AMEN! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg5wkZ-dJXA minute 4:30
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
61–70 of 245 posts
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#62Most of those reasons seem exaggerated, except one: News wastes time. It's just to easy and effortless to click on news stories and bam - there goes 45 minutes of time. Does anyone know a good program that blocks you from e.g. wasting more than 25 minutes reading news each day? Browser tools are too easy to bypass to be effective. (Editing the hosts file works, but then you can't visit those sites at all.)
Editing the hosts file works, but then you can't visit those sites at all.
Consider doing that for a week (or however long) and see if your habit changes. I've found that sense of effortlessness declines after such a break.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#63Heroin is supposed to make you happy, if that's the goal. Being an ignorant member of society is a recipe for personal and societal disaster.
How many people have taken the time to define news? Not in terms of what makes one thing more interesting than others, but at the simplest level: what is news?
You can't ask for more substance until you define what the substance you are after is. Once you've defined it, you will see solutions where you haven't before.
After that, ask yourself if the information sources you've historically related to as news media are in fact news sources or public relations sources.
More third-party aggregators and readers are only going to disappoint the market because they don't do anything about the underlying news problems.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be opening myself up to some flak here but I think it is generally accepted that the BBC is one of, if not the, least biased news source (Excepting climate change.) Some of my friends swear by Al-Jazeera for non Middle-East news
Al Jazeera and BBC are both solidly on the left. I'm not disputing the quality of their reporting or the value of exposing oneself to their reporting, but you're fooling yourself if you think they're neutral.
I agree that the organisations are on the left but as far as I can see (for the BBC, do not know al-jazeera) they do not let their organisational bias affect their reporting as much as other organisations.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#65Reading news articles that are informative can be thought provoking and improve my understanding of people and the world around me. Over time, many smaller pieces of information can accrue into an understandable whole, providing context for future experiences and information. If you never end up understanding the information thrown at you, or consume garbage news, then yeah, it won't help. It's possible you need to ingest a lot of background material to really make sense of the news in a useful and non-helplessness-inducing way.
The news to me is incremental history, economics, and political science. I wouldn't watch low-content information like daily TV news, but that's not the only option.
That said, you don't have to do it all the time, because sometimes, in your topic of interest, nothing much happens for a while... The most I do on an actual daily basis is read the top three headlines on the BCC News site, just to check that nothing incredibly crazy happened. Oh, and read too much HN, but that stuff can be interesting... and I mostly read the comments...
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#66I stopped using Google Reader recently; this has had the side effect of making me read much less news and, thus, being less buzzed to write a scathing or snarky comment/reply.
I browse a few news sites once or twice a day, read the 1 or 2 news that look relevant to me, and that's it.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#67you do realize you are posting news right? on Hacker NEWS
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#68News programming should be pronounced noise. It's mostly gossip and tragedy and crap. We stopped watching it years ago.
My parents watch the news and talk about "staying informed" and "keeping up" with things. What exactly is newsworthy? You need to know about that apartment complex that caught fire or the shootout between drug dealers?
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#69There are some serious offenders who take the low and quick road when it comes to journalism but I have seen a swing of sorts in higher quality journalistic standards. While Fox News is considered the epitome of everything wrong with biased news, there are lot of smaller shows and websites that have a higher standard. Here in Australia while we have the likes of news.com.au (a joke and a half) we have other online news outlets in the form of Crikey! and the philanthropically funded long-form journalism website The Global Mail who put effort into their articles and don't misconstrue the facts to get more Facebook shares and readers.
Not all news is bad news. I see the likes of Facebook and Twitter are forms of news, both have their fair share of gossip and junk, but also have their share of information that we need to know; massacres, accidents, bank robberies and slaughter of innocents in countries that try and control their people and shield their actions from the rest of the world. Choose your news carefully, don't believe everything you read and always look further into things (there is more than meets the eye).
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
news.ycombinator.com Could, not, resist.
If you think that HN is neutral, need to know, or even concise, you're crazy. Though on the subject of neutrality, humans aren't neutral, so expecting their publications to be is itself insane.
The fact it's not neutral is probably why I'm coming back to it. I don't really keep track of general news, because they are very boring, and highly irreverent. (The only side I'm exposed about news is that people around me going nuts over what they heard in the news.)
What comes up on HN to me, is more entertaining, and somewhat more relevant (I do run across the things once in a while that I could apply to what I do at my work.)