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Re: No More Stories

#31

Post by skybrian »

I'm a fan of data journalism too, but not everything can be done that way, and social sciences have lots of problems.

In particular, surveys are a cursed instrument. You aren't allowed to know what people were thinking when they filled out the survey a certain way.

I think there might be interesting ways to combine these. As part of doing a survey, maybe pick a few people at random and interview them to find out where they're coming from and why they answered the survey a certain way?

Re: No More Stories

#32

Post by Mezzie »

alexfromapex wrote: post #2

I would really appreciate a "news" site that just cited verifiable facts and maybe showed data trends but didn't try to make any conclusions for me

I work in political communications, so I'll throw a few US resources here. Unfortunately, because the media IS unreliable, doing this requires going to primary sources and a lot of time as well as a very defined idea of what you care about. There's nowhere that will bundle up the 'most important' things for you, but if you're willing to drink from the firehose:

- https://www.govtrack.us/

- Your local and state websites (if they don't suck, this is highly variable). Some allow for things like RSS feeds of bill updates if you'd like to track certain things

- https://ballotpedia.org/ is an encyclopedia that, while slow on the news side, had a lot of structural supporting information so you can look up things like how ballot measures work. So good for fact checking basic government facts.

- https://www.congress.gov/ - The LoC also collects and archives data on Congressional actions

- https://www.senate.gov/legislative/HowTo/how_to_votes.htm and the Congressional Register

- Wire services and things like AP + Reuters are good triggers/trip wires to go check on your own. So they tell you about a story, and you don't read their version, you just go look up whatever it is on one of the sources above.

That's what I end up doing, and it's time-consuming and janky. I hate it, but I've also been a professional fact-checker and do so occasionally on news articles and I am not pleased with what I find, so.

Re: No More Stories

#33

Post by nerdponx »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #21

Problems that people have with journalism are always misplaced IMO. It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear. Quite to the contrary, most journalists I've met and talked to (largely in print media) have journalistic standards and generally want to do the right thing by their readers. But…

I have come to believe that people don't want it as much as they are just generally susceptible to it. The "news" has figured out how to become a supernormal stimulus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

Re: No More Stories

#34

Post by WaitWaitWha »

> What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated set of ongoing collections of consensus.

This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various facets on a topic is good. Consensus breeds complacency, avoids change, and the meek-but-correct get crushed.

Let's teach our children how to identify opinion and compare opinions for reasonableness.

Re: No More Stories

#35

Post by carabiner »

coldpie wrote: post #23
thomascgalvin wrote: post #3

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, n…

The ad-based business model is probably the single largest contributor to bad outcomes in our time.

Go for news sources that are less reliant on ads for revenue, and more on subscriptions. That would be the Financial Times.

Re: No More Stories

#36

Post by gpm »

I'm working on something similar to the "tracker for every issue of public concern" idea that OP suggests at the end. A news site that doesn't write articles. Instead just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.

It's not released yet, and I just talked about it publicly for the first time in another HN comment a few days ago [1]. There I asked people to email me if they were interested in being notified when I had an MVP ready, and I had a great response (33 emails, for context the comment itself only got 46 upvotes), so I guess I'll do the same here. Email is in my profile, sorry for the blatant self promotion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=29552009

Re: No More Stories

#37

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #21

Problems that people have with journalism are always misplaced IMO. It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear. Quite to the contrary, most journalists I've met and talked to (largely in print media) have journalistic standards and generally want to do the right thing by their readers. But…

> It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear.

Hard to believe that someone could be this naive. Even 50 [ EDIT: more like 40 ] years ago, Paul Weller of the Jam sang, in relation to this precise issue:

    Does the public want what the public gets?
    Or does the public get what the public wants?
It's not easy to answer this question definitively, and seems unwise to pretend that this is a settled matter.

Re: No More Stories

#38

Post by darawk »

nerdponx wrote: post #33
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #21

Problems that people have with journalism are always misplaced IMO. It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear. Quite to the contrary, most journalists I've met and talked to (largely in print media) have journalistic standards and generally want to do the right thing by their readers. But…

I have come to believe that people don't want it as much as they are just generally susceptible to it. The "news" has figured out how to become a supernormal stimulus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

I think this point is sort of the fundamental contradiction of modernity, and it underlies many of our disagreements and problems. Succinctly, it's the non-unitary nature of preference.

I want to eat the cookie and I want to be thin. The fact that I eat the cookie does not actually mean that I want the cookie "more" than I want to be thin. It just means that preference functions are not consistent over time. My preference over the next 5 minutes is not the same as my preference for what to do with the collection of all of my 5 minutes over the course of my life.

You can prove this with a simple thought experiment. Almost everyone on earth has some vice or bad habit that they'd like to break if they could, or some better behavior they'd like to do if they could. What that means is that for those people, if they could take a side-effect free pill to change their brain to behave in that way, they would. If that's true, it's clear that the consistency of preferences is falsified.

Once you accept this, I think it recasts how we ought to think about technology, and social architecture. The implications of this are that, probably in general, we want to allow people to architect their environment to conform to their longer term executive preferences, rather than imposing an environment tailored to their shorter term instinctual ones.

Notably this does not mean imposing this environment on them. If people want to read clickbait they should be allowed to. But I think most people, if they had a "filter clickbait bullshit journalism from my life" button, they would press that button. Those same people (myself included), will also happily click on a perfectly tailored to my hot buttons headline. This is not a contradiction, and people shouldn't be shamed for it.

The promise of technology in this domain is to engage executive preferences by providing intentional, tailored environments for people. If you can give me the option not to be exposed to click bait, i'll take it. If you can give me the option not to be exposed to sugary snacks, i'll take that too. I'm hopeful that technology and media will start to move in this direction, because I think it'd be a really significant improvement.

Re: No More Stories

#39

Post by debacle »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #21

Problems that people have with journalism are always misplaced IMO. It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear. Quite to the contrary, most journalists I've met and talked to (largely in print media) have journalistic standards and generally want to do the right thing by their readers. But…

I advocate on grassroots political issues locally. There is a special interest group that has much more sway than the general public is aware over local policy decisions (to the extent that they head two local, theoretically competing political parties). In the last 12 months, I have brought this up at least a dozen times in media interviews, letters to the editor, etc.

It has gotten nearly no media attention. Eventually I just asked one of the interviewers why this aspect of our advocacy was getting no coverage, and she plainly stated that her editors would not publish this information, because they are part of this special interest group.

Take this and scale it nationally. Our news media does not serve its stated purpose. It is simply another mechanism for control.

There has never been a time in history where the news media has been a bastion of unbiased, informed reporting.

Re: No More Stories

#40

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Mezzie wrote: post #30
kiba wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is an informed electorate by definition a group of people who sat through a series of free college level lecture taught by an expert virologist? Even then, I found an error or two because I did exhaustive surface level fact checking. Or is it about the public being informed of accurate surface level facts and big picture views?

This also ignores that there are multiple perspectives to being 'informed'. For example, as someone who's studied online communication and social computing at the graduate level, my main disagreement with a lot of policy decisions isn't due to my disagreement with scientists, but rather because I think that the policy decisions made are pouring gasoline on our infosphere problems. So am I not informed because I don't…

> I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time investment to be informed is too much to put on the average citizen.

Entirely reasonable, and also universally accepted in many domains. When it comes to figuring out how we next put someone on the moon, nobody thinks that an informed electorate is an important part of the process. We just generally keep quiet and let "them" get on with it.

The difficulties start when there is an issue (such as a pandemic) about which huge numbers of people are neither informed nor will they shut up.

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