Hackathon Live Demo Catches Fire, Again

Advertisement

Advertisement

The most notable difference between The Post and the WSJ is that WSJ's editors had a reputation of being very much of an alternative opinion website, but after the Times published a piece on a similar strategy two weeks ago and was now running a daily news cycle, it became even more important to be more than a news source. Post has a similar editorial board and has been an alternative to CNN since 2011, though it now has a smaller editorial staff.

What's more, Post reporters who write online take on real journalism with a different approach: It's hard to have a real editorial staff. You need an Internet presence to get noticed, they say. And the bigger problem is that Post editors often don't have a clear point of view on things like the campaign or health care.

This is a particularly big problem when news goes off air: News networks often do nothing to stop the circulation and distribution of fake news or bias of people who want to make life better for themselves.

The Post may be better for that because the network they operate doesn't have a clear political philosophy. It does have a newsroom that has a vision that's different to that of CNN. But it takes up space with the stories the network generates and the content that it produces.

The Post's real goals, as usual, are to change the way news is consumed — by journalists' time, their day-to-day lives, and their reputation. The Journal's goal is to improve on both its editorial staff and its mission. But it must understand how those changes come about by understanding that its most critical piece on "Trumpcare" is now written and delivered by The Post's editorial staff. Those changes take time. A year after it was published, The Washington Post finally announced that it would cut $25 million of spending to improve the Post's ability to continue covering news and stories on a regular basis.

But The Post has a point of view that has changed every day: It's a "storyteller." Post editors get to create content that they write at work every day, so this may not be a case of all news organizations doing the exact same thing, but it is a case of a reporter writing for The Post, who's trying to write stories for The Post, not the paper.

Advertisement

I'm pretty sure the point The Post made was that stories don't necessarily have to be what you say they do, because when you break stories down to the individual stories, you are not going to have to ask yourself how and why you wrote those stories.

But I'm worried that the Post's journalism has become too liberal, too far left, and too deeply partisan; The Internet becomes increasingly a forum where people speak about race, age, religion, and a lot of other things that you can't do in your job or your community.