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I just read an article on the Beeb about York, in the U.K., banning cars from the city centre, at the end of which I was advised that 'Grouchy Old Man' had tweeted "Glad I don't own a shop, bar, hotel, or eating house in York" in response.

Why do I give even the slightest [Expletive Deleted] what Grouchy Old Man thinks?

Why is Auntie Beeb padding out news reports with this arse-gravy?

It's easier to copy & paste a tweet than to actually go out and talk to someone.

York has been pedestrianised for years. It will make little difference.

The rise of outrage culture.
The death of journalism.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
York has been pedestrianised for years. It will make little difference.

Not really the point, but strongly disagree.

I used to live in South Bank and had to cycle across the city centre to get to work. I was almost killed almost daily.

 Excommunicatus wrote:

I just read an article on the Beeb about York, in the U.K., banning cars from the city centre, at the end of which I was advised that 'Grouchy Old Man' had tweeted "Glad I don't own a shop, bar, hotel, or eating house in York" in response.

Why do I give even the slightest [Expletive Deleted] what Grouchy Old Man thinks?

Why is Auntie Beeb padding out news reports with this arse-gravy?

Because people want updates and new things and stimulation constantly and the publisher needs 24/7 content feeds.

Personally, I see Twitter as the internet equivalent of the dude spinning an ad sign at the street corner or ranting at an intersection, and treat it appropriately. It's an awful platform for actual discussions that's largely an echo-chamber or e-confrontation amplifier. It's fine if you want to announce a band is having a show, or that a store is gonna open late, or that there is a local emergency, but anything beyond that is just inappropriate for that platform. I tend to strongly associate Twitter usage inversly with the level of intelligence and value I place on a person's opinion.

When normies started using the internet in 2007.

That was the beginning of the end.

What's amusing is if you read the article "Grouchy Old Man" doesn't actually exist as a link. Perhaps the person got the link wrong; or whoever wrote the article is playing with the twitter comments.



As for when - well - when twitter became a portal for people to share their views and when hundreds of thousands of people started paying attention to it. So yeah when the "normies" started using the internet.

Because it's click bait and you clicked

The secret of "modern journalism" is to learn to spot bs from the title. I'm not even sure it's really a new trend, so much as an old trend with a new medium. bs news articles have been around well before the internet, and click bait existed before the mouse pad in its own way.

They're just fishing for ad revenue.

 LordofHats wrote:
Because it's click bait and you clicked

The secret of "modern journalism" is to learn to spot bs from the title. I'm not even sure it's really a new trend, so much as an old trend with a new medium. bs news articles have been around well before the internet, and click bait existed before the mouse pad in its own way.

Definitely an old trend. I was working with a newspaper digitization project, and 19th century US newspapers were very familiar in form and content- fearmongering, advertising and BS was very well established. The angry shouting just took longer to reach the opposing sides of an argument.
The best version of the latter where men from different units on the same side in the civil war, arguing about who was where on which battlefield, who shot first and what have you. 'Well actually...' internet debates in print.
Its either funny or depressing, depending on how you want to cope.

Voss wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Because it's click bait and you clicked

The secret of "modern journalism" is to learn to spot bs from the title. I'm not even sure it's really a new trend, so much as an old trend with a new medium. bs news articles have been around well before the internet, and click bait existed before the mouse pad in its own way.

Definitely an old trend. I was working with a newspaper digitization project, and 19th century US newspapers were very familiar in form and content- fearmongering, advertising and BS was very well established. The angry shouting just took longer to reach the opposing sides of an argument.
The best version of the latter where men from different units on the same side in the civil war, arguing about who was where on which battlefield, who shot first and what have you. 'Well actually...' internet debates in print.
Its either funny or depressing, depending on how you want to cope.

Yeah, I noticed similar in some 1840s newspapers I worked with for a Grad paper. Some articles were thinly veiled advertisements, and others were just blatant attack ads (shockingly, I think newspapers back then wore their politics much more openly than most do now). I even say "buy the next issue for part 2 of this story" kind of things in one of them.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
When normies started using the internet in 2007.

That was the beginning of the end.

The internet was actually ruined back when AOL became popular and destroyed usenet.

So far as OP.... I don't know but I have often thought that myself, starting a few years ago when reporting started having a social media crawl at the bottom of the screen. Why exactly are you offering me nonstop dipperfuls from the crapstream? If I wanted to know what Twitter thought, and I never ever would, I'd just sign up for Twitter. I didn't put on CNN or whatever to watch Twitter.

The new hotness seems to be repurposing reddit threads into "articles". They state the premise of it, and then just post a bunch of responses (AITA is popular for this). Super lame but I guess that is what you get when you combine a desire for 24/7 news content with a desire not to have to pay for it at all.

 LordofHats wrote:
The secret of "modern journalism" is to learn to spot bs from the title.

In that vein, here's a life hack: If the article's title ends in a question mark, the answer is invariably "no".

 LordofHats wrote:
They're just fishing for ad revenue.

It's the BBC, though. They don't get any ad revenue, nor are they in commercial competition with anyone, so 'clicks' are meaningless to them.

 Duskweaver wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
They're just fishing for ad revenue.

It's the BBC, though. They don't get any ad revenue, nor are they in commercial competition with anyone, so 'clicks' are meaningless to them.

Whilst no, they aren't drawing advertising income, they are absolutely in competition for viewers, listeners, and readers. Traffic, likes, retweets, shares etc all still matter.

Really why it has become a thing is pure cost-cutting and time-saving, though. Same reason the Beeb is suffering from uncritically reporting events described to them by political figures: it's way easier to present someone else's content than it is to generate your own.

Journalists are almost all massive twitter users and to them it is likely one of the more important websites. So they sort of assume it is just as important to the rest of us.

In the context of this article the twitter responses are part of the article itself. Treated as a vox pop, they are just as meaningless as hitting up randoms on the street.

No reason to get riled up about this article. The BBC aren't adding a scrolling twitter feed to their content.

The BBC does rely way too heavily on Vox Pop though. It has really gone down hill in recent years.

I mean it was never as unbiased as people in the UK tended to think it was, but it was pretty good on a lot of topics in the past.

FWIW, I view the Beeb from Canada and it does display ads.

It's not a clickbait article. Read it. It's proper, legitimate news, just with some a-hole's tweet stuck at the end of it.

Like it or not a portion of those people who are running the planet make Twitter comments.
Some use it as a texted soundbyte generator, others as a form of instant reaction.
Therefore it has become important.

Right, but that's an entirely different thing.

I'm not complaining about the Beeb reporting on a Trump tweet, or on, say, a tweet of dubious historic veracity by the US Ambassador.

I'm complaining about making the Comment section part of the article. Again, I don't give a rat's what Angry People in Local Newspapers think.

It isn't news.

Because operating a news room is expensive. Hiring Journalists to do the actual job of journalism is expensive and news rooms don't make money for most of the people who own them.

Having a couple of interns watch Twitter and "crowd source" news is cheap.

Twitter became a legitimate news source when the American president started using it for public statements.

The making money arguments don't really apply to the BBC, it is publically funded and does not make a profit, it is not making money for anyone.

Tis true. Profit is not the point of Auntie Beeb.

"Inform, Educate and Entertain" is the point of the Beeb.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Because operating a news room is expensive. Hiring Journalists to do the actual job of journalism is expensive and news rooms don't make money for most of the people who own them.

Having a couple of interns watch Twitter and "crowd source" news is cheap.

And also shoddy journalism.

Call me old fashioned. But considering i am in the generation of the nutjobs and smombies , and whatever else people call smartphone addiction, it desilusions me greatly when i see where my generation get's it's news.

Otoh, swiss newspapers tend to be okay in their presence online, so maybee there's hope afterall.

......

“Reaction quote from local citizen” has been a part of journalism forever. The medium has just changed from sending a crew to talk to the local citizen to getting that quote from twitter or Facebook or email.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Because operating a news room is expensive. Hiring Journalists to do the actual job of journalism is expensive and news rooms don't make money for most of the people who own them.

Having a couple of interns watch Twitter and "crowd source" news is cheap.

And also shoddy journalism.

Call me old fashioned. But considering i am in the generation of the nutjobs and smombies , and whatever else people call smartphone addiction, it desilusions me greatly when i see where my generation get's it's news.

Otoh, swiss newspapers tend to be okay in their presence online, so maybee there's hope afterall.

......

It very much is shoddy journalism. What else is there to be done however? There is no money in Journalism in the modern digital age. All I hear is people lamenting about twitter and how it has taken over the conversation when it comes to how news is disseminated. However those same people would never even dream about actually spending money to get quality journalism.

While newspapers still do a lot of work to get good stories, the way they get financed can...skew perspective...that's about as diplomatic as I can get with it. Same with TV news. All those people in the background on their computers? Think they're talking to sources and working on fact checking? Lol! Nope! They are on Twitter to see what is trending or what cool video someone posted about a particular news story that's hot at the moment they can use on there live show.


TL;DR Newrooms aren't money makers and businesses that own them are not willing to operate at a loss for the public good so they get free news, live video and hot takes/opinion crowd sourced from online sources.

In reality, it's basically impossible to get access to a (decent) news site without paying a subscription, unless you rely heavily on state media like the Beeb and its little brother the CBC and all the issues inherent to same.

AFAIK, the sole tier-A independent English-language news website that does not hide content behind a paywall is The Grauniad, and even they plead with you constantly to pay up.

Which I do.

Serious answer: When online influencers got more subscribers and more credibility than mainstream media by orders of magnitude.

 d-usa wrote:
“Reaction quote from local citizen” has been a part of journalism forever. The medium has just changed from sending a crew to talk to the local citizen to getting that quote from twitter or Facebook or email.

I still am not fond of it. I think the local citizen on the street reactions were generally pretty worthless new, and now it's just randos not even on the street. Can any twitter reaction from someone not there adequately describe the sound of the whistle tip like Bubb Rubb could have? At best, they are guessing.