alt Hacker NewsI guess Blameless Postmortems haven't arrived in journalism yet.
Pretty weird that journalism as a business still revolves around "we hired a guy to write a thing, and he's perfect. oh wait, he's not perfect? it was all his fault. we've hired a new perfect guy, so everything's good now." My dudes... there are many ways you can vet information before publishing it. I get that the business is all about "being first", but that also seems to imply "being the first to be wrong".
I feel bad for the reporters. People seem to be piling onto them like they're supposed to be superhuman, but actually they're normal people under intense pressure. People fail, it's human. But when an organization fails, it's a failure of many people, not one.
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This is more akin to "looking into your ex's private data at work" than "made a mistake that caused a production outage"
They have. Some paper journals even have a dedicated space in early pages (2-3) for corrections and retractation.
This isn’t a case of “made a mistake”/“did something incorrectly”, though. This is “knowingly broke the rules”. They had a policy against using our benevolent robot overlords to generate slop.
And fabricating quotes is pretty high up there in the list of things that journos should never, ever do.
> I guess Blameless Postmortems haven't arrived in journalism yet.
Not anymore. Back in the day of print newspapers, a dozen people read an article before it was printed, including editorial staff, fact checkers, legal review, layouting and printers. If something slipped through – which was much rarer at the time – they'd also print a retraction.
Most of that stopped when newspapers and the blogosphere basically merged into one ad-funded business.