Manipulated by Words? Only if You Don't Think

Words can manipulate. It's up to readers to think, harder than ever, about the written (or at least typed and disseminated) word. 

Two examples - quite worthy of consideration together, methinks - are Truth Goggles, another annotation tool for journalists, which Poynter breaks down nicely, and (yet) another little experiment by Facebook. 

Please writers, write well. Honestly, even. And people everywhere - please, read thoughtfully. 

In case you're not inclined to click on embedded links and read/decide for yourself, I'll offer my opinion here. For free, even. (#luckyyou)

That Facebook is attempting to make its product more popular using some of the principles psychology isn't surprising, nor is its rather manipulative "sharing" of the data. (Read the article and you'll see why I used quotation marks.)

As Poynter writes: 

The Truth Googles launching today is a tool to enable anyone to annotate an existing piece of online content to raise and answer questions about what's been reported/written. It can also offer a layer of personalized commentary.

Whether Truth Goggles is a tool or yet another shade of social media apps, I'm not sure.

I'll keep watching, reading, and thinking - and hoping you do, too.  

Journalism Lives!

I dare you to read John Kroll's post about the five 5 Ws and H and tell me you don't agree.

He's right about the fact that expecting professional writers to apply this Journalism 101 principle to the concept of fact-checking should NOT require a half-day seminar, too. But damn. I got all goose-pimply reading this, and remembered why I wanted to be a journalist in the first place.

Sigh. So much for righteous dreams; I ended up as a freelance copywriter and taxicab driver. But hey, at least I can still get all goose-pimply.

Side note from copywriter me: I wonder how this page will rank for "goose-pimply."

~Diane Stresing

We're all fact-checkers now?

Could be a good and/or bad thing, I think. Certainly worth considering and if you're willing, participating in the public "calling %v!!$#i+," as the author says. Read the article at regrettheerror.com

Bye Bye Blogs, So Long to Standards?

Today I read that blogs are passe, dead, a waste of time. When the question is, how can I get readers? apparently, the answer is Twitter. Hm.

I can digg (in fact, I really Digg it!) but I'm not ready to tweet.

Assuming there's some momentum and truth (or real worth) to back up the tweeting on Twitter, and Digg lasts longer than most of my web-crushes, then (you know what's coming) what does it mean for writers? and for writing?

I'm not sure, beyond the fact that it's acceptable to start a sentence like the one above with a lowercase "a."
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I believe writers are really, really important in any civilized society. Seriously. And not just the legal specialists who write the plethora of contracts, disclaimers, and warranties.

But it's been a long day.
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I spent part of it on a conference call with about a dozen eager writers who were, I was led to believe, all ready to jump at the chance to write for the website of a "major brand" in the medical space for ... ready? $70 per article. The articles should take about two hours to complete, we were told. (I suspect more like five.) Writers on the project are instructed to conduct one interview and use it to create 5+ articles on a given topic. And/or to source quotes from the host website - with attribution to the folks previously quoted on the host website.

Is anyone besides me nauseous at this point?

If we, the professional writers, are to repurpose and essentially regurgitate the same material, the same quotes, over and over and (I really HATE this part) reuse OTHER writers' material (even from "approved" websites - in this case, a partner site, but one with separate ownership and a separate staff of writers) how long will it be before what we read has no meaning?

Not very long, my friends; webspeed is roughly equivalent to the speed of light.

And the ugly twist in the wild-web-world is that while we can crank out "new" material with a few keystrokes and cut-and-paste commands, it's damn near impossible to to determine the relative age, or accuracy, of anything we read.

What if I repurpose a quote from a doc who was an expert in his field last year but who recently was indicted for having sex with his patients, prescribing drugs based on kickbacks, fiddling with research results to further his career at the big-name clinic?

I won't know and readers won't know, if I didn't do the interviews firsthand.

So for $70 you can get a pithy article on pinkeye, and say "goodbye" to journalistic standards.

That's a very costly mistake.

I'll admit that news of the death of the blog may be grossly exaggerated, and not at all related to the demise of journalism, however, there's a lesson to be learned in both.

I think it's this: While you don't always get what you pay for, even more often, when the price tag is low so is the quality.

In the case of the $70 medical article, you, dear reader, don't know if you're getting the story straight from the horse's mouth, even if the horse is quoted and the website looks like a thoroughbred.

Caveat emptor, dear readers. Writers, good luck. And fact-checkers, raise your rates. I hope you'll soon be in great demand.