Conclusions are dangerous, and direct exposure to unregulated information may result in the wrong (potentially dangerous) ones.
You need the disciplined mind of a journalist to filter out the most dangerous elements of context and content so your mind isn't dazzled and deranged by the intricacies of Google's corporate strategies.
But, in all seriousness, there are a number of reasons at play here.
Firstly, they want to increase the friction required for you to leave the site. News publications are all but interchangeable anymore, and if they're reporting a story second-hand, then they don't want you to realize you could get more information by swimming upstream.
Secondly, they want to milk it. There's very little information in this article. If there's anything else worth knowing in the document, they probably want to atomize it into multiple articles to stimulate pageviews.
Thirdly, if you have the document, and the document is short, the journalist likely contributes no value to the system. Short term strategy documents like the one described in the article are often concise and easily consumed by members of the public. The document likely outlines the context in-which it was written, and then contains one or two pages of a proposed strategy (if that, going by the sparseness of the quotes). Almost anybody curious enough to actually read the article beyond the headline would likely be better served by the document itself.
Great journalism has been done over leaked documents. The Snowden leaks involved reams of content produced by intelligence concerning a plethora of subjects, for a diversity of purposes. Weaving that information together into a coherent story that exposed the broad strokes of what the NSA was up to was great journalism.
Likewise, great journalism can be done by distilling and contextualizing singular documents that are long, nuanced, and require domain knowledge.
This likely isn't one of those circumstances. If you had the document, you wouldn't need the writer, who may not even have seen the original document (the story dates at least back to the 29th [0]).
Fourthly, if you had the document, you would be able to check the author's work. This has been an underconsidered thorn in journalist's side for some time. Different publications have different content production policies. A writer may be expected to produce three to four pieces a day. In this context, even when they aren't trying to manipulate information push a narrative or belief on you (though they often are), the writer may only have skimmed the original document before putting out their piece. As a result, they may have been wrong in some essential, or technical manner that astute readers could pick up on.
This would diminish the writer's reputation, as well as the publication, and the journalistic field's.
5) Generally speaking, uploading unaltered documents is a great way to burn your source, since both printed and digital copies of documents can be easily fingerprinted.
Massive one-time dumps like Chelsea Manning's or Edward Snowden's are not the norm when it comes to leaks; leakers often stay at their position for quite some time, and journalists have every incentive to protect their ability to get inside information
You need the disciplined mind of a journalist to filter out the most dangerous elements of context and content so your mind isn't dazzled and deranged by the intricacies of Google's corporate strategies.
But, in all seriousness, there are a number of reasons at play here.
Firstly, they want to increase the friction required for you to leave the site. News publications are all but interchangeable anymore, and if they're reporting a story second-hand, then they don't want you to realize you could get more information by swimming upstream.
Secondly, they want to milk it. There's very little information in this article. If there's anything else worth knowing in the document, they probably want to atomize it into multiple articles to stimulate pageviews.
Thirdly, if you have the document, and the document is short, the journalist likely contributes no value to the system. Short term strategy documents like the one described in the article are often concise and easily consumed by members of the public. The document likely outlines the context in-which it was written, and then contains one or two pages of a proposed strategy (if that, going by the sparseness of the quotes). Almost anybody curious enough to actually read the article beyond the headline would likely be better served by the document itself.
Great journalism has been done over leaked documents. The Snowden leaks involved reams of content produced by intelligence concerning a plethora of subjects, for a diversity of purposes. Weaving that information together into a coherent story that exposed the broad strokes of what the NSA was up to was great journalism.
Likewise, great journalism can be done by distilling and contextualizing singular documents that are long, nuanced, and require domain knowledge.
This likely isn't one of those circumstances. If you had the document, you wouldn't need the writer, who may not even have seen the original document (the story dates at least back to the 29th [0]).
Fourthly, if you had the document, you would be able to check the author's work. This has been an underconsidered thorn in journalist's side for some time. Different publications have different content production policies. A writer may be expected to produce three to four pieces a day. In this context, even when they aren't trying to manipulate information push a narrative or belief on you (though they often are), the writer may only have skimmed the original document before putting out their piece. As a result, they may have been wrong in some essential, or technical manner that astute readers could pick up on.
This would diminish the writer's reputation, as well as the publication, and the journalistic field's.
[0] https://www.gizchina.com/2020/10/29/google-launches-a-new-st...