Amateurs, Algorithms and Local Fluff – Local News & Weather: Haystack Review

A TV journalist’s opinion | Highlights of late night talk shows are okay as comedy content, and movie trailers are simply studio advertisements — far too ubiquitous to be considered newsworthy. Haystack’s attempts at hard news are rehashes of the already-heard and the getting-stale-fast — like Newsy, one of Haystack’s touted “sources” where wanna-be anchors kick out thin rewrites and pirated video mashups from major news shops. Count on neither to add depth to a story, break news, or present investigative exposés. Understandable for a news app with no in-house reporters or fact-checkers. No journos’ names are found anywhere at Haystack, and there’s no fake news reporting mechanism allowing informed viewers to override Haystack’s machine guesswork — algorithms incapable of news judgment. Facebook and Twitter taught us that’s how fake news spreads. Haystack’s local stories are mostly fluff filler pieces from late in my hometown newscasts (when viewers are tuning out), never the most important stories. I have yet to see a local top story or breaking news item, but Haystack only carries one station’s work here – a second-rate outfit hungry for exposure, and willing to give up a show-closing kicker — a cat-up-a-tree story. Why waste an audience-grabbing lede? Speaks volumes that none of the organizations presenting awards to Haystack are journalism entities, and its lack of login by any means other than Facebook and Google point to data harvesting as Haystack’s real M.O., using other organizations’ news as clickbait. This is an app programmer’s news toy aimed at an audience with a low-information threshold. Coulda been a contender. It’s not the real deal.
Review by KVB-FM on Local News & Weather: Haystack.