Law & Order detectives always want to “get justice for the victim”. Opponents of police brutality also call for justice, by name. No one opposes justice, as far as I know. And yet… what is it, exactly? An eye for an eye? Moral concepts can be so slippery. I can’t get a handle on justice.
The Macmillan Dictionary defines the word as “the fact that something is reasonable and fair” or “treatment of people that is fair and morally right”. To make sense of these definitions, you have to define “reasonable”, “fair”, and “morally right”. Those words are difficult to pin down, to but I define them like this, respectively:
Truism: life ain’t fair. Therefore… justice is an infrequent occurrence? (Hence the first illustration, in which Lady Justice walks naked through the wind, brandishing her scales and sword.) Most often the way I hear justice used tallies with “retribution”, but isn’t justice supposed to be a more noble concept?
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight dinged Vox for stealing content. Basically, the beef is that Vox reposts infographics from other websites, adding insult to injury by not linking back. Cue media kerfuffle on Twitter (my favorite regular internet occurrence). Ezra Klein, the ego behind Vox, responded with an imitation of an apology called “How Vox aggregates”. Twitchy rounded up some entertaining tweets, but didn’t include all of the best ones, possibly because they hadn’t been posted yet. Here are my favorites, starting with a pun from Jay Rosen:
Adam Schweigert chimed in, “If you aggregate by posting things without attribution, it’s not on the person you stole from to complain, it’s on you to not be an asshole.” True. Schweigert also accused Vox of aggregating by “taking screenshots and not giving credit.”
In response to Sinker, Brian Boyer said, “Fuck links back. Let’s talk about copyright.” That whole thread is interesting in its discussion of intellectual property and fair use, concepts that the internet has shaken up considerably. But hey, let’s get back to the jokes!
Roy followed up with, “we also delete the apologies and then apologize for deleting them”. (This was a reference to the BuzzFeed nonsense: 1, 2, 3, 4.) Anil Dash claimed that his publication had already “disrupted” her proposed business with a list of ridiculous apologies, to which Roy responded, “my company will aggregate this apology”. Near the end Dash quipped, “We were hacked! And our intern did it. Our intern has been fired, and our next hacking is scheduled for Thursday.”
Explaining Journo Twitter in-jokes is difficult, and everything is less funny out of the stream. Hmm. ONWARD!
I was extremely tempted to go ahead and enact Zitron’s threat. But I settled for what I’m currently doing. [Update: I copy-pasted Klein’s post on Medium.]
Matt Boggie: “The strawmanning and equivocation in [Vox’s post] is astounding. Apologize, pledge to do better, and get on with it.”
“Well, what do you expect from those who bring you the spectacular irony of a publication that is named with the Latin word for ‘voice,’ but doesn’t allow comments?”
Brands often get hashtags wrong to the extent that it gives me secondhand embarrassment. Or they don’t seem to know why they’re prompting people to use a certain hashtag. It’s like they think, “The cool kids are doing hashtags, and we want to be hip, so we’ll do hashtags too!”
Example: Last fall I went to the Asian Art Museum’s exhibit Gorgeous. Near the gallery entrance, a big poster instructed me to post photos on social media with the hashtag #HelloGorgeous. (See also: SFMOMA on Tumblr.) For one thing, I didn’t do it, because there was no compelling reason why I should. For another, #HelloGorgeous is generic enough that most of the Instagram posts using it were unrelated. Generality could be a plus if it aided exposure, but the Asian Art Museum didn’t benefit; although #HelloGorgeous is frequently used, it’s not an intuitive search term. So what was the point? #SFGorgeous would have been better. Brand-building hashtags need specificity.
Some companies get it right, or at least righter. GEICO’s #BrakeTheHabit video contest, which aims to promote safe driving among teens, is relatively well-conceived. When you search #BrakeTheHabit on Twitter, you encounter content that’s actually relevant to GEICO’s promotion. Furthermore, the phrase is catchy, and a good use of triggers. People seem to be responding:
GEICO could greatly improve their webpage for the contest, and thus encourage media coverage, by including pictures and writing snappier copy. But that’s neither here nor there; the hashtag #BrakeTheHabit is just about perfect for its purpose.
The Society for News Design crowned Facebook “World’s Best-Designed Digital”, although without specifying digital what. Presumably “digital experience” is what they were going for. Here’s some malarkey from the announcement page, on how to qualify as “World’s Best-Designed Digital”:
“You must be thoughtful and meaningful, but fast. You must be clear, engaging and engaged. You must be available anywhere and everywhere. Now, more than ever, your audience is in control.
From desktop to mobile to app, this year’s winner works. […] It provides a richer news experience than any one ‘site.’ It is redefining ‘community,’ by evolving our relationships with the news and each other. […] It is the platform that you love, or hate, or love to hate. But increasingly cannot live without. This would not be possible without world class design.
This year’s winner is Facebook.”
SND’s choice is particularly interesting because Facebook’s mobile website and app are both garbage, meaning the judges’ concept of “design” must be quite… expansive. If they were examining beauty and ease-of-use, Evan Williams’ website Medium would have won. (Or, you know, an actual news site. I mention Medium because it was a contender.) Apparently aesthetics and UX were not high-rated factors:
Presumably Facebook won because they have billions of users.
Twitter commentary from the #OmgMedia crowd was wry and pithily outraged:
The best reactions emerged on Facebook itself. SND posted that their announcement “was met with tepid applause” and asked, “Do you agree with the decision?” The response was, basically, “No.” Sue Apfelbaum said it very well:
“All the nominees might provide news and community, but to liken the New Yorker to Twitter, or NPR to Facebook, is hardly a fair comparison. Imagine we were talking about food and not this stuff we’re just lumping together and calling content—Andrew Losowsky and I were riffing on this analogy.
What this award does, essentially, is compare fine dining with someone who hosts an excellent potluck. It could be an amazing potluck, where all your favorite people are, and everything you need to serve your dishes is provided for you, and the ambiance is just right for socializing, but it’s still up to those guests to provide the feast.
On the other hand, fine restaurants source their ingredients, produce menus to nourish and please customers (in these cases 24/7), staff their establishments with chefs, food preparers, and servers, and create an atmosphere as welcoming to the first-time diner as their regulars. Would you really put these establishments in the same category?”
[I edited the quote for readability; see the original on FB.] A+ analogy; Apfelbaum has it right. We don’t even need to talk about Facebook’s bad design. The crux of the matter is that Facebook is a coincidental conduit between journalists and audience, not an entity that creates and sustains those relationships on purpose. Facebook is a news middleman, not a creator or a consumer!
Facebook = information potluck. Photo by Loren Kerns.
Commenting on the same post, Leah Nicole protested:
“The decision was an insult to digital news teams that invest a lot of time into designing and understanding the audiences they serve.
And it’s difficult to believe a social media site with an algorithm focused on ‘trending topics’ would be compared to news teams producing real journalism.”
Whereas Ted Han asked:
“What aspects of Facebook are responsible for its praiseworthiness (even if it’s a gestalt) in a news context […]? […] Facebook certainly is the platform among platforms for the conveyance of news (and everything else) to an audience… but why stop at Facebook? Should Google win an award for having a fast secure browser? Should Apple be lauded for killing Flash? Android/iOS for giving people access to news content anywhere/everywhere?”
IMO the answer to these queries is… no. Let’s refrain from blending categories until they’re senseless.
Meta blogging note: I’m discovering that one of the things I want to do with this blog is highlight ideas or ways of approaching ideas that are really good (for example, Martin Weigert re: Apple Watch). I’m even happy to post tidbits that don’t ascend to the level of “idea” but which are interesting nonetheless (Ben Thompson re: RSS users).
As noted in the headline, there is an internet cottage industry of people getting paid to write online about how to get paid to write online. See websites like The Write Life, Making A Living Writing, and many more if you Google anything along the lines of “professional blogger”. It’s a weird, self-referential phenomenon.
Empowering writers to make more money is obviously something that I support, and I’ve read a million posts about upping your personal ROI. However, I do think these “Unlock your potential!” types of websites deceive readers. Maybe not directly. But here’s the reality, a reality that’s unprofitable to admit: There aren’t that many well-paying writing jobs out there; most people are neither lucky enough nor talented enough to get them.
(I kept this post in drafts for a while, but I realized that I don’t have anything else to add. So… here ya go, world.)
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