The Atlantic Cares About Rich White People

Cant that be said of anyone who reads beyond a paywall? Arent rhey all echo chambers? The Athletic? The New Yorker? WSJ? the Times?

where is the open source middle ground?

frankly, i am down on news as a whole; i seek context, reflection, remove. And so i read magazines, The Economist, The Week.

As a 20 year journo, it pains me to conclude that meeting day to day story budgets seems like our greatest undoing. We always ran half completed stories bc of incomplete background, self serving angles and quotes, etc.

One of the most discombobulating things a citizen ever said to me was, “I dont read the daily newspaper. If it’s real news. i’ll hear about it; if it’s huge news, it will be in the history books.”

In short, he was saying I was transcribing the ephemeral with little context. That has stuck with me.

 

A damn good perspective. I'm fortunate to work at a place now that gives me time and as much of a news hole as I need.

Not much of anything I report is totally definitive, but I'm given more of an opportunity to chase a goal that cannot be caught.

 

Real, responsible news reporting and talented feature writing costs money and is harder to get lots of people to click on. Breitbart is free.

That's why we need a business model for news that doesn't depend on local news sources turning a razor-thin profit to survive. And that's to say nothing of the hedge funds actively trying to end them.

 

Most interesting thing about the story is who wrote it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-wrote-atlantic-would-readers-know-it-byline/

 

Can anybody give the gist of the story? I get she is a fraud, but is there anything about the original piece?

 

The gist is that admissions at elite schools like Ivy Leagues are getting so much more selective that a lot of affluent white people are resorting to overtraining their kids in sports because they have found that getting a scholarship to one of those schools makes it easier to get into the school. Like, you may have the grades to get into Yale, but that's not enough anymore, especially with the ~perceived~ injustice of affirmative action added on, so getting the school's coach to vouch for you is another way to get a leg up in admissions.

I didn't know about Ruth Shalit before reading the story. Having read that Eric Wemple thing, I get a very different vibe of the story. It read like it was an observant reporter parachuting into Connecticut. Knowing the truth about Ruth Shalit, it seems much more like someone just interviewing their friends and acquaintances. That doesn't delegitimize the point of the story to me (though that was probably the reason it didn't have sharp enough teeth, like many people in here pointed out), but still it is dishonest.

 

I had to look up four words/terms. Too highbrow for me, I guess.

 

Follow-up work by Wemple says that the fencing injury anecdote in her story is highly unlikely, as is the stuff about Olympic sized hockey rinks. I imagine there is probably more, but 1) he's not employed to be a full-time fact checker for her and 2) it doesn't really seem like The Atlantic wants to deal with the fuss of pulling the article, which strikes me as something they should do.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/30/atlantics-troubled-niche-sports-story/

 

Between this and the cop/security guard shooting story from the summer, a few shaky months there.

This episode gave me a chance to go back and read Carr's piece on Shalit. I wasn't as familiar with her as I was with Glass (owing partly of course to the shrewd, sniveling performance by Hayden Christensen in the movie), who of course comes up in this story.

Goodbye to All That - Washington City Paper

 

An editor's note has been added. The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents