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Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

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Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#41

Post by ArnoVW »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #34
Georgelemental wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of the actual ideas being promulgated, Le Monde is approximately CP-level.

CP stands for child porn?

Classe Préparatoire. When you quit kindergarden and enter ‘real school’. Age 6

I guess it is meant as hyperbole, though I read NRC, Le Monde and NYT and can confirm that le Monde is the leading newspaper of France but it is not the newspaper it was. Mostly opinion and lifestyle, not a lot of investigative or even just in-depth journalism. Mostly preaching (some of it for causes I happen to agree with, but still)

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#42

Post by KPGv2 »

jll29 wrote: post #18

In Europe, The Economist and The Guardian are about the only serious in-depth sources left, at least for those that can read English.

Le Monde has an English edition. Die Welt has an English version, doesn't it? I'm only familiar with the German, but I could've sworn.

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#43

Post by thesuitonym »

berytos_storm wrote: post #10
SoftTalker wrote: post #3

Major newspapers and even local ones (if they still exist) have been so dumbed down in the past few decades. I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. Worse, news often seems to be written to elicit outrage or fear (probably because "engagement").

It’s admittedly been a long time since I looked at a local newspaper, but I do seem them occasionally. Kinda seems like the local ones are just the local news segment in text format. Fine, but I can read that on my phone or watch it on the TV with much more convenience. Maybe there’s some interesting stuff left in classified ads or whatnot, but a lot of that shit so on marketplace now.

I used to feel that way, but I've come back around to finding it easier to read the news in the actual paper. For once, I'm not going to get distracted by a text or email notification. But more importantly, there's no cookie notification to dismiss, there's no autoplay video ad that somehow got around my pihole and ublock origin, there's no subscription nag flyout, and I don't have to log in every time despite clicking on "Remember me."

Plus, there's the visual cue to those around me that I'm not just idly scrolling, I'm actually looking at something.

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#44

Post by KPGv2 »

bluGill wrote: post #35
TheMatten wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feels a little bit reductive, at least given that non-English news is precisely what big part of population is going to consume. There isn't even an unified market for news content given the language boundaries. Not to say there aren't many shallow, clickbait sources, but there're good ones as well.

The better educated somebody is, the more likely they are to have reasonably fluency in English. There are some great non-English sources out there, but English is the most read language by well educated people. Not saying there are not great news content in other languages. However English should be expected to dominate over the whole world.

This is a bizarre take. Newspapers, even really good ones, generally don't target international readers. They target their home country's readers. How many Englishmen are interested in the machinations of unions in Paris? How many Frenchmen?

Obviously the best coverage will be in the country's majority language.

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#45

Post by thesuitonym »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #25
SoftTalker wrote: post #3

Major newspapers and even local ones (if they still exist) have been so dumbed down in the past few decades. I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. Worse, news often seems to be written to elicit outrage or fear (probably because "engagement").

> I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. I would have imagined they would have been targeting less than high school literacy since their inception. At least the ones intended to be read by the masses. I'd actually expect that they target somewhere in the 4th-6th grade literacy range.

It used to be a pretty well-known guideline that any writing for general consumption should be at no higher than an 8th grade level.

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#46

Post by cjs_ac »

newspaper1 wrote: post #19

How about making teenagers seek out independent media? We've seen the results of people being raised reading MSM newspapers and it's not pretty. Propaganda packaged as "serious news", is some of the most dangerous media that exists.

> Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.

They taught the teenagers how to question and interrogate the claims presented in the newspapers, which is far more effective than blindly branding 'MSM newspapers' as propaganda. (The study was conducted in France; are you sure that conventional French newspapers are propaganda of any inclination?)

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#47

Post by thesuitonym »

jmspamerton wrote: post #17

Again, what does this have to do with hacker news. This isn't reddit.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Re: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

#48

Post by bityard »

Ha. Not knowing any better, I took a class in high school that turned out to be actually reading the daily newspaper and writing a one-page report _every single day_ about international issues that literally never impacted our day-to-day lives in rural Podunk, USA.

It was the most boring and soul-crushing class I've ever taken in my life. After that remote learning course about Quality Assurance in college, of course.

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