"Dangers" seems like a strong word to me. This blog post is strong on technical analysis, but light on substantive analysis. It tells us exactly how many words are common between the first and last piece, but doesn't say whether any factual errors or omissions occurred between the first and last piece. We know that facts and analysis were added, but is that a "danger?"
The undercurrent in the blog post, and I predict an undercurrent here, is that reporting on issues of gender is not appropriate for a story about a tech company. The Times article went from basically a transmission of the official line from Reddit, to a more in-depth story of the background and implications. This is presented, implicitly, as a bad thing. I don't necessarily agree that it is.
The Clinton story had the opposite problem--there were factual inaccuracies in the first version because of the rush to print. I agree that the rush to be first is usually pointless and potentially harmful.
Issues of gender are perfectly relevant in tech. But the issue wasn't gender - it was basic competence and cultural fit.
IMO Reddit would be absolutely fine with a good female CEO. But Pao wasn't a good Reddit CEO, she was a terrible Reddit CEO. Her gender is incidental to that.
So when journalists try to frame the narrative as "cellar-dwelling young male mouthbreathers vs a shocked and innocent victim of disgusting sexism" - that's heavy-handed editorialising at best, and plain bullshit at worst.
Now - there's always been a thick and disgusting stream of bullshit running through trad media. (See also, Fox News.)
But that's a problem with the old journalistic model, which was (is...) based on selling opinion-shaping to advertisers, sponsors, and media owners.
Pretending the Internet is worse than that seems very self-indulgent.
It's also a rather panicked attempt to undermine the effectiveness of Internet communities as opinion-forming media machines in their own right. The machines happen to self-assemble rather than being engineered in a top-down way like trad media, and they're certainly more open than they believe to external influence.
Even so. The newsies aren't just losing the ad sale and eyeball space, they're also losing the traditional op-ed space to spontaneous community narratives.
If you're an editor, that's a serious problem. If you lose both eyeballs and PR leverage, you really have no reason to exist at all.
The undercurrent in the blog post, and I predict an undercurrent here, is that reporting on issues of gender is not appropriate for a story about a tech company. The Times article went from basically a transmission of the official line from Reddit, to a more in-depth story of the background and implications. This is presented, implicitly, as a bad thing. I don't necessarily agree that it is.
The Clinton story had the opposite problem--there were factual inaccuracies in the first version because of the rush to print. I agree that the rush to be first is usually pointless and potentially harmful.