Huh. This doesn't hit home for me at all. The New York Times has a long history of bold investigative journalism and, compared to a lot of other news outlets, caution and strong adherence to verifiable facts. If they're succeeding these days, that only makes me more hopeful for the future.
I'd love to see more news outlets do as well as the times does at reporting honestly and courageously. But BuzzFeed? Gawker? What are the great contributions these entities make, such that we should worry about their having staff poached away, or getting bought entirely?
NY Times is like most newspapers. There are certain topics they don't care about and write with average accuracy, and others they feel are important to the current of world events, which they manipulate ruthlessly.
Sometimes people like to claim the NYT only has issues with factual accuracy in op-eds, but it's not true. The first article shown as an example in the UnHerd piece, for example, is investigative reporting about Britain, hardly a war zone that's difficult for journalists to reach. Yet it's riddled with basic geographical and factual errors.
The author here is trying to claim that Buzzfeed and Gawker have been 'taken over' by the NYT, which is gobbling up everything in its path. From afar it looks more like a reverse takeover.
On their podcast a bit back, they had a somewhat surprising retrospective on their role as a news agency during issues such as the Clinton email incident, Trumps rise to power, and other events where they make the statement they might have to be more careful in the future about what they say and how they say it.
Though I'm still somewhat skeptical this is done from an entirely neutral/altruistic perspective
I mean you saw they made their democratic endorsement a joke because they now wanted to play the TV game. Plus for a global paper; the editorial staff is the typical costal elite. It’s going to be a delicate balance to keep it up.
Internal policy changes regarding how they report the news. I somehow doubt they would care enough to report how they are changing internally if anyone but Trump had won the election.
“The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington.”
It’s the double-edge sword of our new world. As our world is moving faster than laws, there’s this tangential excuse that all these companies use as competitors for why their once markets, are completely evaporating. Sure Ben’s argument isn’t the greatest (listicles had to happen to pay for the News division). I’m just disheartening that for the time being it just seems the nature of the game. The room is either niche or a oversized conglomerate of algorithm-based decision making...and not always the good kind.
Every democracy needs a state funded but independent news organization. Just as it needs a state funded but independent judiciary and statistics organization. It's not the NYT's fault that the US does not have such an news organization.
I'd love to see more news outlets do as well as the times does at reporting honestly and courageously. But BuzzFeed? Gawker? What are the great contributions these entities make, such that we should worry about their having staff poached away, or getting bought entirely?