I'm a life-long (but intermittent) NYT reader. Coverage of SpaceX (in NYT, WSJ, and WaPo) changed how I think of journalism.
Faced with the usual issue of good newspapers getting every topic you know about not-quite right, variously wrong, I used to explain it by an analogy. It was like when newspapers closed their foreign offices. Loss of ground truth, of sanity checking, of insight and nuance. An abundance of misinterpretation and missing the point. My analogy was that for science, and tech policy, and diplomacy, and engineering, and manufacturing, and so much else, the foreign offices were closed. Generalist journalists, not embedded in the various professional communities of expertise, writing from afar, and getting it variously wrong.
What struck me about SpaceX coverage was the process failure. Not the getting things wrong - that was unsurprising. But there was no sign of learning, of process improvement. For instance, there was a successful short-term disinformation PR campaign targeting the press (around Zuma satellite failure attribution). But afterwards, there was little sign of recognition, reflection, remediation. No sign that they wouldn't fail just as hard if the same thing was done again a month later. And journalistic devices to pursue quality, seemed not just poorly executed, but inadequate to need.
So my new analogy is with medicine. Like journalism, medicine has long had folk practices for pursuing quality. But medicine has had it's "oh, shit" moment. The realization that medical error was a leading cause of mortality. That even easy and important standards of care were failing to be consistently executed. That there were decades of experience in other fields, on how to engineer process to systemically achieve quality and avoid failure, to which medicine had been oblivious. Journalism seems still oblivious.
So I suggest that journalism as a profession, and even the best of newspapers as institutions, have not yet realized just how badly they are failing. Or recognized the need for, or even the possibility of, systemic process improvement.
Perhaps the existence of the OP project might help with that.
Feel free to write your own content - publish your own knowledge by contributing to the media outlets - NYT has tons of contributing writers who's full time job is not in journalism!
Nifty. This suggestion seems to nicely illustrate what journalism seems to be missing. I see it as analogous to...
Think you can operate our press without losing fingers? Great - we're often looking for replacement operators. Does the machine have guards? Well, we have both a day and a night watchman, why?
Think you can operate without ever leaving sponges and instruments behind in patients? Great, set yourself up as a barber surgeon and go for it. Do we count sponges? You'll have to talk to accounting, but they're not that expensive, why?
And so on.
Responding to operator errors with "well, just stop doing that". Responding to pervasive systemic failures with "well, maybe we need better operators". That's being oblivious to a half century of progress, to minimum standards and best practices, across multiple industries.
Some years back, someone said their first-tier newspaper didn't even have a process for tracking errors. Despite an institutional self-image of caring about quality. ISO 9000 has not hit journalism yet?
Faced with the usual issue of good newspapers getting every topic you know about not-quite right, variously wrong, I used to explain it by an analogy. It was like when newspapers closed their foreign offices. Loss of ground truth, of sanity checking, of insight and nuance. An abundance of misinterpretation and missing the point. My analogy was that for science, and tech policy, and diplomacy, and engineering, and manufacturing, and so much else, the foreign offices were closed. Generalist journalists, not embedded in the various professional communities of expertise, writing from afar, and getting it variously wrong.
What struck me about SpaceX coverage was the process failure. Not the getting things wrong - that was unsurprising. But there was no sign of learning, of process improvement. For instance, there was a successful short-term disinformation PR campaign targeting the press (around Zuma satellite failure attribution). But afterwards, there was little sign of recognition, reflection, remediation. No sign that they wouldn't fail just as hard if the same thing was done again a month later. And journalistic devices to pursue quality, seemed not just poorly executed, but inadequate to need.
So my new analogy is with medicine. Like journalism, medicine has long had folk practices for pursuing quality. But medicine has had it's "oh, shit" moment. The realization that medical error was a leading cause of mortality. That even easy and important standards of care were failing to be consistently executed. That there were decades of experience in other fields, on how to engineer process to systemically achieve quality and avoid failure, to which medicine had been oblivious. Journalism seems still oblivious.
So I suggest that journalism as a profession, and even the best of newspapers as institutions, have not yet realized just how badly they are failing. Or recognized the need for, or even the possibility of, systemic process improvement.
Perhaps the existence of the OP project might help with that.