Throughout the day Tuesday, the top trending hashtag on Twitter was #AdviceForYoungJournalists. I'm fairly certain it was started by USA Today, but I could be wrong on that. Anyway, I decided to participate. Here are ten words of wisdom for young journalists.
Rule Number 1: shoehorn yourself and your agenda into every story you report. No one is more important than you. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 2: Screw accuracy. Retweets are the ONLY THING. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 3: Few people read more than 1 paragraph, so hide any facts that undermine your agenda down there. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 4: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How = Irrelevant! #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 5: When in doubt... leave it in there, and maybe even use it in the lede, dammit! #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 6: Only cover the easiest topics. Eg: Kanye West? YES! Climate science? FUCK NO! #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 7: While reporting on a statistic (boring!) don't provide any context so the numbers seem outrageous. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule #8: If anyone questions your reporting, tell them they're drooling statists and you're rewriting the rules. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 9: Make sure you cover topics that you know nothing about. Techno-phobe? Write a huge tech story! #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
Rule Number 10: Embedding someone else's tweets = Journalism. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
BONUS Rule: If can't think of actual words, use GIFs. #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 10, 2015
It should be rather obvious who and what I was referencing throughout (except for #6 and #10). The hashtag coincidentally appeared on the first anniversary of The Intercept's launch (February 10, 2014). If you've followed The Daily Banter for the last year or so, you probably have a strong sense of how I feel about The Intercept and especially its flagship adversarial writer Glenn Greenwald, who migrated his personally bastardized version of what's only generously referred to as "journalism" from The Guardian to his current home. Contrary to accusations, my view on this topic has little to do with the NSA or Edward Snowden or surveillance in general and considerably more to do with what I consider to be bad journalism.
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