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Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

slow-journalism.com

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Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#91

Post by TuringTest »

fyltr wrote: post #60
openasocket wrote: post #51

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…

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'?

Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them.

If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#92

Post by DrewADesign »

openasocket wrote: post #51

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 was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#93

Post by the_sleaze_ »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #24

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 found the Economist to be a liberal rag. I mean that respectfully, and it has been a number of years since I've bothered to pick one up so maybe it has changed. I know people who I respect that read every issue cover to cover.

A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.

I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#94

Post by Funes- »

openasocket wrote: post #51

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…

>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline

Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#96

Post by BeetleB »

openasocket wrote: post #51

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…

How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)

2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online

Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#97

Post by pzxc »

TuringTest wrote: post #91
fyltr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'? Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them. If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.

Exactly. As the saying goes, if one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not, it's not the job of the journalist to report both. It's the job of the journalist to look out the fucking window to see if it's really raining or not.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#98

Post by BeetleB »

munk-a wrote: post #61

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…

I used to be somewhat of a news junkie.

When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).

And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.

(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#99

Post by smoe »

watwut wrote: post #88
smoe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder, do those people you talk about also happen to avoid the other forms of journalism, such as investigative reporting, analysis, essays, documentaries, books, and long-form features in general?

Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.

Re: Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

#100

Post by jonathanlb »

abound wrote: post #8

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…

I ran a similar personal project where weekly I scraped a country's news stories across curated sources using Brave News API and used an LLM to dedupe and cluster stories. This got expensive fast, so I'm wondering what your approach is to keep costs down across what I imagine is a lot of volume, i.e., one months' worth of stories across several sources.
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