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from the poking-the-bear-with-a-sharply-pointed-stick dept.
How CNET got banned by Google:
[...] [Elinor Mills] started [at CNET] in 2005 with arguably the hottest beat: internet companies, primarily rising star Google, and Yahoo, which was losing the internet search battle. I'd met Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 1999 when he gave me a desk-side demo of the simple and fast Google search site. By the mid-aughts, the company had come a long way, going public in 2004. The hugely popular Google search was raking in ad revenue, but the fact that Google knew all of our web searches and the content of Gmails had some people worried about privacy risks. I decided that for my first big feature in my new job I'd do a deep dive into Google's services to see if the concerns were justified. The resulting article -- published Aug. 3, 2005, under the headline Google balances privacy, reach -- would be the high-water mark of my journalism career. It certainly wasn't a wash for Google, either. The company's extreme reaction to my story prompted widespread criticism, led to a mini backlash and served as a case study in how not to deal with the media over perceived bad press.
[...] After I pitched the story to my editor, Jim Kerstetter, I spent a month researching and reporting the ins and outs of Google's products and policies, trying to understand what data the company collected and how that info was used. [...] As I was starting to write the article, News Editor Scott Ard stopped by my desk. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he suggested that I google Schmidt to see what types of information I could find.
The linked article is well worth reading, especially on how NOT to deal with the press!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @04:22PM (5 children)
None of their staff writers are transgendered, and they refuse to print anything about the shocking lack of transgendered CEOs in tech companies.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by DECbot on Sunday June 07 2020, @05:13PM (3 children)
I know you shouldn't feed the trolls, but your argument fails the no true Scotsman fallacy test. How does "no transgenered staff" automatically equate to "no articles about lack of transgenered CEOs?" As much as we bicker and call each other names, in general we are critical thinkers that recognize fallacies for what they are. Have you ever considered that they are covering transgender issues in technology in the exact proportion to the transgendered persons in their target audience? Roughly half the world population is female, so why aren't there more male nudes in Playboy? CNET is a not an LGBTQ++ interests news site nor do I think that they have to be one. If they started pushing an agenda, I would be put off and stop reading their news (well, truth be told, I don't currently read CNET as every article of theirs that I have read lacked any details or interesting content after the first paragraph. as far as I know, they could have an agenda claiming all real dragons are purple).
The Google story back in 2005 would have been interesting and I would be more interested in knowing how Google uses the data now--especially for the Gsuite users, but after getting burned by Google I think they gut the content from their articles to not ruffle feathers.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @06:35PM (2 children)
Agenda is sorta of not even the 'right' thing to call it.
This guy points out our media is controlled by a *very* *very* small group of people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hBv7ue8icQ [youtube.com]
The stories they tell or do not tell are what they want us to hear. If this group of people did not want us to be yelling at each other about these things it just would not be shown. They hire people who can push whatever they want. If they did not want us arguing about it they would hand out cardboard boxes to the 'true believers' that work for them and show them the door.
My personal theory is it is advert spamming (yell louder about something *anything* and get more views). But that is just a theory. Think about it. We went from 'stay inside covid19 is going to end us all' to '"peaceful protests" with moltov cocktails in the background' in under a week. Which sells better 'you are dying' or chaos?
As for why CNET got drop kicked? It was easy. They were spamming the hell out of everyone with early SEO techniques. They started off decently enough as a tech review site. All to get those views to get those ad impressions and sometimes sweet sweet click thru. Which folds back into my theory 'he who yells loudest'. You can think of them as a proto gawker news media.
Also you can see some of these groups are fighting each other. Take Facebook. Once the darling of the Obama admin. He personally heralded it as a new we to reach the people. Right up until Facebook took that same platform and sold it the Republicans for money to do the exact same thing. Now they are evil and have too much power. All pushed through the news organs of the other big groups. What you are seeing is the small group of power players keeping each other in line. We are being shown what to believe and what to fight about.
Advertising ruins everything.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @09:45PM (1 child)
If you think that all newspapers and other media are "in cahoots" you're mad. I've worked for small newspapers. It's chaos, not massaged messaging. Yes, I fully believe that Murdoch-owned might have some bad policies, which dictate what opinions are OK to present, and what facts. But the "small group of power players" that you imagine doesn't exist outside of media conglomerates.
Now, are media conglomerates bad, because they can (and in Murdoch and other cases, do) force perspectives? Yes. But if you think that all media is controlled in such a way, then you're into lizard-people fantasyland.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @11:01PM
How much coverage of politics can a small newspaper muster? For the most part, they'll buy stories from the AP, who are definitely part of the conglomerate.
You also have True Believer reporters that meet to agree on the political line to take, regardless of what the paper's owners want.
All in all, I think the oligarchs owning the media are quite happy with keeping the chattering masses twittering, because even while keeping the people at each other throats and Donald Trump getting reelected, their ultimate goals are being catered to.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @06:52PM
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