On a tangental meta point: this is a good, solid piece of reportage [1] which is increasingly uncommon. The author talked to a number of people over a long period of time and uncovered subtleties that typically are ignored these days. A particularly nice touch was to use of a relatively recent historical reference from the mid 18th century. Mob justice and public shaming go back millennia and it would have been easy to pull out a roman or biblical reference. But he found one that actually focussed on the victimhood of the transgressor. Lovely.
(Sorry to use a French term; I'm not intending to be pretentious, it's just that the term "journalism" has been debased to the point where it is now casually used to refer to advertising).
It's b/c it's the NYTimes-- they actually do reporting & journalism.
There's seems to be a lot of piggybacking/freeloading off of original reporting. I was involved with a project that got a big splashy NYTimes write up and it was astonishing in the coming days to see how many joker press outlets basically crimped off the Times' original reporting. They'd include a link and all that but they'd lift the juciest quotes/content and the only thing they'd contribute was some usually sassy commentary.
It's a great little news nugget- provocative, interesting, yadda yadda.
And then before you know it, all these "summary"/"reaction" stories get published which didn't exactly contribute much or move the ball down the field:
I'm not sure if this is a real problem or not, but it seems kind of lame that those other groups get to sit on their cans and pontificate while others get out of their offices.
> In his book Flat Earth News,[3] the British journalist Nick Davies reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers[4] which found that 80% of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12% of stories were generated by reporters.[1]
(Sorry to use a French term; I'm not intending to be pretentious, it's just that the term "journalism" has been debased to the point where it is now casually used to refer to advertising).