Tag: Reading.am

 

Reading as follow up to the provocative article I read in The Atlantic yesterday. I’m a bit more interested in the cultural differences brought up by The Atlantic author and the millennial viewpoint in this article.

I’m often struck with people’s seeming lack of ability to communicate verbally, and this seems even more apparent with the millennial generations. Also striking is “Grace’s” even more dramatic reaction to the encounter after she’d had time to discuss it more with friends. It almost reads as if she didn’t know what to think of things by herself without the filter of her friends’ comments and thoughts. I’m curious if this phenomenon is generational and what role the texting/sharing/social media environment of the past decade has or hasn’t done to impact this viewpoint.

Some thoughts about the journalistic perspective

I spent a few minutes looking into babe as a source and I’m even more curious how to take the story given the photo I found at the bottom of their article and the text from their “about page” which is given the permalink path “/manifesto”. Their top menu rail includes the topics: “news, lust, fads, looks, IRL, pop” which makes me even more suspicious.

Given these and their apparent size and exuberant youth and lack of experience, I have to wonder about their journalistic integrity a bit. While they did seemingly go to some lengths to verify Grace’s story with friends and back it up with apparent photos and texts, it almost plays as journalistic theater copying work and stories they’ve likely recently read out of The Washington Post and The New York Times. How does such a small publication get a story and choose to push it right after the Golden Globes in such a way? Are the editors or writer friends with the subject or even the subject herself? If so this should be mentioned for full disclosure in the article. Especially in the case where they may be trying to press such an article into the mainstream and thereby have some significant exposure and financial upside for themselves.

We publish our own voices, uncensored and unfiltered
babe started in May 2016 as an experiment by a group of editors in our early twenties. We now reach more than 3 million readers a month, and a million girls follow us on Facebook. And because we aren’t owned by a magazine empire which needs cover stars, we can say what we like.

We know our readers like we know our friends. On babe we put out the kind of media we want to read – stories and videos and memes that are as spontaneous and savage as what goes down our group chats. And then on Fridays we get drunk together.

babe is into good news reporting, trash trends, personal stories, industry-leading analysis of fuckboys and the pettiest celebrity drama.

And we’re cool with admitting that we are full of contradictions, because all girls are. We care about safe sex and access to birth control, but know sometimes you just need to pop some Plan B. Find us in the gap between our image of ourselves and how we actually behave.

Hang with us here, read our top stories here, tell us where we’ve fucked up here.

I love that the author discusses her personal background and cultural viewpoint here. It’s certainly an interesting perspective on the #MeToo movement in the past six months. I’m quite curious to read the underlying source article. Until now I’ve not heard of babe as a source at all.