Rui Nunes's thoughts and ideas

Photo of JD Lasica

Here's the thing. People rush to prejudgements and be very critic about something without investigating further. The bad thoughts are the first ones coming to mind and people almost struggle to be the firsts with an inflamating comment at a medium.

Here's an example I've stumbled a few days ago. Marissa Mayer, the head of Search Departament at Google was appointed to lead the Local Programs (Localization and so on), leaving the previous Departament. Rapidly and based on comments from "someone" not identified but described as a Google Employee, news sites were fast to propagate the news as if Marissa had been demoted. If you check the comments in these articles, several people just rampage saying that she deserved to be demoted since she lost the run for Facebook's agreement to search their users as Bing has succeded and that she was having lucky so far, because of her looks and by being with the market leader. Well, I don't really know if this is true or not, but I don't make assumptions or fast judgements if I don't research a bit more or learn a lot about a company's methods or a person's background and capabilities. For what I've checked in some other sites and professionals of this sector, opinions are that she's actually a very good professional. So, why alleging that she's heading some department because of her looks and so on? Is it based on a real situation? Hardly!

I need to have experience on something to make some kind of remarks.

This is what I think people tend to forget and just don't care about. It's very easy to make comments about some sort of subject that brought our attention with a light mind, but get over it.
What's even more wrong to me is to see some media just posting something that is being rumoured in a kind of writing that people tend to believe as an absolute truth.
A few years ago, newspappers were considered respectful and credible organizations with hundreds of journalists all dedicated to investigate their stories and check every source. Even trying to hear both parties of a question. Something tells me that it's being lost. Why? Well, we live in a fast information flow and the breaking news sites are the most visited. Because they break the news faster. But we really need to get the investigation journalism and old school stories where we check everything very well before writing an article.

Interesting that Jason Calacanis, a notorious web content entrepreneur, famous for starting up with Weblogs,Inc and Mahalo Inc, to name a few, is claiming precisely that. We have a great ammount of news breakers but not enough well written researched stories. Maybe there's a very large and profitable niche here, and press groups are in the best situation to dominate it, because they have the professionals, the methods and the structure. All they need to do is to understand that this is a new medium, not exactly the same as the paper product. There are some different good practices they need to dominate before starting a project like this.

Humm, what are your thoughts about it? Do you have anything to add? I'll appreciate your insight.