Journalists for the most part are attention-whoring nobodies with no expertise in any particular subject, who hide behind overly aggressive and opinionated words. Watch pundits on any news channel, or read any massively circulated news source and it's pretty clear to confirm what I'm saying. They jiggle their jowls with such empty emotion and intensity.

May be harsh, but I think it's pretty accurate.

Equating "journalists" with "pundits" is completely wrong. Sarah Palin, James Carville, et cetera are pundits (among other things), not journalists.

Punditry is not journalism. Journalism is not punditry.

That said, I find it morally repugnant that 001sky seems to want to quash the right of either to engage in public speech, simply because said speech calls some entrepreneur's credentials into question. It's fine for any person (be they a research-oriented journalist or a bloviating pundit) to raise these sorts of questions, even if I think their position is weak and a tad ridiculous.

If you, as an entrepreneur, are too weak to handle public scrutiny (including scrutiny from people who are quite unlike yourself), then you should find another line of work.

Punditry != journalism, you're right. But I think what I said applies to most in both categories.

Journalists provide an important check on politicians and business leaders. Not every journalist is intelligent, but to dismiss journalism as "media punditry" writ large is a gross overstatement.

Specific to this case, I consider Dan Primack to be an informed technology/finance writer whose opinions are well-researched and who is highly plugged-in to the tech sector (which is a sign that others trust his judgment).

Um.. That's sort of their job? Why the outrage here? It's not like the story actually calls for Snapchat's CEO's head to really be severed. That might be offensive.

I think the author's point is a good one. If CEO is really so obtuse he should go. If he is being coached to act this way then his coach should be fired[1].

Pretty straight forward business journalism. It's not like the business journalist went on a long diatribe about API security. That would be out of place.

[1]Unless your argument is that in order to criticize a business leader's actions you must outline each of the myriad possible corrective steps between "Do Nothing" and "Terminate".

On one hand you have a CEO that responded slowly to a fairly mild privacy exploit. On the other hand, he created an apparently billion+ dollar company almost overnight. So, I'm going to guess that SnapChat should keep its CEO.

On the third hand, he's turned down two offers of three to four billion dollars. Perhaps he should be fired for that!

That is a totally fair point, and you might be right.

But I cannot understand the low-grade media backlash here. That was my point. It seems like writing an article with the thesis that "whoever is planning crisis management at Snapchat is horrible an needs to go" isn't wildly beyond the pale.

For a meritocracy to work there must be consequences for both good and bad actions.

A pundit's merit is judged by their page views; not by their correctness. Their salary is based off their readership. If their readership wants to be fed convenient lies that reenforce their world view that's their perogative.

And a CEO's merit is judged by their company's market value. Has this hurt their market cap?

That's the interesting thing about non-public companies from management's perspective. There's no direct way for the public or journalists to really tell if they're succeeding.

The best way to know would be to ask Google if they'd still offer $4 billion. I suspect they'd make a lower offer right now, but it's hard to tell.

I recently heard Sarah Lacy say they ensure their writers do not know the pageview count.

They get a really high CPM for the ads they place, so it's not all about the pageviews. If you wrote a bunch of linkbait or put a few slideshows up there, they might not have the same audience, and therefore wouldn't get the same CPMs they're getting now.

So not knowing the pageview count might actually help in the case of PandoDaily.

Presumably they still reward good performance though, so writers are still incentivized to attempt to get good pageviews, even if they cannot know the exact numbers themselves (and they can probably get reasonable estimates by watching mentions in social media)

Page view is just a proxy for reader engagement. There are other, better metrics that measure engagement.

What better measure is there for selling ads than the number of ads you sell?

demographics and dwell time

Such as?

Accuracy is not the point. It's sensationalist and it gets clicks, which generate money for the website. Why would you fire your most profitable content generators (i.e. journalists)? That would be insane.

Any idea how many disagreeable (and absolutist) things are published or broadcast every day in radio, newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and online?

Why should media punditry be bound to any requirement as to what they express, external to their boss / editor?

They don't get off anywhere in fact, they don't require your permission, as fortunately we still have a mostly intact free press and freedom of speech.

Thoughtful, nuanced commentary doesn't get as many eyeballs. This is part of the problem from journalist's personal brands becoming part of the news story. When I was growing up I had no idea what any of the people who wrote for the newspaper looked like, or what their names were for all but the very largest stories.