Google vs. Boilerplate Activism 277
ArmorFiend writes with this NYTimes article which "details the efforts of journalists to discern real reader-written letters from boilerplate form letters. Seems like there should be a centralized searchable DB of letters to the editor."
Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing... (Score:5, Informative)
I can't help but notice a similarity between this and students who steal code off the web and claim it as their own.
Journalism vs. PR, round X (Score:5, Informative)
These journalists are working to make sure they don't get played like that. And of course, clever public relations professionals are always trying to make boilerplate look less like boilerplate...
Advertising is drying up, pure and simple. Most modern ads don't even list the advantages of their product in a traditional manner.
P.R. is the new advertising...in the future, it will be very difficult to tell genuine product reviews from laudatory PR copy. Sophisticated PR will lead to the collapse of trust in the media-and I welcome it! People trust the media far too much already...
here's a tip from me to you: if your local news is reporting about 'a miracle diet,' or a 'revolutionary new (fat/aging/heart attack) fighter', they are just lazily barfing up public relations. learn to recognize PR, and educate your friends about it. maybe in the future, you will be able to make money determining which media outlets are legit, and which are paved in Astroturf..
Re:huh? (Score:2, Informative)
In a related story, Harry S. Truman's middle name was in fact, "S". It stood for nothing but the letter.
Here's one published 44 times across the country. (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo link [yahoo.com]
Hey, you can win a T-shirt or a cooler if you get enough of their letters published in your local papers.
turnitin.com (Score:1, Informative)
But surely... (Score:1, Informative)
Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President's plan, [thestarpress.com] the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate [10nbc.com] tax cut averaging $1,083 and 46 million married couples will get [sacbee.com] back an average of $1,714. That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.
Click on the links. You will find many people agree with me.
Why this is a Slashdot story (Score:5, Informative)
Boutin's Slate article has the dirt and is funny to boot.
Re:Some interesting points from the article (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Google (Score:5, Informative)
If you spot the "demonstrating genuine leadership" letter, send it to these folks [failureisimpossible.com] who've listed 74 and climbing.
Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes but the congresscritters want to know how committed you are to that point of view. So believe it or not a five line handwritten 'kitchen table' letter is regarded far more highly than a laser printed form letter.
Thats not quite what is being talked about here which is bogus letters to the editor. Looks like the GOP is getting really rattled by the drop in Bush's opinion ratings which are now lower than his father's at the same point in the cycle. So they have a Web site that pumps out bogus letters to the editor under the names and addresses of local supporters. They need the local addresses because even the most ludicrous GOP lapdogs like the New York Post are not going to publish a letter saying 'President Bush is the greatest President ever, he has been demonstrating genuine leadership, blah blah' if it is from GOP HQ. And even if they did publish it readers would ignore it as a piece of ludicrous propaganda.
The GOP 'aliengrams' [unblinking.com] only have force if their source is disguised. They are written as independent letters of support. The only thing that makes them of interest to a local paper is that they come from a local person. Hence the need for the lie.
Campaign tactics of this sort say a lot about the character (or rather lack of it) of the politicians who use them. The intention is to deceive people into believing that there is widespread support for Bush's policies such as the invasion of Iraq.
The major newspapers like the London Times or the New York Times will almost always call before publishing, at least in my experience. The London Times wants to know that the letter has only been sent to them, and will quite often want to edit for length (although my style is compact enough to usually not need this).
Amnesty discourages boilerplate (Score:3, Informative)
I must admit, sometimes I felt like there wasn't enough background provided and I wanted (and sometimes obtained) more information about the subject I wrote about, but this is a world away from just creating form letters with zero thought.
Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing... (Score:5, Informative)
You'll note in the article that one thing editors are concerned about is actually _printing_ these form letters. They're not taking polls, they're actually publishing content, and there's something at least vaguely dishonest about sending a "letter to the editor" that you didn't write.
Just to support this point -- it's more than vaguely dishonest, it's plagiarism. [m-w.com] It doesn't matter if the original author wants the work passed off or not; passing it off without crediting the source is plagiarism no matter what. (That's why you can't turn in your friend's term paper as your own even if your friend approves.)
the software exists (Score:3, Informative)
How 'bout using Razor? (Score:2, Informative)
The only thing you really need to do is get a large enough body of media submitting their frequently-boilerplated topics and check if they've been spotted before. You'd want to have a way to retrieve the other submissions so you could do an eyeball test, something not available in Razor right now, but the code could be extended to do this.