by ycdxvjp on 1/9/24, 3:33 PM with 95 comments
by forinti on 1/9/24, 3:53 PM
Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new.
You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed.
The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.
by vlucas on 1/9/24, 4:04 PM
There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer/reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.
by NegativeLatency on 1/9/24, 3:52 PM
Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives.
Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.
by _fat_santa on 1/9/24, 4:37 PM
The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn't matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy. Again if you are in DC then it's an important issue but if you're the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally.
And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren't really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.
by seeknotfind on 1/9/24, 3:50 PM
Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.
by cratermoon on 1/9/24, 4:23 PM
News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2]
1. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/...
2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-s...
by incomingpain on 1/9/24, 5:43 PM
A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy.
In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.
But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.
>So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge.
We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.
by gooob on 1/9/24, 4:05 PM
by melagonster on 1/9/24, 4:17 PM
by amadeuspagel on 1/9/24, 4:05 PM
These are all TV/radio channels. Somehow newspaper brands work better on the web then TV brands.
by 6gvONxR4sf7o on 1/9/24, 3:50 PM
by kukkeliskuu on 1/9/24, 3:59 PM
Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around.
They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of "journalism" is easy to replace with AI.
Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don't see it disappearing, because the consumers of the "news" provide value to those who have an agenda to push.
by kikokikokiko on 1/9/24, 4:01 PM
by taeric on 1/9/24, 4:10 PM
Indeed, with the level of understanding and agency that most of us have, I'm struggling to see what an alternative would be.
by edflsafoiewq on 1/9/24, 4:10 PM
by lifeisstillgood on 1/9/24, 4:49 PM
I think there are three levels for looking after prod
- monitoring - modelling - machining
This applies here I think
Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model
What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it?
Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red?
Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs.
This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week.
News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator)
But Murrows news has been disaggregated.
The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well)
The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model
We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models.
We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work
Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions
What we need are great journalists.
by snakeyjake on 1/9/24, 4:14 PM
The top headlines on my version of Google News are:
* an update on Trump's trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses
* a story about France's new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France
* more trump trial
* more trump trial
* a piece on Age of Emprires
* whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer
* an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info
* news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I'm an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available
* crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess
Minimally important.
The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting.
Everything else is just information/misery/voyeurism pornography.
It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news.
That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.
by mikhael28 on 1/9/24, 6:25 PM
That's it - I could care less about anything else. Sometimes I read The Hill.
by DudeOpotomus on 1/9/24, 4:08 PM
When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters.
The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures.
Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it's profitable, all boundaries are lost.
The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It's all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.
by thisisauserid on 1/9/24, 3:47 PM
by soneca on 1/9/24, 3:52 PM
But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?
by drcongo on 1/9/24, 3:53 PM