jloome

When a friend of mine won an international photojournalism award for covering the pipeline protests, she told me Buzzfeed was the only outlet that would ante up for her to travel and cover them.

Very little of the news is true, but even less is 'engineered.' Most news sources are desperately grasping for attention, so they say anything that might win 1/2 a percent more viewership

This is sort of right. I was a print journalist for nearly three decades at every level.

It's not that it's not true, it's that most of it is valueless opinion.

There's no desire beyond the reporter -- no management, publisher or owner support and very little editor support -- to reach 'truth', just to get out a 'competitive product'.

So they cover what's out there, then get divergent opinions from both sides to 'color' it with controversy, rather than digging into how that issue and related policy, decisions and deception really affect people.

There's a lot of long-form journalism out there from newspapers and groups like Pro Publica that we need stop tarring it as 'very little of it is true', because they DO provide that depth and context. A lot of us retired from the biz precisely when our chains/employers stopped allowing us to do so.

Very little of the DAILY BROADCAST NEWS CYCLE is there to achieve truth, just to report both sides fighting. But in the internet age of viral videos, it leads.

Very little daily print does much more, but some does a great deal more, as the NY Times and Washington Post have demonstrated for decades. AND as investigate groups like Pro Publica and the weekly New Times papers do regularly.

You're going to play his song on Spotify 1,843 times?

Daniel, as a 45-year-old man with aspergers/ASD, I find your entire schtick somewhat hard to believe. You act as if all people with aspergers have is an issue with social skills and seem to reflect little to nothing of the monumentally different mindset that comes from having naturally lower empathy and less of a desire for the security of group association.

This isn't stuff that can just be 'learned' away. I was a reasonably successful journalist for twenty-five years but always had to 'fake' it to make it through social interaction, as little-to-none of it beyond the exceptionally intellectual or broadly-based was of any interest; it typically isn't for aspies.

That's your "most awkward" story? Who, as an aspie, has this kind of life? I've had grocery trips that took twenty minutes that were worse than that. Where are the fights, the beatings, the pained disassociationm, the broken friendships and relationships the... you know, the trying to fit in part?

I don't buy it. I'm not saying you're being wilfuly dishonest, but you may well have been misdiagnosed.(I also hold out considerable suspicion that neurotypicals' definitions for who and what people like me are will change every five years for the next few decades or so.)

EDIT: In fact, I'll go further after reading some of your response and say some of your advice is just harmful; telling someone with aspergers that anxiety will disappear if they just keep doing something until they're not afraid is woefully bad advice. Anxiety isn't just a product of lack of experience, it's also a product of past experience, of neural network pathways, of genetics; for most people with autism spectrum disorders overcoming it requires a combination of lifestyle adjustment, therapy and pharmaceutical care. Even then, it will be an ongoing issue of care.

Success may be part luck, but if you’re not ready when the opportunity shows up, you’re fucked. He may have known Jay Leno, but Jay Leno is a professional who has been at the peak of his field for decades. If the jokes weren’t good enough, he wouldn’t give the guy the break.

It’s always too easy to say “they knew someone.” Everyone has to catch a break at some time, but if they’re not good enough or ready, all the bitching about access isn’t going to help.