It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people.
We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.
How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Ha…
> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push…
I understand and appreciate your point, but takes like brexit are nuanced. They might be overall bad, but they will always have some benefits and in my opinion journalism (especially economic journalism) should explain those benefits even if the point is to show that they are more than cancelled out by the negatives. Without this kind of reporting this is exactly how the Overton window gets moved.
I think that when it comes to topics we can vote on, saying X is bad because media says it's totally bad is not really an informed opinion.
One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes…
In this spirit, I prefer to not read any online news, or daily newspaper, but the weekly Economist in print. It has higher quality writing than all the rest, has a built in capacitor buffer against high frequency low signal bullshit (noise) by virtue of being weekly, and contains all the information about the world that mattered in that time period. Zero engagement bait because it's an expensive subscription.
I haven't read or engaged in mainstream media in over 15 years now. I just pulled up the Economist website for fun to see what's on it. I see stories that have absolutely nothing to do with me or the country (e.g. an article gushing about how China managed to stop massively polluting one of their rivers. In what universe is that remotely relevant to me? Why is this the front page story?), I see the typical biased articles and bias in choosing what to report on, everything all biased politically the same way (of course, if you hold the same biases then you don't see the bias, it all just just looks normal/neutral/true to you), I see stories increasing the fear and hate in the world (China has a scary secretive shadowy maritime militia! Oil markets are scary right now! Be afraid!), there's absolutely nothing of interest to me. Guess I'll go another 15.
It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people. We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for…
Nassim Taleb has a note about this idea in one of his books. Essentially just pointing out how unimportant most news headlines are a few years out.
One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes…
I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known. I have often thought about with my friends who are "terminally online" that they would benefit from NOT being a town crier from times gone by. Many of my friends hate Twitter, hate Elon and hate social media, but because they have to be first to all the latest news, they remain locked…
I think proximity is a good measure, what different types of news do you need to know and will impact your decision making on different time scales? There's probably a very small amount of things I really need to know (practically) instantly, regional/national/continental/global news might be interesting to be summarized daily/weekly/monthly, but even then it will be different subsets where it affects me or is little more than trivia and will be forgotten quickly as I have little connection to it.
I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's "Fetch News" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that…
This sounds really interesting and something I'd love to try. Do you have more details on how someone else can utilise this?