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The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

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Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#111
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, how do you turn off your empathy for the suffering of your fellow countrymen? Which is what ignoring their plight would require (at least, it would for me).

I don't think that reading or not reading the news is engaging with the plight of "my fellow countrymen". We all ignore the plight of millions/billions of people every day. That is the way life has always been.

I remember someone coined a concept recently that when you read about a problem in the world that you can help alleviate then you become morally responsible. It’s liks quantum entanglement but with ethics. Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949572

What about that? Coming upon news where you can make a difference right now, by sending money to NGOs with workers on the ground.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#112

Actually, what we need first is: 1) A common and agreed upon standard definition of news. Facts alone are not news. News also has importance and relevance. It's not news simply because a (major) "news" outlet publishes it. I ate eggs for breakfast. That's truth / fact. It's not news. 2) A common and agreed upon standard definition of journalism / journalist. Again, working for a "news" outlet does not make you a jour…

I claim that we don't. I mean, it's way too ambitious goal to set universal definitions like this, and this is not the point anyway.

> 2. definition of journalism / journalist

Whoever who likes to be called one. This is the silliest proposition, I don't care the slightest of what do you tell a girl when she asks what do you do for money, usually I don't even care who you are at all, I just care if reading stuff on your resource adds value to my life. It's not a honorary title, for goddamn sake, you are not (or rather, unfortunately, you should be not) entitled to anything because you "are a journalist". I care only for what I read, and you (a news portal/journal or a person working for such an entity) mostly care about if what you publish brings you money, and maybe for some artistic matters that make you believe it's your "purpose" or whatever.

So: maybe possible, but not useful.

> 3. full disclosure about what is news (objective) and what is op-ed

Useful, but absolutely impossible. I find a way to publish a story about unicorns fighting dragons in the Singapore and call it news, because I'm fucking Salvador Dali and you won't do a thing about it. And if the country we live in makes it possible to sue me for that, then it's the worst form of censorship possible and basically it's just a shitty country.

> 1.definition of news

Given the 2 and 3, and the fact that your wife or your local farmer might care that you ate eggs for breakfast: both impossible, not useful and yet already solved somehow. Readers eventually buy what they feel (maybe just because of marketing, but still) adds value to their lives (and part of it is news, defined as "facts being of interest to the specific person"). Writers (journalists, if you will) eventually are somewhat forced to write stuff that people will buy, and since some potential users are interested in "news" (i.e. basic facts w/o much of an interpretation being of interest for them), there is an incentive to make such content. So, basically it's THE job of a journalist (defined as "any content maker at all") to find out what is interesting to a specific audience (both facts and op-ed pieces and stories about unicorns) and make it.

So, defining what is the news for your audience is difficult and yet, honestly, I think "journalists" are pretty proficient in finding out what that is, because, well, market economy. The problem with making quality content is not that nobody knows what people want, there just is too little incentive to make quality content, because you only care about larger audience, and the way to sell to larger audience is basically just marketing. At some point, it doesn't even matter that much what you write as long as enough people recognize you as "the source of the news".

After all, I only want to be notified about stuff I actually care about, it may be something that happens once in a few months, plus maybe some very specific stats every day, plus some "op-ed" stuff that is mostly written by actual professionals in their actual industries (which obviously pretty much never can be "professional journalists", simply by definition). In short, what I (and most people) want is expensive to make, and after you make it, you will find hard time selling it to us.

TL;DR: "they" make shitty things, because "we" buy shitty things, and there's no way around it, no matter how hard you try to "define" anything.

P.S.: when I say "buy" I don't necessarily mean literally buying, it may be viewing ads or whatever form of monetization the resource makes up.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#113
Doesn’t slower, better news conflict with how news is primarily funded today i.e. advertising? Tabloid news has existed much longer than I’ve been alive, and their style (attention-grabbing, exaggerated titles) matches the kinds of ads they display. A newspaper on a slower circulation cycle would need to attract advertisers that market on similar cycle if the newspaper is dependent on ad revenue (e.g. month-long offers).

A subscription-only / patron-only news service makes sense for the typical customer of a Bloomberg terminal, but what about everyone else? Do they just pay for headlines or three-sentence summaries?

You might say that most people don’t need that frequency of news, and for most topics I would agree. However, there are topics like sports that create news on such a frequent basis, and topics like politics where one could argue that being accurately informed in a timely manner is a responsibility and a necessity for a well-functioning democracy.

Tl;dr I don’t think you can separate the news from the manner in which it is funded, and the issues in quality and business-viability that we’ve heard a lot about is evidence for it.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#116
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what you wrote addressed the point of the comment you were responding to, which is that it's hard get people to be informed about the news if they just don't care. I'm not arguing that what you said is inherently wrong, it just doesn't have anything to do with the question at hand. The OP wrote that, "You can send the best art / math / business professor to a school, but if the students are not interested in…

The best proxy for "interest in politics", specifically, would seem to be voter turnout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... That data shows only modest changes since 1940, and no discernible decline in the last decade or so. If anything, turnout was lower in the 80s and 90s, slightly higher in the 60s.

[deleted]

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#117
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what you wrote addressed the point of the comment you were responding to, which is that it's hard get people to be informed about the news if they just don't care. I'm not arguing that what you said is inherently wrong, it just doesn't have anything to do with the question at hand. The OP wrote that, "You can send the best art / math / business professor to a school, but if the students are not interested in…

The best proxy for "interest in politics", specifically, would seem to be voter turnout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... That data shows only modest changes since 1940, and no discernible decline in the last decade or so. If anything, turnout was lower in the 80s and 90s, slightly higher in the 60s.

I feel like I understand what you're getting at with that data as it pertains to "interest in politics" at a general level, but I'm not sure how you intend to use that data in this specific conversation. OP and I are wondering how we get the general populous to invest quality time in educating themselves about the news/politics, subjects many people don't care about. How does the data you provided correlate with that conversation?

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#118
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sunlight is the best disinfectant, after all. So, I had never heard this phrase until maybe a year or so ago. Now it seems like (on this site particularly) someone parrots this exact sentence in any thread at all related to news and/or social media. Where is this coming from? Especially since it is... Emphatically untrue. It's just another one of those turns of phrase that asks you to believe it purely because it's…

You mean literally, sunlight is not a disinfectant? (false, https://www.cdc.gov/safewater/solardisinfection.html ) Or it's not the best? (true, but the phrase is not meant literally). Or that the figurative meaning is wrong - that "shining a light" on shady or immoral acts and behaviors is not "the best" for some sense of that word, and there are better options? https://sunlightfoundation.com/2009/05/26/brandeis-and-…

If anyone wants an overcompressed tl;dr of the last link, the author of the quote was a "militant crusader for social justice" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Brandeis).

I've felt somewhat gobsmacked seeing free speech go from being seen as more left than right to the opposite in recent years.

Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News

#119

I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it. I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me a…

At the risk of sounding glib, your presence on this site would seem to imply that you've not, in fact, stopped reading the news.

I was just about to make that comment.

Anyone on Hacker News, has not "stopped reading the news".

Maybe they stopped looking at the FOX news website? Or maybe they stopped looking at the CNN website? Or what have you. But they consume a lot of news every day. The reality is that a very large percentage of the front page of HN is political type stuff:

"US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums"

Or stuff intended to trigger discussions of political type stuff:

"Big Tech Helps China Censor People"

etc, etc etc.

There is a lot of negative, outrage focused, news on HN.

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