Zero Hedge's new justifcation for spewing falsehoods

Posted on | Saturday, February 13, 2010 | No Comments

Abstract:
The majority of our "news" is total crap because we are understaffed.

(I'm not making this up see for yourself Here)

But, having waxed poetic on our greatness and accomplishments, it falls to us to admit that there is a Dark Side(tm) to employing a non-professional (read: unpaid) and skeleton crew. We miss quite a lot. (Right, like truthful statements) Our tips@zh inbox sees about 200-300 emails per day, of which perhaps 15% are penis enlargement advertisements and 25% represent actionable, interesting material. Yesterday between 12:00am and 11:59pm we processed more than 1700 comments. No, that's not a typo. We are hosting over 225,000 comments in total today.

As you will quickly see, it is literally impossible for
a newsroom as sparse as ours to cover such a beat. We miss quite a lot of
interesting stories. Many reader tips are, if not ignored, simply lost in the
static. More significantly, Zero Hedge employs no "Managing
Editor." (We know, it shows)

Unfortunately, Zero Hedge, which was but a small online carve-out lost in a salty sea of Blogger.com foam only 10 months ago, has reached a point where the weight of subject matter we regularly manage requires a bit more care and attention than we have been able to give before now. (No kidding.)

It is for this reason that Zero Hedge has retained our first Ombuds(wo)man.

It would not be waterboarding the matter in the least to suggest that Zero Hedge is a literal lightening rod for criticism. Nor would it be out of place to point out that, where it is dismissed, Zero Hedge tends to fall into the
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" bucket. True, we have hit a number of very thin nails on the head (national security exceptions to financial disclosures and AIG balance sheets come to mind). But, to the extent "extraordinary evidence" is the side of that balance sheet that readers (or non-reader critics) find lacking, we are underperforming in the marketplace. This will not do. (The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. This is good)

The sorts of small details that are likely to escape a writing staff with no formal editors in-house, quite obviously, escape us- as we have no formal editors in-house. Moreover, despite the fact that we maintain a dedicated abuse / legal team (with a dedicated inbox that we monitor pretty closely), most Zero Hedge criticism seems to find root in
the pages of other blogs, whose authors do not appear to regard comment from us as a pre-requisite to unfettered publication. Often, we learn of some "cutting" rebuke somewhere in the blogosphere (or even the mainstream media) days or even weeks after its publication. In fact, it seems to be the rule that issues of citation, clerical or even significant factual errors on Zero Hedge play out in public before we ever hear of them. This month (as you may have noticed) has been no exception.
(Oh the irony. They can follow BIDHITTER with an RSS reader and can also follow us off a cliff on twitter. They can also type in http://bidhitter.blogspot.com/ into a fancy web browser and in less than a min they will wind up here. Cooler yet, they can load us up on their MP3 player! It's the wave of the future.)

Related posts:
Interpreting Volume and why Zero Hedge are morons
Zero Hedge is starting up with their BS again
Computers... Right.

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