New York Times’ Reddit Piece Shows Dangers of Internet Journalism
The world is still adjusting to the idea of instant news on the Internet and the ability to easily change and rewrite history in many ways. The Internet has, for better or worse, completely changed the way reporting can be done with a very simple tool: the ability to update pieces after launch. This has many upsides as it means new information can be added to easily augment or complete stories to provide more information to readers and keeping pieces timely. However, there is a hefty potential downside, where sites can cover up and completely rewrite stories without any informing, correcting major errors without comment or just flat out change the story they’re covering.
The New York Times is most recently guilty of this as a NewsDiff’s comparison of their story on Ellen Pao’s resignation shows. The original story was written by Mike Isaac who titled it “Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief” and presented a relatively neutral and information driven piece on the situation as a business technologies writer. That story, though, is not what you’d find if you went to the New York Times now, because nearly all of it was rewritten by David Streitfeld with reporting by Vindu Goel in San Francisco and published on the front page. It is titled “It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit” and is much more of an opinion heavy piece compared to the previous one.
The differences are astounding, as anyone who viewed the original article would return and find it replaced with a wholly other story dealing primarily with sexism around Reddit and how Ellen Pao was a “hero to many.” While the original article included the sentence “Many Reddit users blamed Ms. Pao directly in the hours after Ms. Taylor’s firing, flooding Reddit’s forums with vitriolic messages — often racist and misogynistic — calling for Ms. Pao’s ouster” it was the only instance of citing sexism or misogyny in the original article, as, particularly recently, users’ comments towards Pao were generally unkind. The story also originally had a small mention of her previous and ongoing court room drama regarding gender discrimination that was significantly increased in the rewrite, putting in almost a small other article on the state of that trial there.
The issue here in many ways has to deal with the fact that David Streitfeld’s updated story has almost nothing in common with Mike Isaac’s original story. Only 87 words carried over to the new version, and while allowing for a few more in just format changes, that is an incredibly small amount of the 477 words that were in the original article. The tone, the angle, the presentation, and what the article was attempting to accomplish are vastly different things that merit a separate piece instead of a complete rewrite.
http://techraptor.net/content/new-york-times-reddit-piece-shows-dangers-of-internet-journalism
Comparing: It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
Were they purported to be the same article, or did the rewrite change the byline too?
It just seems like the mainstream media is heading further towards sensationalism to get readers versus just reporting news. There were a few articles on Yahoo (dunno if anyone would call them mainstream), but they talked about homosexuality, and those issues recently. They are often criticized in their comment section of using the worst titles, idiotic stories with wrong conclusions based on what little facts they have, etc, just to get views these days. Most of the comments on those types of stories show not many are buying into it, and yet, they continue to pump them out instead of trying to clean up the way they "report" things or "advertise" with odd titles that don't really match the story.
Does the nyt article mention any correction or updates or changes? If not then it was stealthy. Check out the newsdiffs.org link.
