I have some slight experience with the PR world. The thing I think went wrong here, is that the news slowly came in over the course of several days. Each one adding slight excitement, but individually insignificant. First there was a story about a landing going to happen and the first pictures from space. Then there was a story of landing going on but they would only have results a couple of days later. Then there was a story of the landing seemingly successful and now they have images.
If you compare it to a Tesla launch. One clear moment defined in time, various completely superfluous but amazing details for the stories. Most importantly: high quality photogenic imagery! All leading to a giant one day peak of excitement which does take the frontpages.
That's a great take on the question (and relevant to anyone trying to generate hype for their start ups or projects)... I'm reasonably interested in space, and am regularly excited to watch the launches etc - but the way this story played out I ended up seeing a few photographs, going "wow, that's amazingly cool... ok, next story..." There was nothing to explore, nothing to be swept up along with.
"News" is harmful because out of billions of things going on every day it has to pick out just a few and those few things have to have enough coherence that somebody who watches CNN at 5:25 has a similar experience to someone who tunes in at 7:10 later on.
Communities have shared truths and falsehoods. Here in the US I think many people are following the Kavanaugh supreme court nomination. If you reload Google News every hour you will probably see nothing new, but some bombshell seems to drop every 1.5 days or so.
It is not irrational that people care about it, but the way in which people are irrational is particularly irrational.
For instance Kavanaugh could just withdraw him nomination and the Republicans have a long list of other conservative judges that could do that job but no they can't stand losing at all so they will wind up losing something bigger all while warning the Democrats that they risk looking like crazy fools who are out of touch with the American people.
And you know that gets people right back in it and keeps the ratings high and you'd better believe all those anchors on CNN got a bonus at the end of 2018 because if it bleeds it leads.
>For instance Kavanaugh could just withdraw him nomination and the Republicans have a long list of other conservative judges that could do that job but no they can't stand losing at all so they will wind up losing something bigger all while warning the Democrats that they risk looking like crazy fools who are out of touch with the American people.
No they couldn't, the Democrats would try to delay any vote to after mid terms. Kavanaugh was announced July 9th for example (of course if the Republicans win again, it wouldn't matter).
Worse, you'd be setting a precedent that you don't need any evidence to take down a supreme court judge nomination, which would of course carry over to politicians as well.
"The nomination remained before the Senate for 293 days,[6] the longest nomination process in the history of Supreme Court nominations.[7] With the failure of Garland's nomination, President Donald Trump, a Republican, successfully nominated Neil Gorsuch in 2017."
> Worse, you'd be setting a precedent that you don't need any evidence to take down a supreme court judge nomination, which would of course carry over to politicians as well.
You mean like refusing to even have a confirmation hearing at all? We're already there.
Not to mention Robert Bork well before that even. There is no need for evidence in the first place - just like Congress can technically impeach the president for wearing an ugly tie.
"On October 23, 1987, the Senate denied Bork's confirmation, with 42 Senators voting in favor and 58 voting against. Two Democratic Senators, David Boren (D-OK) and Ernest Hollings (D-SC), voted in his favor, with 6 Republican Senators (John Chafee (R-RI), Bob Packwood (R-OR), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Robert Stafford (R-VT), John Warner (R-VA), and Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-CT) voting against him.[34]"
and
"On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was instrumental in the 'Saturday Night Massacre' when President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox following Cox's request for tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon initially ordered U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson's top deputy, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also considered the order "fundamentally wrong"[15] and resigned, making Bork acting attorney general. When Nixon reiterated his order, Bork complied and fired Cox."
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork. Bork got a hearing. He just was unable to get approved - by a wide margin - because of his disgraceful conduct during Watergate.
There's no evidence to suggest Democrats would delay this vote. Chuck Schumer is doing everything in his power to make sure all of Trump's judicial picks get through unabated.
I really want to respond to, and point out some things that I think are fallacies in your thinking. But I won't. What I will do is point out that your comment, my desire to comment on it, and others decision to do just that -- that is precisely why the media focuses on low brow trash. It drives discussion, interest, and ultimately a nonstop target for clicks, which generates revenue. Now let's talk about the rover. Man isn't that cool. Yeah, it's cool. Wow. Yeah.. wow. See those pictures? Yeah. They're cool huh? Yeah. Yeah...
It's quite unfortunate that there's now such a strong profit motive in pushing controversial and divisive topics. The internet was supposed to be the great uniter. Unforeseen consequences, as always.
I like that asteroid footage, I like anything about minor planets and dream that there will be a trillion people living in the Kuiper belt.
That is not trash at all.
The Buddha says that "enticing speech" is a sin and the primary difference between low brash trash and high brow trash is the size of the market.
I think if you want to be transhuman in 2018, other than swimming with fins, you should be hacking your attention.
I spent 4 years without looking at the mass media regularly and I then I got more normal and I can point the fallacies in my younger self's argument and find that there is something good in television, video games, etc.
Facebook on the other hand turned into something like cigarette smoking in less than ten years.
So if you want to get better than normal results consider your own attention and innovations that help people pay attention differently: anti-Facebook could be the basis of many a business.
I think you misread Tango's comment. He's not saying the asteroid rover landing is trash, quite the opposite.
@Tango: I think you're right about the inability of most consumers of US media to form intelligent opinions and discussion about such abstract events. However, I would charge the media to convey the importance of such events. On the other hand, sadly, long gone are the days of consumption of in depth aggregated (the best & richest) media and also the personal investments of time people used to make consuming such rich content. Here are the days of real housewives of 'blank' (feel free to subsitute housewives for politicians). We can [must] do better.
If the US media only likes US news stories, why was there a huge following for the soccer team in Thailand who were trapped in the cave? It's just a matter of how many other things are in the news right now, and the news cycle right now is being hammered with the SCOTUS nomination. If people want to complain about US news being myopic, this is a really bad example.
Because, while it is a landmark achievement, it has little relevance to which people have access to health care, which people are confined to cages their entire lives, or which people are allowed to make decisions about their own bodies -- and, in the US, other stories are very relevant to these questions right now.
I would love for Hayabusa to get more attention, but the problem isn't that it's being drowned out by nothing. It's being drowned out by stories that will have real and long-lasting effects on people's everyday lives.
And, yet, a billionaire launching a car into space, or a tiny hole in the ISS both received significantly more press coverage than this, but are equally as unimportant compared to the other things you mentioned.
That's just how the news cycle goes. When things are happening, important stories get pushed aside. When nothing is happening, less 'important' stories get featured.
Even here in Japan, I don't recall seeing any news outlets cover this as top story material; in fact, the first place I heard about this was from non-Japanese news sources...
This is very interesting insight. As a US citizen I often marvel at the apparently strongly principled value system of Japanese culture. Specifically, it's a sense of acting for 'the greater good' as opposed to acting for what I call the 'look at me' factor (which I find both repugnant yet rampant in the US today).
I wonder if it's these values that simply led to Japan letting the story take a natual course rather than wasting funds to pumping up a PR campaign. If so, I wish Japan all the best in being the first to tap into the virtually limitless space mining resources. They deserve it.
The purpose of news is not to inform, but to make money. Divisive and emotionally charged issues get people to share, respond, and take a more active part in issues. This, in turn, can be monetized -- clicks are money. And it also tends to be easy to keep milking these sort of divisive and emotionally charged issues for days/weeks at a time.
I was even more disappointed in the coverage of the Falcon Heavy. Most news outlets gave it little more than basic coverage, even though it was one of the most significant achievement in space in decades. And that landing footage of multiple rockets separating and autonomously landing, simultaneously, is something that can give anybody goose bumps. And that was a US achievement, which goes against the hypothesis of 'because it was Japanese' many are stating in this thread.
It's pretty sad. We are currently living through what will undoubtedly be seen as one of the most important times in the history of our very species as we develop the technology and ships that will one day go from being just rockets to outright space ships. And you could ask the average person what they know about it, and it would be next to nothing. Yet ask that same person about whether somebody might have drunkenly groped somebody else 35 years ago, and they'll have all the details and dirt. I suppose when it comes to clicks, gropes beat hopes.
I think he got it right, I think you've assumed that just because a news organization is legally given a "non-profit" tag that they aren't all about making money. The people that work there are still paid a salary just like the "for-profit" agencies, and they still base funding on ratings and how much money a given program brings in. My main news sources are PBS News and NPR News, and I can't tell much of a difference in coverage compared to NBC News or ABC News when I watch those.
BBC, NPR, etc. are not for profit and receive some public funding yet fall into the exact same trappings. News requires resources to publish. Resources require money. You need to make money, or you're not going to exist for long. In times past the monopoly of the traditional media on news had the advantage of basically removing economic concern from the picture. Journalistic ethics come with a cost. One of the few examples of where a monopoly/oligopoly remained relatively benevolent. Of course on the other hand, it also opened the door to important issues being completely ignored - but it's hard to say if that was all that much worse than the vicious rat race that media has turned into today.
A really great article I always recommend on these topics is Robert Kaiser's "The Bad News About the News." [1] Kaiser was a 50 year veteran of the Washington Post working as both editor and reporter. He retired briefly after Bezos bought the paper. It's a great article that gives an insider perspective on the rise and fall of traditional media, and how they reacted and failed to react to the internet in time.
In the US, there are a number of us that wake up every day and feel like our hair is on fire. We read the news, hoping that at some point our elected leaders will do their job and rein in the madness, so we can, for a change, sleep well at night. Anything not related to the circus that is currently running our country is pretty much back-page.
On this subject, if you folks haven't heard about the evolution of "mexican blood tabloids", which is so disgusting I can hardly stand it, you need to see this [please know that the irony of this statement is not lost on me - I'm not saying you need to read these tabloids, but am suggesting you need to see how this machine is working and why it evolved]:
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/29/622275371/working-the-night-s...
Maybe because its population is 4-5x as much as the US and UK's population combined and its economic growth is an unstoppable force? Especially given how both the US and UK are a political clusterfuck at the moment.
Why is landing on an asteroid a monumentous achievement? It seems like a nice one, I guess a first-of, but monumentous? No. Second, it was Japan, not the US, that probably meant there was less coverage than if NASA had done it. Third, we had some other news over the past few days which has riveted the nation.
Journalism is dead in America. We have clickbait and we have people who share videos typically the length of a vine maybe a bit longer. Traditional journalism has been vilified by expensive slavic viral marketing firms quite successfully. Footage of forest fires is shown on national news every time it happens because its engaging to the typical video clip consumer. Anything spectacular. If a fireworks factory in China explodes its a top headline but if were engaged in a very serious trade war with China that's just nerd stuff left to the eggheads on public media(reviled by at least 30% of the country and even more would see it defunded). Also internationalism has been vilified to the point it is despised by at least 30% of the country probably more. Also many content providers have been scrambling to pander to the emerging Nu Right demographic who explicitly don't care about the achievements of Chinamen.
If you compare it to a Tesla launch. One clear moment defined in time, various completely superfluous but amazing details for the stories. Most importantly: high quality photogenic imagery! All leading to a giant one day peak of excitement which does take the frontpages.