Holy shitballs. Spending 20 hours just researching? And then the actual writing time? For $200 per article? That’s far less than minimum wage. And Cracked pays so well? Doesn’t that mean the opportunities it opens are even lower paying? Damn. Maybe your next article should be Ten Reasons Why it Sucks to be a Freelance Writer.
I freelance non-fiction for gargantuan aid organizations (I’ll see your Cracked fact checking and raise you a prime minister or two). It’s really far from the lucrative end of writing/editing, but a completely different world from what you’re describing income-wise. I wouldn’t approach their Writer’s Workshop for a lack of being funny; I’d stay away from lack of being able to eat.
If you read the articles there, you’ll notice extensive links acting as citations for claims. This is great, and far better than most websites, including news sites.
BUT…
They lean towards exaggeration and sensationalism, ignore competing evidence, turn correlation into causation and likelyhood into certainty, and generally strain credulity to make a point or claim a click. Consider holding a box of Mortons while reading for the appropriate quantity of grains of salt necessary.
The photoplasty is even worse.
As for humor, I find the articles interesting, but rarely funny. Actually they are often depressing. The videos are far better in that department. After Hours, Does Not Compute, Topic of the Day, Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder and many of the short series are really quite good.
One doesn’t follow the other. Cracked isn’t interested in publishing a paper on the effects of vitamin E on scorpion gestation no matter how well researched it is, nor is “Five Times Game Developers Were Jerks” going to require significant citations.
Cracked is primarily interested in entertaining Buzzfeed style listicles these days. If they can pretend to act informative or push their social agenda, so much the better but keeping people amused/interested long enough to see the banner ads on Page 2 is the primary focus.
They get the facts as accurate as can be expected, I have seen some errors. Their writing style is such that it’s not always apparent on the first read what is fact and what is sarcasm.
Nobody in their right mind uses Cracked as a source of valid information. It is entertainment backed up with facts. The style of the writing is based around comedy. The main difficulty is to write about a scientific/heavy topic in an accessible and humorous manner.
The cites and links presented within each article are there to back up the articles and provide further means for seeking more information. The whole point is to cover themselves from a legal standpoint, and to back up anything that sounds ridiculous within the article.
If the primary source is incorrect… then that isn’t the fault of Cracked. You can only check what is in front of you. If a scientific study or research was flawed to begin with, then short of donning a white coat, grabbing a test tube and doing your own experiments, there’s not much anyone can do about it. If something does prove to be false (and it crops up), Cracked are also very good at telling people about it. Sometimes a fact is presented in say, 2009, that turns out to be contradicted by a new fact in 2015 - but then they will link back to that article and mention why.
As for the less than minimum wage thing - people don’t do it for the money so much, but for the experience and to get their foot in the writing door. It can also be seen as a paid internship as some of the regular writers/contributors end up being employed by Cracked in the future.
But, technically, the facts are mostly right. Some libraries are throwing out books and some aren’t super thorough about it. However, most aren’t doing this and most actually do manage to give away as many discarded books as possible. The article skates just up to the truth line, takes one step back, and then Cracked puts it on the front page. They’re better than some sites in this regard, but I wouldn’t say they’re “reliable.”
No one is missing that point. Several people are pointing to it as a reason why it’s not “reliable” – it’s first and foremost entertainment. Facts and data give way to dick jokes when one gets in the way of the other.
This doesn’t mean it’s 100% bullshit, just that it’s not a reliable source for facts.
Off the top of my head, I can remember an article quoting the findings of a study. The study existed, but the author fundamentally misunderstood the study’s conclusions and presented his misinterpretation as fact. Nothing was fabricated, it just wasn’t particularly thoughtful writing.
The subreddit Bad History regularly takes on Cracked for egregious misinterpretations of history. It can be quite amusing reading some of the takedowns to see just how hard Cracked is willing to stretch the truth for their clickbait.
I think the quality varies widely from article to article, and that’s because the authors and their various forms of expertise vary widely. Some of them take great liberties with the scientific method in forming their conclusions and some of them don’t. Some of them speak from a scientific consensus standpoint, and others cherry-pick their data. The articles are entertaining – and I actually find reading the comments to be the most useful, because knowledgeable people will often post counterarguments, then you can go down the whole rabbit hole of research on that one topic and learn new things.
[QUOTE=guitario]
If the primary source is incorrect… then that isn’t the fault of Cracked. You can only check what is in front of you. If a scientific study or research was flawed to begin with, then short of donning a white coat, grabbing a test tube and doing your own experiments, there’s not much anyone can do about it.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not really true. You can usually tell by a study’s design whether the methodology is flawed. Hell, I’ve figured out flawed methodology just based on a Cracked article’s description of the study. You can also look at the entire body of research on the subject to find out if your study is an outlier. You can review meta-analyses. There are a lot of things you can do to evaluate the data.
I don’t think anybody’s questioning your personal commitment to research, but I seriously doubt every writer for Cracked has the same standards. BTW, it’s cool you have done this. I have considered writing for Cracked, but it would be more of the personal experience variety than research-based. I wrote one article for Cracked but avoided submitting it and someone else jumped the gun with a much crappier article about the same thing. Now I’m just trying to figure out what to write about next.
I don’t get the attitude in this thread. I read Cracked almost every day. They almost always provide a link for the facts they use. Yes the link may be wrong but Cracked is sourcing the link which is all you can ask for.
And then stretching the truth of that source until it almost breaks. Like I said, find any expert in what Cracked is writing about for the day, they could probably pick it apart in seconds.
I like Cracked, but you have to take everything they write with a huge grain of salt.
I do agree with some of what you say. I’ve read articles based on subjects I have very specific and deep knowledge of, and I can pick it apart - but most readers aren’t in that 1%, and as long as the information is presented in a reasonable fashion (while providing the real links), then I think that’s fine.
Not that the articles were lying, guessing or were factually inaccurate, but all writers are doing their best (as well as the editors) to understand and to present the information as reliably as possible. All mistakes are genuine errors.
There’s a subreddit for every subreddit these days.
My apologies. It wasn’t my intention to insult - just I forget my dry sense of humour doesn’t always translate well in written form.
That is a straight up lie (though I do like that the author felt the need to respect the trademark for Dumpster). The author holds up “total destruction” as the goal of all library weeding and that isn’t the case. Not at all. “Total destruction” is only practiced at a handful of institutions and the public freaks out every time. Ergo, that handful of examples in the article are the only examples you can find every though the author writes about it as a universal truth.
Straight up lie. Visit your local library on Monday. Look at the books they have for sale. If you can’t find dozens with “DISCARD” stamped all over them, I will eat a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Straight up lie. The health of “The Library” is dependent entirely on the health of your locality or of the connected college (depending upon whether its public or academic).
Straight up lie. Yes, this section was partially made obsolete by the fact that ebook sales leveled off a year after the article was written, but it also ignores the fact that libraries offer ebooks. Nearly all of them. In huge numbers.
