Why does tech reporting seem so bad now?
Is everyone just using AI and not proof reading? I see this a lot lately. Even Tom's Guide has bad editing, a good example is this article: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/pixel-8
Most notably, the display looks set to shrink from 6.3 inches to 5.8 inches
Then
The Pixel 8's screen is rumored to measure 6.17 inches, down from 6.31 inches.
It's like they're just grabbing from other articles and cramming together or adding content to old news now vs analyzing and forming opinions. With all the LMG drama lately, I had hoped written news would take note. Maybe I'm just too picky.
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A TV journalist I know helped shed some light on this.
He used to write about one article a week. Usually a review, sometimes an article article.
Nowadays, they have him write about seven "articles" a week, but six of them are SEO-optimized factoids. You know, those articles where you're looking for the premiere date of a show, but they're six sections long, the premiere date is the last section, and the first five sections look kind of like they were written by a human who hates his job? Yeah. They make actual journalists write those, and they want them written well, because Google's idea of fixing the SEO race was to prioritize long articles and articles that look like they were written by humans.
So these articles are created by humans, they're churned out fast, and they have a few sections represented by headers that directly answer common search terms / questions. The more common the question, the further the answer is buried down in the article.
These articles aren't serious, so they expect you to get six of them done per week on top of your actual job, but they still want you to put effort in and write them well so they don't look like chatgpt garbage, and so that, when people click on them, a fraction of a percent of those people actually stick around on the website and look at more ads.
I expected the mass SEO responses, but this was an angle that while I was aware of, hit the details. Adds up!
this is so sad. i hope he’s doing okay with it. i feel like if i loved writing enough to be a writer that having to do this kind of work would break my spirit.