How do you even find what book to read without reading articles about them? If people told you about them, how did they find them?
I Hate the News (2006)
91–100 of 192 posts
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#92The most ironic thing I think about this piece is that he claims not to have followed the news since he was 13 and has drawn this conclusion... Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions. Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further th…
Aaron was very precocious. I would expect that at 11 he was following the news a lot like an adult would.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#93Delayed Gratification magazine suits my time sched http://www.slow-journalism.com/
Quarterly that covers the news of the last 3mos after all the misinformation peddled by 24/7 news cycle has run it's course. I also like Stallman's political notes as they are brief and he has an interesting perspective sometimes
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#94I'm curious what sources others get their news from and how you "cut through the clutter" so to speak. Mine are: BostInno, Abnormal Returns (curates investing/VC/startup/economy links), selected webdev subreddits, hacker news. I imagine this is fairly typical for someone on HN, but maybe not.
Also, does anyone know of a long time horizon news company that primarily provides 3-5 year updates on large macro topics? Actually maybe that's just called "a book"
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a litt…
The site looks slick, but it doesn't have some features I'd expect and want from a news aggregation site. I can't find any way to search for news about specific topics, for example.
Ya, it's still an infant. We're adding tagging, but it will be a couple of weeks
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#96I stopped watching the news about a year ago. I have only benefited. My mood is much better (due to not constantly hearing about horrible goings on), and I have more free time.
I have not found that I am out of the loop on anything relevant to my life. I still follow blogs and news sites (and of course, Hacker News). And I still feel that I am aware of important world events such as what is going on in Brazil right now.
Knowledge is power, but useless knowledge is a waste of mental capacity.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#97Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so.
When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing.
The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#98He uses voting as an example. Which begs the question: why vote? If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside. No matter what, none of these people h…
>If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are)
[Citation Needed]
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#99I agree wholeheartedly. The news is no longer interesting and relevant to me, it's merely all the bad things happening all over the world.
i.e. the headline might be about a train crash on the other side of the world, rather than some good story that happened in my own country.
I spent two weeks above the Arctic Circle in September hiking and camping, with no access to the world [1]. When coming back along the road, my car radio was continually searching for a station, and it eventually locked onto one randomly. The first words I heard from "the world" after two weeks were "ISIS Threat".
It turned it off and didn't turn it back on for the rest of the 8 hour drive home.
[1] If you're curious, it looks like this http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway
Re: I Hate the News (2006)
#100I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…
I don't think you agree with Swartz at all. You used an article that explains why someone does not read the news to promote your news site. According to the article, Swartz wasn't looking for an alternative way to consume news: he decries the news industry as a whole. I'm all for self-promotion on HN when it's relevant, but Grasswire appears to be exactly the kind of thing Swartz would not be interested in.
If you were selling books or long-form journalism I could understand your post, but as it stands it's blatant self-promotion. And I say that as the founder of a news company.