Earlier I wrote about bad science reporting, and from there mentioned that journalists don’t have much incentive to be accurate and complete in their writing — they’re primarily in the business of selling advertising, and only incidentally in the business of accurately reporting the news. Megan McArdle has a post on the same subject, with a heck of a lot more nuance.
She quotes Felix Salmon’s analysis of the NYT’s plan to not die:
If you don’t have the “click data”, fear for your job! If you snark about the president, or how to analyze your husband “the way a trainer considers an exotic animal”, then you’re probably fine. If you’re an investigative reporter who spends months at a time uncovering secrets, not so much. And if you’re a war correspondent putting your life on the line to cover important conflicts around the world, well, remember to include lots of pictures of kittens to boost that all-important click data.
For a paper like the Times, selling ads is largely about appealing to a broad swathe of the populace — and puffy “clever” opinion pieces have a pretty good track record at doing just that. (Consider, for example, just about every blog ever.) On the other hand, there are more specialized publications out there where accurate reporting is much more important than simply catching someone’s eye over coffee:
The Wall Street Journal is different from the New York Times in two important ways. First, there’s less competition in business journalism than general political news, in part because journalists would rather cover the government than boring old companies. And second, many–maybe most–of the people who pay for the Wall Street Journal have to read it for work.
On the extreme end of the scale, you find academic journals publishing research papers. The big journals in my field — ACM Transactions on Graphics and EG’s Computer Graphics Forum — depend critically upon publishing the best research in the field. (If you click on those links, you’ll quickly discover that they don’t need much in the way of flashy web design.) Of course, their content is generated by actual researchers rather than science reporters: as you get further to this extreme, I’d bet you’ll find that the journalists involved have more and more actual expertise. (As a thought experiment, imagine the sorts of people who’d write for your local paper’s once-a-week automotive section, Car and Driver magazine, and Race Tech magazine.)
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