Apple? If a company is so
weak that it cannot operate on losing a few employees, then isn't it the
company's fault? It's even more a problem with the company given that it's a
bull market for startups and funding.

~~~
ghshephard
Almost every great company has been in a position where losing just a few key
employees would have killed it before it became large enough to sustain
itself.

I have a theory that a lot of companies become great _because_ of the output
of those absolutely superb (but not necessarily self-promoting) employees who
create 95%+ of the intellectual output of the startup, while all the the
credit goes to those who promote themselves.

Snag those great employees, kill the company.

------
archmikhail
So now who do you trust? This guy (whom I know nothing about) or the several
media articles (whose writers and sources I know nothing about)? This is the
problem with how news is delivered in our age. Back in the day, you primarily
just knew the news of your town, and to verify the claims you could walk over
to the subjects and ask them.

~~~
hartator
I am pretty sure we have better access to information now than before.

~~~
jkestner
More signal, more noise.

------
Animats
Imagine what Steve Jobs would have done if someone "poached" three key
engineers from the iPhone team before it shipped.

~~~
cwyers
Probably nothing nice. But I am not obligated to share Steve Jobs' ethics when
judging Apple's actions here, and I really don't like the notion that an
employee "belongs" to a company that isn't covered in that employee's contract
(and even some contracts I think overstep what's legally permissable, not to
mention "right.") If you want to keep an employee, you do it by valuing that
employee properly, not by shaming competing offers for that employee.

