At a time of increasing polarization and rigid ideologies, the L.A. Times has decided it wants to make its opinion pieces less persuasive to readers by increasing the cost of changing your mind.
The hope: The L.A. Times will appear more “objective” if it presents both sides of an issue, even if one side’s written by a human and the other side is generated by AI. The reality: Kind of a mess.
“Never get comfortable; always assume that the world is conspiring to take down the industry and that we will have to move heaven and earth to overcome those forces to blaze a path forward for quality journalism.”
Voices Across America is looking for writers who can write about where they live with sufficient authority to be credible to their neighbors, but with sufficient altitude to be compelling to readers anywhere.
The community members will join internal meetings, participate in interviews for candidate endorsements, and recommend topics for editorials and contributed opinion pieces.
The campaign reflects an “increasingly digital” readership, including new subscribers without the experience of holding clearly separated news and opinion sections in their hands.
“She wrote a fabulous piece that did incredibly well and I think there’s no way on earth that (a) she would have submitted or (b) it would have run, before we started this stuff. It got more than double the usual number of pageviews for an opinion piece.”
Coddington, Mark. "This Week in Review: Nate Silver and data journalism’s critics, and the roots of diversity problems." Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 21 Mar. 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2025.
APA
Coddington, M. (2014, Mar. 21). This Week in Review: Nate Silver and data journalism’s critics, and the roots of diversity problems. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved March 24, 2025, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/this-week-in-review-nate-silver-and-data-journalisms-critics-and-the-roots-of-diversity-problems/
Chicago
Coddington, Mark. "This Week in Review: Nate Silver and data journalism’s critics, and the roots of diversity problems." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified March 21, 2014. Accessed March 24, 2025. https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/this-week-in-review-nate-silver-and-data-journalisms-critics-and-the-roots-of-diversity-problems/.
Wikipedia
{{cite web
| url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/this-week-in-review-nate-silver-and-data-journalisms-critics-and-the-roots-of-diversity-problems/
| title = This Week in Review: Nate Silver and data journalism’s critics, and the roots of diversity problems
| last = Coddington
| first = Mark
| work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]
| date = 21 March 2014
| accessdate = 24 March 2025
| ref = {{harvid|Coddington|2014}}
}}
