Moronic media - may 22, 2014

Ezra Klein
https://www.facebook.com/mhudack/posts/10152148792566194?comment_id=10152149316181194&offset=0&total_comments=171

I don't think we're fighting. I think we're talking! And I think it's interesting.

Editorially, I'm going to keep trying to make Vox better at both. I want to be your source for North Korea and for Levi's care. Something I hope I've conveyed in what I've said here is I manifestly disagree that Solange and Jay-Z and Levi's are unimportant. I genuinely don't look down on that kind of thing either as an editor or as a consumer. Culture matters. The mundanities of life matter. I want Vox to be a force there.

But my broad point here is I think as a guy with power at Facebook you need to do a bit of reflection on why you're seeing the stories you're seeing, because I assure you — Vox writes orders of magnitude more about Obamacare than about jeans. We get more traffic from Obamacare than jeans, too. In an age of algorithmic personalization, if you're seeing more jeans than Obamacare — and, in general, more fluff than hard news — I think you need to ask why that is rather than assuming it's representative of what's being published and criticizing publishers for which of their articles your algorithm highlights.

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https://www.facebook.com/mhudack/posts/10152148792566194?comment_id=10152149352546194&offset=0&total_comments=171

Mike Hudack Ezra, we agree that culture matters. I also want to emphasize that I don't work on Feed or Trending Topics, and that I speak for myself and not the company or the folks who work hard to make Feed and Trending Topics better. I know those guys, but I can't speak for them. I understand that there are such things as filter bias, and I think that you're right that all of the players in the ecosystem can get better at this.

But I think my point stands independent of what the ecosystem may or may not do. You have a choice about what kind of a publication you build. To take an extreme example you can decide whether you want to be an Internet-native tabloid or an Internet-native source of serious news and reporting. I don't think that any external force makes that choice for you. And as I've said repeatedly, I went out of my way to give you credit for the really good work you do. I just think you're on the bubble and can go either way, and I hope that you choose to stick to your knitting and do important work.

#todo