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It is the disease which has afflicted all media nowadays—the quick cash-out, polarize the audience, start controversy, model.
SC-365 also uses the old and outmoded “scoop” paradigm.
Clickbait is the things, now—monetizing the news to a level which satisfies corporate owners demands a lot of hits to satisfy sponsors. And there has to be more ”news’ on your site than on the competitors’—else people might go to their sites. Hence the rambling podcasts filled with almost random opinions.
Nobody takes the time to do deep research or to wait for a story to develop—the money is in volume and speed.
Also, “neutral” reporting gets less engagement. Don’t blame the media—they get paid when you posts reactions. If we all made pithy comments on pithy stories, that would be what we saw more often. Instead, we post snarky comments on snarky stories.
Part of the answer, as Akropovic has found, is simply to avoid most of the mess.
Another technique is critical reading. We can notice when we are being fed crap, especially the third or fourth time from the same source in the same fashion. Scan the headlines, know in advance what to expect, pick the meaty bits and spit out the filler.
One thing: Akropovic defends SC-365, but I am not sure that is the right move.
A story which claims facts not in existence is dishonest. And if we accept dishonest journalism, we force the competition to go the dame route to stay afloat.
The idea is not to defend the miscreants for their crimes by saying others do it—the idea is to call out Everyone who does it—or just stop reading those sorts of stories.
John Dagys is a driven, obsessed, extremely hard-working man who has made the most of his skills, and made the most of the current media environment. He has always been a little too interested in “scoops”—which are sort of meaningless in the current time, as any article will be echoed on every other site within minutes (as a person who has written far too many “Website X reports that … “ articles, I see it many times every day.) In an effort to get scoops, and to get readers in general, he sensationalizes, he uses “clickbait” headlines (we don’t need to take the bait) and he pretends to know more than he does.
He also does (or now, organizes) a huge amount of reporting on many facets of sports car racing.
Anyone recall the old Mariantic? The days when there were a few English-language websites, often translated, often badly, from French or German sites, and next to no reporting on the North American scene at all?
If we want to the modern sports-car media to improve, we need to stop hitting the clickbait, stop commenting—at all, positive or negative—on unfounded articles, and when we do comment, thoughtfully and rationally explain what we think is wrong with the writing.
Turn off the podcasts—and send a long a note saying to wanrt more information and less infighting.
On the whole, though … When I look at the SC365 website and see all those stories covring all those aspects of the sport—sure, many are hastily written and maybe spotilly researched—but would we rather have next to no news at all?
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