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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
shakedown that happen across the web countless times a day.
Many other blogs do the same thing through a combination of a sense of entitlement and laziness.
These are the economics of extortion.
Give blogs special treatment or they’ll attack you.
Being right is more important to the person being written about than the person writing.
Navigating this terrain has become a critical part of brand management.
The constant threat of being blindsided by a false controversy, or crucified unfairly for some misconstrued remark, hovers over everyone in the public sphere.
it forces them to act in two ways—deliberately provocative or conservatively fake. In a word: unreal.
Nuance is a weakness. As a result, politicians must stick even more closely to their prepared remarks. Companies bury their essence in even more convoluted marketing-speak. Public figures cannot answer a question with anything but: “No comment.” Everyone limits their exposure to risk by being fake.
There has been a marked increase in use of social media platforms and similar devices, including weblogs (blogs), social media websites, and other forms of Internet-based communications which allow individuals access to a broad audience of consumers and other interested persons. Consumers value readily available information concerning retailers, manufacturers, and their goods and services and often act on such information without further investigation, authentication and without regard to its accuracy. The availability of information on social media platforms and devices is virtually immediate
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To not be petrified of a shakedown, a malicious lie, or an unscrupulous rival planting stories is to be unimportant. You only have nothing to fear if you’re a nobody.
Iterative Journalism.
Iterative journalism, process journalism, beta journalism—whatever name you use, it’s stupid and dangerous. It calls for bloggers to publish first and then verify what they wrote after they’ve posted it. Publishers
they buy the lie that iterative journalism improves the news.
iterative journalists throw up their hands, claim to be knowledge-less, and report whatever they’ve heard as the news.
rile up the crowd by repeating sensational allegations and then pretend that they are waiting for the facts to come in.
Jeff Jarvis
“Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”
“Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.”
Events are “liveblogged” instead of filtered.
Iterative journalism is defined by its jumpiness. It is as jumpy as reporters can get without outright making things up. Only the slightest twitch is needed for a journalist to get a story live.
If a blog is lucky, the gamble it took on a sketchy iterative tip will be confirmed later by events. If they are unlucky, and this is the real insidious part of it, the site simply continues to report on the reaction to the news, as though they had nothing to do with creating it.
why iterative journalism is so attractive for publishers. It eliminates costs such as fact-checkers or staff time to build relationships with sources. It is profitable, because it allows writers to return to the same story multiple times and drives more comments, links, and excitement than normal, non-“breaking” news.
blogs duck behind qualifiers: “We’re hearing …”; “I wonder …”; “Possibly …”; “Lots of buzz that …”; “Sites are reporting …”; “Could…, Would…, Should …”; and so on.
After weeks of escalating buzz about a New York Times piece that would reveal a “bombshell” scandal about New York Governor David Paterson, Business Insider is reporting that the story will likely come out tomorrow and will be followed by the governor’s resignation (!!). Though the nature of the revelation is still a mystery, reports are that this story is “much worse” than Paterson’s publicly acknowledged affair with a state employee [emphases mine]. 5
Nearly every claim is tempered by what might happen or attributed to someone else.
Another common iterative tactic is to write about the rumors “that other people are writing about.”
We no longer discuss if rumors are true, only that they being talked about right now.
This is justified by the self-serving distinction between reporting the rumors and reporting about the rumors. In reality there is no difference whatsoever.
There are certainly some advantages to iterative journalism—it’s cheap, it’s fast, it gets people’s attention. Take its most compelling performance: reporting the death of Osama bin Laden.
the greatest success of iterative journalism gave us a story twenty minutes earlier than it would have come otherwise. Bravo. A whole twenty fucking minutes. The world is forever in your debt.
twenty minutes is a vapid victory. And yet it is all that iterative journalism brings us when it works well.
What do we get when iterative journalism fails?
a lot of pain and suffering for innocent people.
Process journalism, fed by controversy, rumors, and titillating scandals, is a beast that gives no quarter.
It is with the stories upon which we most need to tread lightly, to speak carefully on behalf of those who cannot speak, that bloggers are unwilling to do so, because it is not in their interest.
The types of stories that scream out to be written and broken before they are fully written are precisely the types of stories that cannot be taken back.
“Twitter, which exacerbates the demands of immediacy, blurs the line between reporting and postulating, and forces writers to chase too many bum steers.”
“entices reporters to become enslaved to certain sources, push transparent agendas, and ‘break’ news before there’s anything to officially break”
the best and brightest (and richest) online publishers push iterative reportin...
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Its jumpiness can easily be exploited by int...
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the audience is viewed as nothing more than a dumb mob to be manipulated and used to create pageviews.
What spread yesterday—drove tweets of “Holy shit, did you hear?”—is hardly enough to spread the same way today. So it must be newer, faster, crazier.
we’re dealing with the news and information, and those things affect people’s lives.
Software as beta means the risk of small glitches; the news as beta means the risk of a false reality.
Iterative journalism makes the news cheap to produce but expensive to read.
ITERATIVE JOURNALISM IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF A belief in the web’s ability to make corrections and updates to news stories.
Corrections online are a joke.
Bloggers are no more eager to seek out feedback that shows they were wrong than anyone else is.
If you want to get a blogger to correct something
