Resignation Letter

Re:Resignation Letter by PaulDavisThe1st on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @03:10PM (#23836331)

>Journalism is not our fact gathering apparatus.

Well then what is? I used to live next door to a journalist - by which I mean someone who went out into the world (haiti, israel/west bank, US immigration policy) and asked questions and collected facts. They didn't always get everything right, and their work seemed to encourage a deliberate sort of fence-sitting with respect to the issues and places that they covered, but they did work that nobody else is/was doing.

Those people on social media who appear to be the "fact gathering apparatus" ? they are just echoing the work of people like my old neighbor.

Without journalists, the ones we sometimes call reporters, we've got nothing to work with.

Now certainly, their job also extends into "sense making" and "relevance deciding". But the important ones - the reporters - are the ones gathering the material that the the rest of us - including the non-reporting journalists - are working with when we try to do the same thing.

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Re:Resignation Letter by acituan on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @04:28PM (#23837399)

Absolutely what your neighbor did is crucial, but it is not a waterfall process. The problem space of "gathering facts" is virtually infinite, means relevance decisions has to start while deciding on what to gather more facts on. It is an iterative process that says "based on these facts we found, we investigated for these further facts and here why it all was important to promote them to public attention".

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Re:Resignation Letter by PaulDavisThe1st on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @04:37PM (#23837515)

Absolutely, but my point is the original claim of "journalism is not our fact gathering process" is just wrong.

Sure, there's a frame problem in journalism just as much as there is in AI, and sure, journalists play a (possibly outsized) role in finding contemporary suboptimal solutions for it. But even with that being the case, somebody has to go out and get information for us to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about etc. etc.

That's what (good) journalists (reporters) do.

"Facts all come with points of view" (Talking Heads, early 1980s)

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Re:Resignation Letter by acituan on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @07:00PM (#23839144)

> my point is the original claim of "journalism is not our fact gathering process" is just wrong.

Allow me to reword; facts are necessary but not at all sufficient to constitute journalism, nor journalism can claim monopoly on fact gathering. E.g. we have other, more formal, fact gathering processes such as science or court of law, which cannot be substituted with journalism, damages of which we see to the extent it tries to.

The firehose of twitter, youtube etc feeds already give us facts to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about. And we are not in better shape for it. We cannot sufficiently convert those facts into sense. Nor those facts are always the ones we should be interested in.

That's why it's critical not to reduce journalism to fact gathering.

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Re:Resignation Letter by PaulDavisThe1st on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @08:05PM (#23839674)

I would broadly agree with that. I am not sure it is the job of journalism to "convert facts into sense", though it seems reasonable to posit that this is part of the role of journalism in contemporary society. It is certainly something that many journalists (particularly of the journal-ist variety aka op-ed writers) try to do. But it seems to me that if you're serious about trying to make sense of the facts/the world, you need to turn to much deeper analysis than journalism typically represents.

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