I’m Sick of Reading Articles Written by Reporters with Predetermined Agendas
Every day there is a new article tearing someone or some company apart. I’m convinced that if I decided I wanted to write a piece that spoke negatively about any company or any person that had ever done anything publicly I could.
Too often I think writers decide what they want to write about and then uncover evidence that proves their point. This is as opposed to gathering data and evidence to discover the agenda of a piece.
It’s why I try to never write a title of a blog post before I’ve written it. Sometimes I don’t know what will come out until I have all my thoughts down on paper. Why would I want to constrain my point with a title already contrived.
Further, it’s a reporter’s job to uncover a “surprise.” If writing about someone who is newly successful the story becomes about how “they beat the odds and rose from the bottom.” But once someone has experienced enough success, the only story that can be written is one that tears them apart.
Someone who is successful and stays successful is boring. It doesn’t get page views. So someone’s got to create an agenda that brings them down, and that’s how we get articles like the NY Times piece on Amazon :(
