Holy fuck, I've offended everyone on the internet by saying the "L" word... and it wasn't even in a harsh context.
TWP is liberal, as with everyone I worked with. My point was newspapers in general have their own political bias if they want to get a targeted demographic. LATWP was just an example.
It has no political bias. I'm not for or against either side. The Washington Post is known for being a little more liberal bias and the times is conservative... it is what it is.
You obviously only read that single part and judged based on that word. I still like the people who worked there, and I left because newsprint was failing.
I'm sorry you felt that the word "liberal" marked out the rest of the comment. Wait... no, I'm really not.
I used to work at a few newspapers, including The Washington Post/LA times conglomerate. I left the newsprint industry around 2007 when everything took a turn for the worse, and TWP started pinching pennies due to a massive SAP deployment that went on for nearly half a decade to that point. Yes, they were worth a lot, but management didn't notice the change ahead, and spent money on a product which wouldn't save much money for them, and was merely a convenience.
With that said, their Olive solutions and online web management was in direct competition with NYT, waiting to see who would go full pay online. This is where all newspapers were having problems.... how do you provide news that people will pay for, if you have a plethora of news sites online for free?
The answer lies in 2 different facets. By providing local news by zoning, which quite a few large paper companies do, or by providing news that nobody else has seen, first.
The second part of that is where the problem lies. Small town newspaper companies are still a little stable because they provide local news. They'll pull their other stories from a syndicate without the need to fabricate, stretch, or exaggerate news based on their personal opinions. Not as much, of course.
With larger beasts, you've got to come up with something to get people coming back. Though, if you try to stay even a bit balanced, you need to expand your distribution, like USA/Today, Gannett. For places like TWP, they've got to feed on emotion and beliefs such as liberal views. There's nothing wrong with that, but it ends up becoming a feeding ground for trash and dirty laundry... because that's what readers like. Anyone can make up conspiracy theories or read about a leak online, but if you can get it first and use it to your advantage with surgical precision, you can sell papers with that above the fold.
It's all a competition behind the doors. Of course, you have the journalists who have been around for ages and continue to write articles based on the grand scheme of things, but the younger ones out of college who were the prime of their Podunk town, end up needing to be seen. They're the ones who dig up garbage and try to make a name for themselves. Unfortunately, this is what people feed on, and this is what their business model is based on. I've seen it first hand, and I've seen the streams filing in from AP, Reuters and others, to watch the reports dismantled from 8 pages to 2, with whatever info they feel benefits their cause.
Why is it this way?
Because the people who pay money for their product, want that type of garbage. It doesn't matter what kind of trash or opinion you have, if people buy it, someone will sell it. And that's why we have Clinton and Trump in line for presidency.
I agree completely... and I assure you that most are a total waste of time. Actually, quite a large percentage of them are by students performing educational research of the sort. IF, by chance, the funds that we spend in hard searches by personnel were put toward better technology for indexing (such as previous google appliances), and toward more people redacting, the bottleneck would improve. Small and insignificant abusers would be able to gather more without even speaking to a FOIA rep.
One of the huge issues right now is straight up redacting. There's no true algorithm in software which can detect and do this effectively, so you have to use pure manpower to read each line and look for well known symbols/correlations. When we get a request from a lawyer wanting (X) documents pertaining to project (x) with these keywords, there's a possibility they're going to have to wait until those documents are actually processed, as they're not even digitized yet.
I don't know if it will ever plateau, regardless of how many people you shove in it. Ours involves old historical documents, and not even the documents created every day by e-mail, etc. Granted, we're required to never place personal information in any mail transaction, but it still has to be checked before becoming FOIA eligible.
There needs to be better technology, and there needs to be some accountability for these requests. We can make bots capable of deciphering hundreds of different captcha types, but can't come up with something that's able to figure out redacting without human intervention.
I see quite a few people throwing out ideas of "they should do this" and "they're doing this wrong". That's fine, but I assure you a 13 paragraph article will hardly scratch the surface of what's actually occurring every day.
We literally get truckloads of cold war documents in which have been declassified, on paper. They're manually scanned in, then redacted, to keep the bad guys from finding out Personal information on health documents and where particular contaminants are stored. We also check for classified information AND radiation. Hard copies are made, as well as PDF-A's, stored, indexed, searched and so forth, for the public to search through, whether it be online or straight from the box.
Every single piece of communication must be recorded. Every photo taken must be recorded. All of this has to be stored. All of this has to be indexed. All of this has to be redacted. This takes manpower.
The thing is, storage grows every year. Back-ups have to be transferred to different places. Equipment is obsolete and has to be swapped out every (x) years. It's a huge boat, and we're only a leaf at the end of the government oak tree. In fact, we probably have less than 1000 employees worldwide for this contract, and it will only get bigger.
It all comes with a huge price tag, just for a small operation, all for FOIA.
Now, that's great, right? It's what our taxes pay for. Even though anyone can go to our site and search for most of this, we still get backed up with redacting so YOU, or your Grandparents who worked at a uranium filings plant, don't have their health records and SSN released to the world.
I can't account for all of the other branches or offices, but we do everything we can to make this info available on a website if it's requested. Unfortunately, there are so many records being processed, and at random increments, that there's no predicting how much you're going to be behind or ahead. So, there will always be some record that has to be picked out of the box until it's digitized.
All of this info is always under litigation for one reason or another. It's all unaccounted for hours, all in the name of "Freedom". Everyone's paying taxes on these contracts so that some jackass can request 50,000 documents to see if there's a possibility that their uncle was fired for the right reason back in 1960, or JUST TO MAKE SURE there wasn't any conversation about the whereabouts of a storage site. If there IS a storage site, some dude who lives 1300 miles away wants to make sure that there are noted rad levels within reason, though it's probably possible that quite a few of these requests are from conspiracy theorists.
ALL of this bullshit happens every day. You don't know how many requests you're going to get. I'm certain that places like the DOJ or those responsible for POTUS records are far more busy than ours, but when you have a massive amount of people who want to find out about aliens, racism, segregation, or whatever-the-fuck-the-flavor-of-the-day-is... someone has to address it, personally.
If they want to change the system, make it mandatory to have DMZ search systems, and charge a fee for access to that, even if it's $20. Base other charges for large litigation cases on the size of the documents pulled, as well as a fast track for more money. If people are serious about wasting resources over trying to find aliens or conspiracies, at least charge a minimum fee. If it's going to need more attention, make it worth their while.
You're right, as the government benefits ZERO from it, but giving complete transparency for free only costs the taxpayers money.
I know exactly how all of this works, and I agree with all of it, good and bad. In fact, the tax money put toward this feeds my children. This contract/project will continue to grow, but it can't wasteful due to some guy sitting in his parents basement wanting to see if ALF was buried in Yucca Mountain. It compounds the time for those who actually need it, and something needs to be done.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask me. Nobody around here is sitting around collecting a paycheck, and we're pretty advanced for the ship we're running. Redacting is a serious thing, and it's for ALL of our safety (just so the DOE can lose its OWN employees info in the end).
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by mockylock.
Re: Liberal?
Holy fuck, I've offended everyone on the internet by saying the "L" word... and it wasn't even in a harsh context.
TWP is liberal, as with everyone I worked with. My point was newspapers in general have their own political bias if they want to get a targeted demographic. LATWP was just an example.
Jesus fucking sensitive Christ.
Re: Re: The Real Truth About MSM
You obviously only read that single part and judged based on that word. I still like the people who worked there, and I left because newsprint was failing.
I'm sorry you felt that the word "liberal" marked out the rest of the comment. Wait... no, I'm really not.
Times have changed, greed hasn't. (as Mat)
With that said, their Olive solutions and online web management was in direct competition with NYT, waiting to see who would go full pay online. This is where all newspapers were having problems.... how do you provide news that people will pay for, if you have a plethora of news sites online for free?
The answer lies in 2 different facets. By providing local news by zoning, which quite a few large paper companies do, or by providing news that nobody else has seen, first.
The second part of that is where the problem lies. Small town newspaper companies are still a little stable because they provide local news. They'll pull their other stories from a syndicate without the need to fabricate, stretch, or exaggerate news based on their personal opinions. Not as much, of course.
With larger beasts, you've got to come up with something to get people coming back. Though, if you try to stay even a bit balanced, you need to expand your distribution, like USA/Today, Gannett. For places like TWP, they've got to feed on emotion and beliefs such as liberal views. There's nothing wrong with that, but it ends up becoming a feeding ground for trash and dirty laundry... because that's what readers like. Anyone can make up conspiracy theories or read about a leak online, but if you can get it first and use it to your advantage with surgical precision, you can sell papers with that above the fold.
It's all a competition behind the doors. Of course, you have the journalists who have been around for ages and continue to write articles based on the grand scheme of things, but the younger ones out of college who were the prime of their Podunk town, end up needing to be seen. They're the ones who dig up garbage and try to make a name for themselves. Unfortunately, this is what people feed on, and this is what their business model is based on. I've seen it first hand, and I've seen the streams filing in from AP, Reuters and others, to watch the reports dismantled from 8 pages to 2, with whatever info they feel benefits their cause.
Why is it this way?
Because the people who pay money for their product, want that type of garbage. It doesn't matter what kind of trash or opinion you have, if people buy it, someone will sell it. And that's why we have Clinton and Trump in line for presidency.
Re:
One of the huge issues right now is straight up redacting. There's no true algorithm in software which can detect and do this effectively, so you have to use pure manpower to read each line and look for well known symbols/correlations. When we get a request from a lawyer wanting (X) documents pertaining to project (x) with these keywords, there's a possibility they're going to have to wait until those documents are actually processed, as they're not even digitized yet.
I don't know if it will ever plateau, regardless of how many people you shove in it. Ours involves old historical documents, and not even the documents created every day by e-mail, etc. Granted, we're required to never place personal information in any mail transaction, but it still has to be checked before becoming FOIA eligible.
There needs to be better technology, and there needs to be some accountability for these requests. We can make bots capable of deciphering hundreds of different captcha types, but can't come up with something that's able to figure out redacting without human intervention.
Many great ideas....
We literally get truckloads of cold war documents in which have been declassified, on paper. They're manually scanned in, then redacted, to keep the bad guys from finding out Personal information on health documents and where particular contaminants are stored. We also check for classified information AND radiation. Hard copies are made, as well as PDF-A's, stored, indexed, searched and so forth, for the public to search through, whether it be online or straight from the box.
Every single piece of communication must be recorded. Every photo taken must be recorded. All of this has to be stored. All of this has to be indexed. All of this has to be redacted. This takes manpower.
The thing is, storage grows every year. Back-ups have to be transferred to different places. Equipment is obsolete and has to be swapped out every (x) years. It's a huge boat, and we're only a leaf at the end of the government oak tree. In fact, we probably have less than 1000 employees worldwide for this contract, and it will only get bigger.
It all comes with a huge price tag, just for a small operation, all for FOIA.
Now, that's great, right? It's what our taxes pay for. Even though anyone can go to our site and search for most of this, we still get backed up with redacting so YOU, or your Grandparents who worked at a uranium filings plant, don't have their health records and SSN released to the world.
I can't account for all of the other branches or offices, but we do everything we can to make this info available on a website if it's requested. Unfortunately, there are so many records being processed, and at random increments, that there's no predicting how much you're going to be behind or ahead. So, there will always be some record that has to be picked out of the box until it's digitized.
All of this info is always under litigation for one reason or another. It's all unaccounted for hours, all in the name of "Freedom". Everyone's paying taxes on these contracts so that some jackass can request 50,000 documents to see if there's a possibility that their uncle was fired for the right reason back in 1960, or JUST TO MAKE SURE there wasn't any conversation about the whereabouts of a storage site. If there IS a storage site, some dude who lives 1300 miles away wants to make sure that there are noted rad levels within reason, though it's probably possible that quite a few of these requests are from conspiracy theorists.
ALL of this bullshit happens every day. You don't know how many requests you're going to get. I'm certain that places like the DOJ or those responsible for POTUS records are far more busy than ours, but when you have a massive amount of people who want to find out about aliens, racism, segregation, or whatever-the-fuck-the-flavor-of-the-day-is... someone has to address it, personally.
If they want to change the system, make it mandatory to have DMZ search systems, and charge a fee for access to that, even if it's $20. Base other charges for large litigation cases on the size of the documents pulled, as well as a fast track for more money. If people are serious about wasting resources over trying to find aliens or conspiracies, at least charge a minimum fee. If it's going to need more attention, make it worth their while.
You're right, as the government benefits ZERO from it, but giving complete transparency for free only costs the taxpayers money.
I know exactly how all of this works, and I agree with all of it, good and bad. In fact, the tax money put toward this feeds my children. This contract/project will continue to grow, but it can't wasteful due to some guy sitting in his parents basement wanting to see if ALF was buried in Yucca Mountain. It compounds the time for those who actually need it, and something needs to be done.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask me. Nobody around here is sitting around collecting a paycheck, and we're pretty advanced for the ship we're running. Redacting is a serious thing, and it's for ALL of our safety (just so the DOE can lose its OWN employees info in the end).
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by mockylock.
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