Working inside of the startup world, as I have for a few years now, gives me an entirely fresh perspective on how poorly fact checked most blogs and blog posts are. If there is a hot on the top of the minute story, you can bet you’ll read ~10 articles before you read the whole truth. Sometimes all you will read are nothing more than un-fact checked, mis-informed facts to resemble some sort of truth in that writers head. Most of what is published, even some of the sites that have the gall to be related to a media company, are full of what data is available at the minute. ie: if someone else wrote it first – well it must be the truth.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While the first post starts going viral, everyone wants to jump on the wagon train. No one fact checks, no one puts in an e-mail or call to the companies they are talking about. They in fact won’t even note it in their post, which they should as in ie: “we e-mailed the company, and the company has declined a response“, at the very least. No need, they are a blogger and therefore they must retrieve part of that pageview pie.
The thing that gets me the most, is that the readers who flock to the sites to give their money to the sites in pageviews, and higher monetization of their content, believe each and every post that is published there. Once any story of the moment reaches global reach, or when the time zone in the Pacific reaches past 8am in the morning, everyone is writing or re-writing the same story and linking to the same main story. That original story by now is totally viral and over half the time, the site is down due to the overload.
Everyone is quite happy and there is a pageview spike that has the republican trickle down effect we all love to be abused by. The hilarious thing is that the truth is still never even uncovered, or in the case of the blogger or site – covered. No story wraps it up, as the next pageview spiker is on the burner and the story needs to be churned. And even funnier from the perspective of someone who has been there, are stories that are splinter stories from the main story that even the person writing it has no idea that might be the real story!
Damn the truth. Lie if it causes your pageviews to jump. It’s the blogger way, and I don’t see any changes anytime soon.
Technically Speaking, just because you read it online, doesn’t necessarily mean you read the truth. After all the items I have read online about the different startups I have worked for, it pains me to say this (it doesn’t, but sounded good to say that) – I’m so glad I don’t rely on my blogging, pageviews, and the general white lie to get ahead. I guess I was never cut out to be a page view cut throat blogger, but it does give me a good laugh to read what some people call journalism.
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