Most programmers are barely capable Stack Overflow copy'n'paste merchants.

Programmers value the hacky over the elegant, and work hard to tight release cycles.

And yet there are programmers who care, and who seek out and use better ways of doing things, including the tools to help them. Just as there are journalists who care about getting things right, digging up and exposing the truth.

In fact, a great way to lift the general standard is to make the right way of doing something also the easy way of doing it: better tools can counteract short deadlines and occasional lapses of discipline.

>Journalists value the sensational over the factual, and work hard (true) to tight deadlines.

No, people do. There are tons of highly professional journalists who want to do good work and write important, well-crafted, accurate stories. Who were inspired to get into the field by Watergate. Who are constantly begging their bosses to do labor-intensive features.

The economic reality is that there are not enough people who want this enough to fund it, except barely at a handful of institutions like NYTimes. Good work takes time and manpower and it doesn't sell. If management is doing its job (maximize shareholder value) then it is doing everything it can to turn its paper into Buzzfeed.

There are thousands of journalists who left their dying papers because they couldn't stand it anymore. Thousands more who were simply laid off, or took buyouts because they saw that they were going to be laid off if they didn't. My dad is one of these. They'd want nothing more than to work at a real paper again, but there aren't really real papers anymore.

Being sloppy and fast is absolutely about service to the customer. With a daily publication deadline, you can generally take the time to do it right. But the readership (and therefore management) wants stories on the internet as quickly as possible. Of course they are going to be sloppy.

(I agree with all your complaints about TV news, because that's what it's always been. In print... that's what they were forced to become when the money became tight.)

Hard to see how this apparent stereotyping (a) wouldn't apply to people working in nearly every industry and (b) is relevant to this tool.

I guess it's relevant because the OP is saying that they wouldn't use it because they think that facts are irrelevant.

Definitely, we'd have to look at the studies in this space, namely whether journalists cite their facts, or write their pieces using citable studies/facts, etc. So I also won't accept the OP's statement of it as fact.

Though, in my, supposedly biased, opinion I'd say journalists are quite adept at twisting facts to suit their points, and also of omitting (i.e. cherry picking) facts that support their views/points.

Of course. I just hope you recognize comments like these do precisely the thing they lament: make unsourced assertions designed to advance a point of view.

"Journalism" is a broad tent. I suspect there's plenty of room for tools like this one.

Hold on, you're using the fact that UK journalists ironically recycle a term that's normally used in a perjorative sense as justification for stereotyping them? What you've said can be effectively applied to any possible occupation in any field.