[stirner]

Antonio Garcia Marquez’s employment history includes quanting at Goldman Sachs, founding an advertising startup, and working at Facebook. I don’t feel as if I can take the arguments made here at face value, knowing how much money—for the author personally and through his involvement with the aforementioned companies—is at stake in the changes to journalism being described.

[NotPavlovsDog]

He is a marketer and self-promoter to the core. With above, he continues his tradition of pushing his self-interest. No surprise he sees the role of journalism in that direction. If objectivity and a fair point of view is impossible, self-interest and partisanship is all there is, in journalism and elsewhere. Convenient for him and his current agenda, certainly. And if you oppose, you are a sanctimonious poseur.

Some quotes from his book, "Chaos monkeys".

Quote 1. (summary: Take eyeballs wherever you can find them, for his marketing start-up, AdGrok)

"This post would be the first in a series of hyperviral blog posts that would put AdGrok on the startup map (if not quite the customer one). Every three to four weeks, another gaseous emanation from the latrine of human thought (a.k.a. me) would appear and rocket us to the top of Hacker News (the tech geek’s Cosmo), and make another stir in the evanescent tech buzz-o-sphere. [...] But hey—I didn’t see fifty thousand people a day lining up to use the product we had built. We’d take eyeballs wherever we could find them."

Quote 2. (summary: he gets some free PR for his start-up by posting "edgy" articles, and games the ratings)

"I navigated to that venerable if niche corner of the Internet: Hacker News. A Reddit-like message board hosted by Y Combinator itself, it’s a weird mix of supertechnical geeks, hustling YC founders, and that species of simultaneously frustrated and sanctimonious poseur called a “wantrapreneur.” I posted the piece, while asking a few friends to upvote the article to give it some initial traction."

[exmadscientist]

Asking where the money goes is always worthwhile, but the thesis that journalism was more partisan 100 years ago is well established. For example, look at Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the Pulitzer Prizes, one of the most prestigious awards any journalist can receive. Pulitzer was also an infamous "yellow journalist", one of the most prominent and influential.

Late-20th-century style "real journalism" seems either to be a historical aberration, or something that is only sustainable in very particular social conditions.

(And yes, I miss it too.)

[Bluestein]

> Late-20th-century style "real journalism" seems either to be a historical aberration

I had never considered that possibility. Horrifying thought.

[dragonwriter]

> Late-20th-century style "real journalism" seems either to be a historical aberration, or something that is only sustainable in very particular social conditions.

It's neither, and no less ideologically driven than preceding or subsequent journalism.

The image of the late 20th century journalism as unbiased and non-ideological would be aberrant if it was at all true, but it is an illusion brought about by a combination of the narrowness and ideological alignment of the major media of the time combined with their own incredibly successful self-serving propaganda (which was reinforced by many elites outside of the media, who shared their corporate capitalist ideological alignment.)