141–150 of 468 posts
Journalists and news agencies begging for money, telling us how much we need them. I guess now the shoe is on the other foot things look a bit different. As they said to coal miners, your industry is a dinosaur, it's time to try something new. #learn2code
The internet has created a zero-cost distribution platform, and "news" platforms which exploit irrational emotional responses in order to further an agenda will always exist.
If quality news is gated by a paywall, there exists a cutoff with respect to salary beneath which quality news is inaccessible. Even if some could afford it and choose not to, there still exists an informational membrane between two classes of people. This system inherently couples poverty with less education. That is unacceptable! The playing field must be even for all, and the same knowledge should be accessible by all citizens who wish to participate politically.
There exists a concept in Game Theory called Perfect Information [0]. To quote Wikipedia, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred.
If we don't maintain a system which facilitates perfect information, then most people beneath this socioeconomic membrane will follow the path of least resistance and end up subscribing to free platforms which exist to exploit them. Remember, if the product is free...
And if we allow this to happen, then we create ideological chasms between socioeconomic classes, which leads to distrust and prevents cohesive inter-class political activity. This hurts the lower class the most, as they must rely on human resources more than financial resources in order to exact meaningful change within their lifetimes.
It may be that the only solution is a network of journalist cells and news organizations which are paid for by public donations, university funding, tax money, fundraising, and any and all ethical means of revenue collection which still allow the product itself to be free.
As most browsers of Hacker News are surely Open Source enthusiasts, it would be very beneficial to take the time to gain a deeper understanding of why you appreciate Open Source software, the benefits it has both to empower the individual and society as a whole, and what mechanisms must exist to ensure such a system continues to exist.
If you can identify these root concepts, you can then generalize them and try applying them to your understanding of the news distribution model and the future of journalism, and perhaps you might uncover new insights.
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> For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier. I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well? Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's…
Sadly non-US sources incur the bias of however said source feels about the US. I've seen the BBC home page highlight more random shootings than the actual US mainstream media. And in my experience they'll keep them on the front page longer than CNN when reporting on the same one. It could just be the page I'm being presented via cookie-stored history or whatever, but that seems unlikely as I hardly ever click on said…
Your personal bias, of course.
We see in this thread many people who condemn newspapers because they report differently than they themselves would, and then have the gall to call that "bias".
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It's better following individual journalists via twitter or whatever instead of the organization itself for quality content for subjects you like to read about. Personally, I use the main site just to scan headlines and see if there's anything interesting. Everyone's biased, but I don't think I'm more of an objective thinker than a trained journalist who's taken classes to study it and write about it specifically. I…
Maybe journalists should go out on their own via Patreon etc.?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxQaod7tWvYK_Naia54Gc...
It's garbage. Utter, complete garbage. I've been reading it daily online for the past week and it's 99% political opinion nonsense.
(I'm not referring to anti-Trump or anything, it's actually anti-opposition in Australia; for America it just seems to attack "the left").
"The impact on journalism has been clear. Just within the past week, we have seen over 1,000 planned layoffs at Gannett, BuzzFeed and HuffPost" I had never considered the click-bait outlet "HuffPost" as "quality journalism". "We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism." Well, paid journalism is not a guarantee either: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-r…
It's a real mix and that's my problem. I want to pay for something that's good. I don't need all the bullshit filler, and in fact seeing the bullshit filler makes me not want to pay at all because it's an insult to my time.
Besides that, what makes you think news is more accurate if its paid for ?
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Why BuzzFeed chose to use the same brand to cover such different sites is beyond me. Every time a quality article is linked here, almost without fail there is someone who will comment along the lines of "BuzzFeed is trash, I'm not clicking that" I don't blame them. It's not their fault that the news site decided to share their name with a trash clickbait site.
Isn't it precisely their fault for choosing that name and branding? They are not blameless for the title they chose.
It is the fault of BuzzFeed News, yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly non-US sources incur the bias of however said source feels about the US. I've seen the BBC home page highlight more random shootings than the actual US mainstream media. And in my experience they'll keep them on the front page longer than CNN when reporting on the same one. It could just be the page I'm being presented via cookie-stored history or whatever, but that seems unlikely as I hardly ever click on said…
And what makes you so sure that the BBC's handling of those stories isn't the correct one? Your personal bias, of course. We see in this thread many people who condemn newspapers because they report differently than they themselves would, and then have the gall to call that "bias".