this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
221 points (81.0% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
7 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 290 points 7 months ago (21 children)

I'm getting really tired of the word slammed, maybe writers need to pick up a thesaurus (it's a dinosaur that knows a lot of words).

[–] ramirezmike 49 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I studied news journalism in college and they kinda hammered in that in news journalism it's more important to communicate information consistently and to target a wide audience than it is to make "good writing."

There are style guides you have to follow and words like "slammed" end up getting used a lot despite not quite being accurate because they're words that are used a lot.

The other thing is that usually the person writing the headlines isn't the journalist.. and sometimes they do a lot of versions of the same headline and when people click more because of the word slammed it ends up sticking.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

I've been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it's everywhere

[–] ramirezmike 2 points 7 months ago

yeah, unfortunately they need to make money to exist. And that creates all sorts of incentives that aren't great. I still like journalism and think it's an important part of a working society, but I decided pretty quickly after studying it that I didn't want to be part of it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I'll take that just like Lee Camp being a journalist.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So they use the word often, because its often used by them? Pretty ass backwards, but also makes sense for sensationalist "journalism"

[–] ramirezmike 1 points 7 months ago

I don't see how it's backwards, the word drives clicks and is commonly used. It's unfortunate but most journalism has to be profit-motivated to survive these days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How hard is it to ban the word slammed in your style guide? Excuses are the nails to build a house of failure.

[–] ramirezmike 1 points 7 months ago

I kinda alluded to it but they probably don't want to ban the word because it's commonly used and it drives clicks.

load more comments (17 replies)