The 93rd Block: Examine the ways we tell stories (or the news)
Storytelling is, after all, humanity's greatest tool
This week…
Storytelling, I used to say, is one of the greatest and underrated tools we have as a species. The best storytellers are behind the most effective marketing campaigns, propaganda, and… cult (let’s keep its definition vague). I saw on my Twitter timeline earlier this week, that my mother-in-law liked a positive news tweet, and I thought—wow, my feed is desperately lacking solutions-based or positive angles in news coverage that that was the tweet that caught my eye after hours of doomscrolling.
Here are three case studies to examine the way we tell stories, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
An incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism
“Forbes became a place to launder even the dirtiest of reputations,” writes Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab:
Forbes’ staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside “contributors” — barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? (Some contributors received a monthly flat fee — a few hundred bucks — if they wrote a minimum number of pieces per month, with money above that possible for exceeding traffic targets. Others received nothing but the glory.)
As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were “contributors” — or as they told people at parties, “I’m a columnist for Forbes.”
Let’s think about incentives for a moment. Only a very small number of these contributors can make a living at it — so it’s a side gig for most. The two things that determine your pay are how many articles you write and how many clicks you can harvest — a model that encourages a lot of low-grade clickbait, hot takes, and deceptive headlines. And many of these contributors are writing about the subject of their main job — that’s where their expertise is, after all — which raises all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions. And their work was published completely unedited — unless a piece went viral, in which case a web producer might “check it more carefully.”
All of that meant that Forbes suddenly became the easiest way for a marketer to get their message onto a brand-name site.
Is NBC’s Olympic coverage of skier Mikaela Shiffrin fair game or off course?
Tom Jones for Poynter:
One of the big stories coming into the Winter Olympics was that of American skier Mikaela Shiffrin. She was expected to win multiple medals and was the favorite to win gold in more than one event.
She was supposed to be one of the stars of the Beijing Games.
Going into Thursday, Shiffrin’s Olympics could not have gone much worse.
On Wednesday, for the second time in three days, Shiffrin was eliminated from an event before getting even halfway through the course. She missed a gate in the slalom and was disqualified. Another event down the drain.
Moments after her improbable mistake, while other skiers zoomed past her, Shiffrin sat just off the course for several minutes, her arms wrapped around her knees and her head down. And we know that because NBC Sports zeroed in on her for what seemed like forever — much to angry criticism from viewers.
While I'm not invested in this game, I do have a deep appreciation for articles like this that zooms in on one tiny part of events that last mere seconds—and make readers think beyond that scope. The title of this newsletter referenced a similar article, The Device That Democratized the Foot Race ($) by Janelle Peters for The Atlantic, which also did the same thing: focusing on the starting block used at the start of some of the quickest sporting events—the sprints. The time it takes you to read the article is far longer than the time it takes an Olympic sprinter to finish their race.
The hacked account and suspicious donations behind the Canadian trucker protests
Anya van Wagtendonk, Benjamin Powers, and Steve Reilly for The Grid:
But a close look at several “Freedom Convoy” groups and crowdfunding efforts online shows the involvement of anonymous actors, deep-pocketed non-Canadian donors and prominent U.S. right-wing political figures.
Some of the largest Facebook groups responsible for galvanizing support, both ideological and financial, appeared to have been administered through a stolen account, Grid has found.
The protests are not organized by Canadian trucking unions, the largest of which has come out against the protests. They also do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers: More than 80 percent of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost 90 percent of truckers, according to Canada’s minister of transport.
The speed at which the movement has raised millions of dollars raises red flags.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading What Was the TED Talk? – Some Thoughts on the “Inspiresting” by Oscar Schwartz for The Drift.
I’m watching Inventing Anna on Netflix.
I’m listening to the drag artists, mathematician Kyne and environmentalist Pattie Gonia, on Science Friday with Ira Flatow talking about making science more accessible.
Some stray links:
“Unfortunately, the current machine learning methods are still a bit stupid,” or just a couple of plain language summaries of publications captured on Twitter.
People need to hear the good news about climate change, writes Matthew Yglesias on the newsletter Slow Boring.
Chart of the week
Published in December 2021, this chart by Visual Capitalist with a thorough write-up by Nick Routley is one of the more unconventional visualisations I have seen, but truly a spectacular one. Suddenly I can’t wait for it to be December 2022!
I read a piece by POLITICO, about the finances behind the Grid. Should look into it. Never herd of the Grid until recently, suddenly every where.
And here I thought Forbes is a respectable publication...