I cancelled the subscription because I just couldn't connect its stories ever. such was their choices. Not just the subjects and how the stories were from physically so far that I felt it was an exercise in compulsion on my part. I wasn't a fan of the writing style either. Besides, at some point it started to feel like news and journalism were not centre stage, being "delayed" and different were.
Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
81–90 of 225 posts
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#82One 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…
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-de…
> a need for immediate reporting
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#83I'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?
Not yet, but I'll see if I can publish the basics for it this week.
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#84the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them. i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better info…
that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.
What would you need to start such a project?
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#85One 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…
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If it had been a lab leak, how would that change the behaviors that everyday people would have had to take? The social distancing, masking, handwashing, quarantining would have all been identical.
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#86One 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…
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-de…
> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?
Yes.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#87Was a long term subscriber, now just a podcast listener: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/delayed-gratification-...
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#88It 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…
15 years after making the decision, while working for a major news outlet, to no longer read “the news,” I can pretty confidently say: if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway. Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
I have seen people who don't follow news confidently say fairly absurd things. They tend to assume things are kind of like they were those 15 years ago and don't want to believe a party of or a country or a situation could have change in the meantime.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
#89One 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…
This is not exactly a new criticism. See e.g. Fisk's complaint from decades ago r.e. "US Officials Say" https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
How can we measure if things are worse now? Potentially asking/training an LLM on news stories from different eras might be a fairer comparison than human intelligence at this point.
Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
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