Digital Journalism: The Next Generation
After the Boston marathon bombing sent a surge of traffic to the site, BuzzFeed brought over Lisa Tozzi from The New York Times to build a breaking-news team. It also hired Miriam Elder, a correspondent for The Guardian in Moscow, to create a world desk; it now has a dozen reporters and editors stretching from Mexico City to Nairobi. In 2013BuzzFeed formed an investigative unit and to run it hired Mark Schoofs, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist at ProPublica. Last August, BuzzFeed added to its home page a news feed to run parallel to its usual river of froth, and today one can find posts on the “16 Magical Gifts All Unicorn Lovers Will Appreciate” and “21 Celebrities That Prove Left-Handed People Are By Far the Sexiest” alongside dispatches about the war in eastern Ukraine and terrorist attacks in Kenya.
.. What Vox most sorely lacks is a sense of outrage. Consider, for instance, a recent post headlined, “Why Does the US Have 800 Military Bases Around the World?” This is an important subject that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Clicking on it, though, I found a very brief discussion that drew heavily on a new book by an American University professor. “American taxpayers are in charge of the bill for keeping these bases running,” the post blandly stated.
.. FiveThirtyEight exemplifies a troubling tendency in digital journalism—a preference for gathering data available on the Web itself rather than developing new information by picking up the phone or going into the field.
.. Omidyar came in for sharp criticism for, among other things, insisting that he personally sign off on employee expense reports for taxi rides and office supplies.
.. On virtually any subject these days, you can find opinionated, informative, provocative sites and blogs. There’s Feministing on feminism, Tablet on Judaism, PandoDaily on Silicon Valley, The Millions on books, Inside Higher Ed on academia, Balkinization on the law, Aeon on philosophy, ALDaily on arts and letters, Deadspin on sports, and on and on and on. By geographic region, there are sites on cities (Voice of San Diego,Baltimore Brew), states (Texas Tribune, MinnPost), countries (Tehran Bureau, Syria Deeply), and the world (GlobalVoices, GlobalPost, Goats and Soda).
.. I recently asked a friend who divides her time between writing about the environment and working at a nonprofit to list the sites she follows. Like so many other news consumers these days, she says she doesn’t actually go to sites but instead receives feeds arranged through Facebook and e-mail that deliver a steady flow of information from a multitude of sources.
.. A similar toxicity has seeped into readers’ comments sections. When these were first introduced, most journalists valued them for the instantaneous—and often thoughtful—feedback they provided on articles. Before very long, however, the sections became clogged with insults, slurs, and partisan attacks posted by trolls hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet, and more and more news organizations have decided to either rigorously vet them or drop them altogether.
.. It’s ironic that a medium with such democratizing potential has become so highly centralized. BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Gawker, Quartz,Business Insider, The Intercept, Talking Points Memo, and ProPublica are all located a short walk from one another in lower Manhattan, forming a sort of journalistic counterpart to Silicon Valley and replicating the parochialism of the New York media elite.