Have you heard the joke about how Game of Thrones is like Twitter? There are 140 characters, and terrible things are always happening.
Game of Thrones: Valar Morghulis - Boing Boing (via birdmechanical)
(via birdmechanical)
"i can exclusively reveal..."
In the effort to write in an objective way and cover up all subjective impressions, journalism has become not a method of communication, but a code for knowledgeable insiders. Newsrooms have also become fewer in number and more competitive in spirit, making even the top players loathe to admit that they were scooped or that an important story came to them not from shoe-leather reporting and tenacity, but because of corporate design to gain coverage.
This afternoon on Twitter, a number of journalists offered their own hilarious translations for this coded reporting language, at least where it is designed to avoid responsibility or act as a craven grab for glory. The collection is below. Watch out for these codes in a newspaper or TV near you.
Today in journalese: “little noticed”. Translation: “we totally missed this story” - j.mp/vZ3IAi (Stacy-Marie Ishmael, @s_m_i _)
“I can exclusively reveal” = “assuming you don’t use Twitter” (@s_m_i )
“It is understood” = “We think…” ( @s_m_i)
“We have learned” = “We read in another paper” (Lorcan Roche Kelly, @lorcanrk)…
read the rest here.
this was fun. also sadly true, in all its onion-esque glory.
"This is the way Twitter should be - not a Kremlin command center to push stories on the open-mouthed proletariat, but as a genuine marketplace of ideas."
Twitter is a great underminer of the rigid ivory-tower voice-of-God news judgment that has fed a lot of arrogance into journalists and journalism, and which has been its downfall.
amen to all this. heidi kills it in this post on exactly why twitter can be a fantastic, essential journalistic tool.
