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Apr. 19th, 2016 07:30 amOne of the things I do for my job every day is monitor digital news reporting on various people who are either affiliated with my organization or could in the future be major donors. Some of these people have fairly common names, so there's sometimes a lot of noise to sift through.
I've done a pretty good job setting up my news alerts so that they don't flag on false positives, but this month I'm also covering for a coworker, who hasn't instituted the same kinds of filters I have. One of her news alerts is on a man who shares a name with a major drug dealer who just died, so every day I've come in to seventy or eighty news articles about John Doe the Famous Drug Dealer rather than John Doe The Economist. Poor John Doe Economist must be having a long week.
The funny part is that when a major event hits one of these people, even if it's not the person we're supposed to be monitoring, when you ARE monitoring someone you can see the predictable waves of news wash over the week. First there's the straight-up reporting, then there's the tag-along reporting that clearly just picked up and regurgitated a few other news stories. Then there's the spin one way -- in this case praise for the Famous Drug Dealer, who was a bit of a folk hero in one region of the world. Like nobody wants to outright say "Hey, he was a bit of a mate" but they're all kinda thinkin' it when they write his obits, you can tell. And we've just hit the spin the opposite way, where the pearl-clutchers and pundits are writing in to say "Wait a minute, this man made multiple fortunes selling drugs".
Later this week I'm anticipating the Macro Application wave, where we have a discussion of addiction and the relationship of drug dealers to both addicts on one end and terrorist/fascist regimes on the other, culminating with the recurring question of decriminalizing drug use. Should be fun!
In the meantime, lots of work to do today, so I folded a fast and dirty pelican. Let's be real, that's how pelicans like it.
He'd look more birdlike probably if the white side of the paper wasn't covered in print.
I've done a pretty good job setting up my news alerts so that they don't flag on false positives, but this month I'm also covering for a coworker, who hasn't instituted the same kinds of filters I have. One of her news alerts is on a man who shares a name with a major drug dealer who just died, so every day I've come in to seventy or eighty news articles about John Doe the Famous Drug Dealer rather than John Doe The Economist. Poor John Doe Economist must be having a long week.
The funny part is that when a major event hits one of these people, even if it's not the person we're supposed to be monitoring, when you ARE monitoring someone you can see the predictable waves of news wash over the week. First there's the straight-up reporting, then there's the tag-along reporting that clearly just picked up and regurgitated a few other news stories. Then there's the spin one way -- in this case praise for the Famous Drug Dealer, who was a bit of a folk hero in one region of the world. Like nobody wants to outright say "Hey, he was a bit of a mate" but they're all kinda thinkin' it when they write his obits, you can tell. And we've just hit the spin the opposite way, where the pearl-clutchers and pundits are writing in to say "Wait a minute, this man made multiple fortunes selling drugs".
Later this week I'm anticipating the Macro Application wave, where we have a discussion of addiction and the relationship of drug dealers to both addicts on one end and terrorist/fascist regimes on the other, culminating with the recurring question of decriminalizing drug use. Should be fun!
In the meantime, lots of work to do today, so I folded a fast and dirty pelican. Let's be real, that's how pelicans like it.
He'd look more birdlike probably if the white side of the paper wasn't covered in print.
