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It was a terrible article with baseless claims about Square's business.

"While its profit margins have never been made public, it’s generally believed that the company is near break even or slightly unprofitable"

That is entirely conjecture - and this is journalism???

Then it frames the narrative with negative leading:

"These high expenses and low revenues lead to obviously high burn rates. Square is believed to have lost more than $100 million in 2013"

But... the whole point of raising funding is to spend it. If you didn't need the capital for plans to grow rapidly, you shouldn't have raised capital in the first place.




That is entirely conjecture - and this is journalism?

When hard facts are not around to be had, reporting the general consensus seems acceptable to me.

You may have been thinking of investigative journalism?


One of the principles of journalistic integrity is that coverage should be free of "editorialization" or injecting your own opinions as the writer into the narrative of the story (thus maintaining objectivity).

One example: "it's believed that the losses number in the billions", you should say instead, "it is uncertain what squares operating metrics are currently, or have been in the past."

Only report what you know to be facts, the rest, "conjecture", have someone more qualified than you make those conjectures. Maybe interview someone who works at square who is familiar with these things? Then, slightly, you as the writer will have distanced your own feelings about the subject by relying on someone else, who is hopefully in a better position to answer these questions.


Ok, an interview would make sense then.

My thoughts are basically, as an outsider I don't know the things that are "not fact but pretty much accepted as true". So it is valuable to me to learn about those things in an article.


If hard facts don't exist, you can interview someone for their opinion and attribute it to them. Just putting your own opinion in the text isn't reporting, it is an opinion piece. Mixing the two just seems lazy.




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