Mark Cuban: Are Bloggers Better than the New York Times?
Mark Cuban’s August blog post, “Anatomy of a New York Times Article,” caused quite a stir for its portrayal of the games that reporters sometimes play with their interview subjects.
In that instance, Mark was interviewed for a column that seemed to have had a predetermined outcome; based on the e-mail trail that Mark published with his blog post, his quotes appeared taken out of context and shoehorned in at the last minute.
Mark’s done it again — or, as he puts it, “The NY Times does it again…” Once again, Mark is interviewed at the last minute; once again, the result — a Sunday column by Randall Stross — is questionable.
Obviously ticked off, Mark quickly followed up his post with an even harsher one, titled, “NY Times Sunday Business or Bloggers — Who has higher standards?“
In it, he writes:
The NY Times is obviously feeling some financial pain and cutting back. Costs impact the amount of space they can provide for any article, or for all content as a whole. Bloggers do not have that limitation. I can write as many pages as i like.
The NY Times is limited by deadlines. They have to get to print and get the product out the door. Bloggers do not.
Costs and deadlines limit the amount of resources that can be applied to any given article for both bloggers and the NY Times. Who is more constrained as a result ?
The NY Times certainly has more feet on the street than any given blog, so should they do a better job of breaking news than a specific blog? Or are there more blogger feet on the street en total throughout the blogger universe for any given topic?
Can a reader get a better understanding of the topics of the day, week, month in a given area by trusting the NY Times to present the news, or is it better ot do a search of news sources and the blogosphere for keywords, topics and tags on Icerocket.com and become your own aggregator on an ajax homepage like netvibes.com, goowy.com, my.yahoo, google.com or any other personal aggregation environment ?
Do my experiences reflect a bigger problem that newspapers like the NY Times are having, resulting in some of the financial hardships they are experiencing? Or is it specific to the NY Times and at least their Sunday Business Section standards have fallen? Or were my two experiences simply coincedence, and every other article in any given weekend is meticulous in research and execution?
Methinks a blogstorm is coming.
Technorati tags: Journalism, New York Times, Mark Cuban, Media
Cuban makes some great points. Like it or not, journalists do come to conclusions about their stories before they’re finished gathering material. This effects the questions they ask as they attempt to harvest quotes matching their agenda/angle of the day.
No question about it. I find it disappointing that some journalists are defensive about this rather obvious fact. Defensiveness is weakness; it hinders improvement.