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.
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 heโs 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.
They're competing to see who's gonna land first on Google News, RSS readers and link aggregators as that's how they can get the most organic views, which they can then convert to ad revenue. So I guess for them speed of writing comes before quality.
This is my hypothesis as well, but it's not unique to tech writing.
It's everything. Having a top search result for a common query is just worth too much money.
Most journalism is pretty bad now - if you know about tech, you're just going to notice it more.
Everyone hopped onto ad blockers, and ads were how most online publications made money. Many have tried to switch to subscription, but few successfully, and most people side step that. Journalists are going to work for free, so now publications trip to get the most articles out of the fewest writers, and it's all going to shit.
Rightfully so.
A banner ad here or there, and people could put up with that. But limitless greed kicked in and these companies would bury ads in the article, ones that pop up over the article and everywhere in between. And on mobile it is 10x worse where the formating is an absolute mess and ads take priority over any actual real content.
2 out of 3 Android users don't know this well kept secret!
three forces at work here (two of them on display with recent LMG)
Here are 10 reasons why people with journalism degrees have no journalistic integrity.
Number 6 will surprise you!
Hot take. Consumer reporting is different from actual journalism. See also games journalism.
That's exactly what they're doing. And it gets worse, it's often automated. And they don't disclose that so nobody knows they shouldn't trust the information.
There is not enough money in it. High quality authors are expensive.
Kinda off topic, but I'll leave it up.
Just don't get too angry in the comments please.
Itโs too late Iโm going to flip a table
(โฏยฐโกยฐ๏ผโฏ๏ธต โปโโป
Please respect tables! โฌโโฌใ(เฒ _เฒ ใ)
๐ข
Thank you, I did debate on where to post this, but chose here since the example is recent Android news.
SEO generated garbage is nothing new, it is just becoming more prevalent.
Although, ironically, generated garbage is virtually worthless for SEO.
Actually I think journalistic quality has degraded overall. Not just in technical sites.
The BBC here in the UK I generally counted on well written (if not always technically accurate) articles.
Over the last 10 years or so (maybe longer) this has degraded to articles which have clearly not been proof read.
I put it down to the fact that they need to put out so much content now that proper proof reading isn't possible. I also think in general there's a reliance on spell and grammar checking in software.
Whenever I see people complaining about the quality of journalism I wonder how many of them pay for their news. Journalism isn't free, if they don't get funding from readers then they need to cut costs or get funding from companies and then it becomes tricky to talk against said companies.
I do pay for the BBC.
You realise their funding has been cut repeatedly since 2010? 1bn ยฃ a year from 2017 to 2022.
This decline started long before 2017, but that's not even what we're discussing. If funding is being cut, all that does is shift some of the blame.
But who was at fault wasn't the topic of discussion. The fact is standards are dropping and it's noticeable.
Yes, I mentioned "since 2010", I gave some numbers I could find without wasting the time to find all cuts since 2010.
That's exactly what we're discussing, media budgets going down affects the quality of the work the employees can do and the quality and quantity of employees they can hire.
Radio-Canada used to have their own journalists everywhere in the world, now they have a couple here and there and resort to using contractors when required, why? Their budget got dilapidated.
All medias use articles from the Associated Press more and more because it's cheaper than having their own journalists.
Cost cutting measures are taken all over the place. Add the fact that people don't read the articles anymore because they barely spend enough time on the page to read the title (if they don't just check it from the Google result of from their Facebook feed), the fact that people turn to "alternative journalists" who don't have any ethics code or quality standards plus the people who don't read at all and just check YouTube videos instead... The only way to get their attention isn't with facts but with sensationalism and the only way to increase their budget is by getting clicks and that happens by catching people's attention, not by reporting facts and not by releasing few high quality articles late after the fact. Readers want the news now, as it happens, no time for fact checks or corrections!
No wonder there's a media crisis that affects all serious medias, the way they traditionally did there job would lead to their death today.
This we can agree on. But the point isn't so much why, I can't do much more than pay what I always did for the BBC. It's more just the annoyance that what used to be a great institution (some will argue) has been run into the ground this way.
It's probably the same with the degradation of most services now. The race to the bottom is the result of the average person always buying the cheapest option.
The full service airlines for short haul are mostly now offering the same services as low cost for example.
It's a strange time we live in, at least from my point of view.
Well for media funded by the state we at least have the power to vote for parties that don't want to defund them, so that's that. For private media, well, they'll always thrive to make more profit so yeah, race to the bottom ๐คท
Journalism in general has been in a steady decline since the death of printed media. The last time I remember reading any kind of news worth a shit about anything other than current world wide events, was back when magazines and newspapers were the primary source of new info.
@Kecessa@sh.itjust.works: Other than political and world wide events, which I can get free from the sources every paid website draws from in the first place, hobbiest journalism is also on decline and I don't typically see news outlets for a lot of hobbies even having a subscription option.
Journalists are generally clueless about tech.
Tech people are generally clueless about journalism.
Bro the worst are when YouTubers like MKBHD and Mrwhosetheboss never talk about the privacy concerns of the gadgets they review. I usually ignore their videos these days as I find Louis Rossman videos more interesting.
Sadly because they know their userbase doesn't give a shit about these things, and they don't either. Otherwise they'd bring this up with just about every single review. Their userbase is very simple people with money that want shiny new thing and are way too deep into consumerism
Mrwhosetheboss is fully gone to being a paid for advertiser and nothing else.
His content is for kids who don't know and will buy what he peddles and it feels like he should technically be breaking some UK advertising laws but we don't hold rules to much importance for people making money.
All "tech youtubers" are the same.
most tech sites just became an easy cash grab, it's page displays that counts for publisher, it means money, the content doesn't matter, you entered the site, they got the money, it 'helps' that people nowadays don't browse organically but click headers in aggregating apps like google news/now feed or web aggregators like lemmy or reddit, like android police for example, most of the news are rubbish like guides on how to change your phone's volume etc or find best charging cable for your , they also keep refreshing old (often out of date) articles, they show as new with today timestamp and no apparent changes, people point it out in the comments but they don't care, but i see most news outlets nowadays don't have comment sections, so maybe AP will delete their discuss in the near future, because users don't count, content doesn't count, it's the revenue that counts, that too is why youtube isn't showing downvotes count anymore, it clashed with their business model
A lot of tech reporting is funded directly or indirectly by the people they are reporting on.
And tech reporting has always been terrible.
Another topic I see a bunch is whenever there's an article about Samsung folding phones, it inevitably mentions Samsung killing off the Note line. The Note line isn't dead. S Ultra is the Note. They just renamed it. It's the same damn phone. Compare a Note 10 to an S 20 Ultra and tell me that's not the same series. I've been using the Note/Ultra since the Note 2. This really highlights that they don't care to look beyond the surface level and instead they just regurgitate press releases.
Tech reporting these days is essentially people who have been wined-and-dined by corporate marketing departments and then just regurgitating what press releases tell them what to say. And if these "reporters" don't play ball, they get quietly blacklisted by these companies.
'Content' has replaced information
Journalism is so paid off at this point that it's became normal to see. We need to support independent journalists or do our own research.
Because of the Diggification of the tech community 20 years ago
I like arstechnica and the register for tech news.