oppression isn’t generational and trying to frame politics as “the old people are wrong and the young people are right” erases the fact that there are old people who have been fighting the good fight for decades and the fact that there are young people who are literally nazis
Plus while there might be less old people fighting the good fight it’s usually because they were killed or were part of the minorities that have poor living conditions that kill you early
like obviously i hate buzzfeed and would never work at a place that has such a large hand in destroying serious journalism but i cannot deny that it would be literally the sweetest gig of all time. work in an office with a bunch of other hungover 29 year olds, screenshot posts made by 16 year olds on tumblr who are funnier and smarter than i am and call it an article complete with my own byline, and finish off my day by getting drunk on camera and being paid to do it. that’s the fucking life babey
Right.
I’ve been seeing this post on my dash all day and normally I’d let this nonsense pass but I’m sick so my ability to tolerate bullshit is at an all time low.
This is absolute crap – OP is equating BuzzFeed’s lifestyle section with its news section. Lifestyle focuses on listicles, quizzes and light entertainment. News focuses on exactly that. News.
How good are they at news you might ask?
I have a masters in digital journalism – I’ve worked for major news organisations across broadcast, print and digital. I was a producer for a major news show by the age of 24; I’ve been mentored by some of the best journalists in Australia – and do you know who everyone told me I should be paying attention to?
BuzzFeed.
“If you’re lucky, you’ll land a position at BuzzFeed,” my lecturer who holds MULTIPLE doctorates in media and journalism told my class after she took us to a tour of the BuzzFeed Australia office.
My expertise is in Australia media so you’ll have to excuse the focus on what I’m about to say.
BuzzFeed Australia was one of the first digital news organisations to become part of the Parliamentary press gallery. They were instrumental in shaking up the Australian Parliament, leading to dozens of by-elections and threatening to trigger a Federal election after they discovered a number of politicians were holding office whilst dual citizens – which is illegal in Australia. They have spent months pursuing Minister Michaelia Cash for her role in the death of an 18 year old boy in the controversial Work For The Dole scheme, and for her office tipping off the media ahead of police raids on a union office. Oh, and they were the first news organisation in the country to break the news that a major bank had lost the personal financial details of 12 million clients – every other news outlet lifted the coverage directly from BuzzFeed.
And that was in the last 12 months.
Oh and that Trump piss tape story that everyone here on Tumblr loves to crap on about? That was a BuzzFeed exclusive.
There’s a really stupid trend on tumblr to seem ‘edgy’ by mocking things that are popular or successful. Don’t shit on the hard work of dozens of journalists who report on incredibly important news and write it with our generation in mind, and then have nerve to turn around and complain that the mainstream media only focuses on older people.
You just look sad.
BuzzFeed has been bettering the media landscape for years, and they’ve been doing it while everyone is mocking them.
Rebooting for this great commentary.
Am a journalist, can confirm
The old way of journalism is dying, and through my work in the industry I’ve come to learn that it’s the industry’s own fault.
Old masters we praise refused to adapt to an evolving culture and changing landscape, and it’s biting them in the ass right now. Some are trying to make up for lost ground, but a lot of others are digging in their heels and falling victim to the confirmation bias they hate.
Buzzfeed was created in the new age. It has nothing to change because it was never intended to do things the old way. It’s spearheading digital journalism (i.e. the literal future of journalism).
Old masters are being bought out by digital media entertainment companies right now, and they’re freaking out. They’re going from writing investigative pieces about government waste to compiling lists of the 20 cutest ugly dogs. They’re watching their friends and coworkers get laid off as the big companies “trim the fat” to make the “paper” more profitable. They’re living a forced change at the hands of a big, scary “unknown” and they hate it.
Buzzfeed isn’t at risk of that, because Buzzfeed has been doing this shit all along.
They’re not facing the fire. They were born in it.
They’ve laid the groundwork for how journalism needs to adapt. They’ve figured out how to get ad revenue in the online world, which is what everyone else has failed to do.
You have someone write 3 bullshit lifestyle pieces a day.
“Ariana Grande’s ponytail evolution”
“30 times OS updates screwed over users”
“These birds had babies and we are LIVING for it”
You make sure you deliver on the headlines. Clickbait won’t work. People won’t trust you when you deliver harder news if you can’t even deliver bullshit.
Get those clicks. Get those views. Get that following. Get that ad revenue. Get those sponsorships. Get that funding.
Use the funding to support harder pieces.
“Report: Justice Kennedy refused to retire unless Kavanaugh replaced him”
“President Trump spent over $1 million of tax payer money on trips to his own resorts”
“Refugee women abused, miscarrying in Trump Camps”
This is how we have to do it now. This is what the digital era demands. Anyone with a ounce of knowledge in the area and a lick of sense could tell you that. The problem is: journalism is run by old masters, and old masters will never admit that they’re way is wrong until it’s too late.
Don’t turn your nose up at adaptation and evolution. It’s how survival works.
A lot of people want to study Japanese but think it’s too hard and that they will never succeed. That is really a myth, though. Here is why Japanese is actually easy.
1. All verbs are regular, there are only 2 exceptions
If you know French, this must sound like a dream to you. In other languages [like French] there seem to be more irregular verbs than regular ones. Not in Japanese, though. There are 3 groups of verbs, the first 2 being regular and very easy to conjugate. The third group consists of only 2 irregular verbs!
2. Easy pronunciation
Japanese doesn’t have any exceptionally hard to pronounce letters. Unlike Arabic, German or Finnish, Japanese should be quite easy to pronounce for English speakers. Also, Japanese isn’t a tonal language like Thai or Chinese.
3. No genders, plural or articles
Anyone who studies a romance language [and many other languages that have that] knows how frustrating it can be when you use the wrong article or verb ending. In Japanese, it doesn’t even exist, so nothing to worry!
4. Grammar is easy!
That’s true. It’s just completely different from English, but that doesn’t make it hard. After a while, it will feel completely normal. The best part about the grammar is that you can build a whole sentence with just one word. For example, if you wanted to ask somebody in English if they did their homework, you’d say ‘did you do your homework?’ Kind of long, isn’t it? In Japanese, you can ask by using only the verb ‘to do, can, be able to’ – like this: ‘done?’ Also, spoken, you can drop many words if you don’t really need them, especially particles! So if you’re not sure what particle to use, chances are you can just easily leave it altogether without the sentence losing its meaning. It’s easy to build sentences that seem to end in ‘…’, but that’s completely normal in Japanese and everyone will understand.
5. Tons of resources
Sadly, there are some languages people don’t really care about or not a lot of people want to study/ are interested in. Japanese is not one of those languages. There are hundreds of books about Kanji alone! And so many courses for every level. Also, it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in – anime, manga, books, movies, game show, video games, dramas, music – it’s all out there and super easy to find, so you definitely will find something you can listen to or read to practice your skills.
6. Kanji/the writing systems are hard?
No. They aren’t. It’s just a huge workload, it takes time and effort, but they are not hard.
At first, having to learn 3 writing systems will seem exhausting. But believe me, later, when you start reading, you will be so glad! You can detect if a text has a lot of foreign words at one glance if it has a lot of Katakana, for example, and you could say a lot more on twitter because of the syllabaries!
So actually, the 3 systems put together makes everything easier to read!
So please, just start studying and go at your own pace, and have fun studying every day ⭐︎
One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.