Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#131

Post by dman » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:40 AM UTC

I do pay for news, however one request I have for news providers is a greater emphasis on presenting news from all sides. Over the last 4-5 years most news providers have picked a political side (to a much greater extent than I recall in the past). This is true in both countries for which I follow news (India and the US). Given an event I can predict the coverage that venues will give it. This is troubling to me, and I have to visit multiple news providers (And at times augment that by reading comments on relevant subreddits). I would really like some reputed news organizations to try to pitch a "big tent" and try to get a diverse set of opinions on the news of the day.

While we are at it - please ignore data that long form journalism is dead, the current race to the bottom leads to nowhere. The people who value understanding the world enough to want to pay for it also value understanding the nuance and the multiple perspectives - these are hard to capture in a single paragraph. Do not design your product for the lowest common denominator.

Lastly - please drop the clickbait ads on your websites that you run to augment your income. These ads often contain fake news, and by association they lessen the credibility of your organization in my eye.

In short - respect your audience, build a premium product that is worth subscribing.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#132

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#133

Post by femto » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:51 AM UTC

BigJono wrote: post #120

my_first_acct wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier. I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well? Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's…

What non-US paper though? In my experience as an Australian all of our papers are totally fucked. We don't have anything anywhere near as good as NYT or WaPo.

Crinkling News [1] was a surprisingly good Australian newspaper. It ceased publication in January 2018, but I gather they would reopen if they could find the money (Costs $200k/year to run?).

It was written for children, essentially the print equivalent of ABC's Behind The News bulletin [2]. The writing level wasn't too far removed from the "adult" papers (I gather broadsheets are written to a 12 year old reading level and tabloids lower than that). Articles were a mix of mainstream news and kid specific stuff. There were fewer articles than an adult paper, but was basically all there with the extraneous stuff removed. It was completely independent.

[1] https://www.crinklingnews.com.au/

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/btn/

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#134

Post by warent » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:55 AM UTC

api wrote: post #113

Novashi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better following individual journalists via twitter or whatever instead of the organization itself for quality content for subjects you like to read about. Personally, I use the main site just to scan headlines and see if there's anything interesting. Everyone's biased, but I don't think I'm more of an objective thinker than a trained journalist who's taken classes to study it and write about it specifically. I…

Maybe journalists should go out on their own via Patreon etc.?

This is an interesting idea. I'd like to see more of this in the future. Large news orgs only existed before because of the necessity of combining resources. These days I bet you can do the same thing with only a couple of people or even solo given the advent of high technology.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#135

Post by jammygit » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:56 AM UTC

phreack wrote: post #129

Didn't the NYT have the dark pattern of being one-click subscribe, yet made you fill forms and emails and physically call them to unsubscribe? (At least up until a few months ago, last I heard) Stuff like that is an absolute deal breaker and turns lots of users away from subscriptions entirely, before even talking about article/content quality.

Cancelling an Amazon account takes about an hour of redirects and customer retention chats and emails. I decided not to subscribe to some papers for that reason yesterday

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#136

Post by RickSanchez2600 » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:56 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #74

RickSanchez2600 wrote: post #2

I paid for a newspaper and the only thing factual was the cartoons. Fake news has been around longer than the Internet. Look at Supermarket tabloids. Look at all of the journalists being fired now. Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well. Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningit…

> Newspaper I paid for reported falsely > they charged the parents So the newspaper just reported the fact that they had been charged? > From that day I learned of fake news. You learned to label things you don’t agree with as fake news.

The parents were not neglectful, they took care of their daughter and took her to the hospital as soon as they noticed the trouble.

Parents were not charged with neglect until after the article was written saying they neglected their daughter. There was no neglect just dirty laundry.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#137

Post by NeedMoreTea » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 4:58 AM UTC

my_first_acct wrote: post #104

8ytecoder wrote: post #77

A few complaints I share with the other people in this thread: - It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. As someone in tech I can clearly see what they get and what they don't. Extrapolating it - it's not at all clear they understand economics or foreign policy or policy impact or environmental concerns and how to address them ...etc. - Bias: every single on…

> For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier. I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well? Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's…

I think we Brits are finding Brexit extremely tedious right about now, with no sign of an end to it. Our government tried for unicorns and rainbows to achieve a better deal in leaving than we had as a member. The EU, obviously, have to ensure it's a worse deal than being a member.

I used to subscribe to the FT. It's pretty balanced in its reporting, with good news coverage. Surprisingly perhaps, without the bias you might expect of a financial paper. For a while I'd be surprised to see well argued pieces making a case for less inequality, higher taxes, or a universal basic income. Then you stop being surprised they're not just a vehicle of the Tory party, like the Telegraph and Times mostly now are.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#138

Post by licebmi__at__ » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

tivert wrote: post #13

dawhizkid wrote: post #7

Not sure about anyone else but every time I read an article about something I'm actually an expert in or few times about myself or a company I've worked for I see at least a handful of factual errors and/or exaggerations that aren't real.

> Not sure about anyone else but every time I read an article about something I'm actually an expert in or few times about myself or a company I've worked for I see at least a handful of factual errors and/or exaggerations that aren't real. News is only the first rough draft of history [1] [2]. Newspapers are definitely not perfect, and they definitely make errors, but there's no better way to get such a breadth of t…

Not really, I still find lots of errors on recounts of past events. Aside from a few articles, that almost always come from rare good journalists, I don't really see any research on most news media, not for recent events, nor for historical accounts.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#139

Post by rurcliped » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:05 AM UTC

I'd be happy to pay. I don't because I object to the NYT privacy policy: "we gather ... a history of the pages you view ... We automatically combine this collected log-information with other information we collect about you ... We have a legitimate interest in disclosing or transferring your personal information to a third party in the event of any reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture ...."

I'd pay double or triple their current price if they announced support for anonymous access backed by frictionless anonymous payment.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#140

Post by culot » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:09 AM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #66

fwip wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BuzzFeed News produces pretty good news reports. It's not the same as BuzzFeed proper.

Why BuzzFeed chose to use the same brand to cover such different sites is beyond me. Every time a quality article is linked here, almost without fail there is someone who will comment along the lines of "BuzzFeed is trash, I'm not clicking that" I don't blame them. It's not their fault that the news site decided to share their name with a trash clickbait site.

Isn't it precisely their fault for choosing that name and branding? They are not blameless for the title they chose.