4 ms·

Wake up: News doesn't work

13 points by PretzelFisch 10y ago

PretzelFisch 10y ago
Is this even a Technology issue or just the journalist business model resetting to a point where their voice could reach anyone that can read and competition was fierce. To me it seems like we have reverted back to the yellow press.
- bonobo3000 10y ago
  Its both. Now news is mostly consumed online, and everyone is competing for eyeballs. I think technology exacerbates the problem - earlier a newspaper could have a bunch of eyeball grabbing headlines, AND real, informative, boring content in the later pages (or a mix). Now only the eyeball grabbing content gets shared and seen. It is driven by the same competition, but with article-level tracking rather than newspaper sales, the problem got worse. I don't know how to fix it either, but I agree with the author that its a huge problem. News and entertainment are basically the same thing now.
- imglorp 10y ago
  It's more like Aldous Huxley: give the people the sweet stimulation they want and they'll both ask for more and also ignore more important problems.
Cypher 10y ago
The only question this post raises for myself is: why is this in MY news feed? its not interesting, its not news. I gave up facebook in 2009 and I don't care at all for the Zukerman empire.
- gavinpc 10y ago
  Seriously. I also quit Facebook many years ago, and—based on regular posts here—the extent to which apparently intelligent people confound Facebook with "the world" is troubling. edit: Yes, I'm confounding HN with "the world" in some sense.
danso 10y ago
What does the headline, "News doesn't work", have to do with the actual topic: Facebook's Trending Stories sucks (whether it's human-curated or completely by algorithm). Or is this supposed to be a meta-joke about how news headlines often don't deliver (which I would agree with)? edit: to be fair, Winer seems to be arguing that tech companies can't solve the news problem, so newsmakers (or those affiliated with civic improvement) need to wake up: > We don't have anything remotely like the answer to how news works in the age of the Internet. We're running around in circles, confused, ineffective, and all the while we need a good news system. Evidence: the way we're making political decisions. Also: we're going in reverse on race equity. I guess I just see this as a very, very hard problem. Winer lambasts the media for living too much on the adage, "if it bleeds, it leads": > Get informed. You can't. All you get is sensation. Feelings. Pushes in this primal direction or another. Fear dominates. The people who do what we call news know how this works and they make fear. And that's a rush and it feels good, but what about when you really just want to know what's happening? But what's fear-mongering to one person is often vital information to another. The current police-involved-shootings controversy being the prime example. And news and tech companies face a similar problem -- they often have to create deliverables that users didn't know they needed/wanted.
Joeri 10y ago
Is it really news that news is not informative? To get informed, read a book. To get the latest gossip, read the news. By definition news cannot be proportional, because proportional reporting of almost any story is 99% history and 1% current events.
- reidacdc 10y ago
  This is huge, and if you're interested in an issue, these days it's often not all that difficult. The conceit that you can "get informed" by just reading current news is just plain false, and probably has been for as long as there have been newspapers. These days, we have Wikipedia and the websites of trade journals and magazines of many stripes, and lots of good bloggers, where you can go for backgrounders on a lot of topics which are relevant to public policy. There's often bias, but it's easy to read past that -- read a couple of essays from various viewpoints, read a few other essays by the same authors to get a sense of their level of hysteria, and hey presto, you've got a deeper understanding. Of course, you do have to put in the time, and you won't be able to do it for every trending topic, but you can do a hell of a lot better than all the news sites put together.
arjie 10y ago
Jesus Christ. Get it together, man. There's no need to be so shrill. "we need to get moving whether the tech industry is ready or not". Wtf does this even mean? Like the tech industry needs to be ready for you to do better news story picking. Just go and do it, it doesn't need an industry wide shift in order for you to do it. Bizarre. Some things don't need a movement. For me, the WSJ covers my news needs adequately. I switched from the NYT but they're both somewhat equivalent in terms of news I'm interested in.
njloof 10y ago
I was hoping he was going somewhere much more interesting: how can I reliably detect whether the news I am reading is truthful? We all have to make that assessment every day if we are at all mindful as news consumers. And we do so in part by examining the source of the news, the same story as presented in other media, and ultimately in how the event is recorded in the history books. Being able to do this (including transcending the language barrier -- many unique perspectives on current events exist only in certain languages) would greatly improve our ability to evaluate the news. And as we have all learned, the news is what drives us to constructive or destructive action, even to the point of waging war, throughout history.
advertising 10y ago
What other sites do people here browse for more curated news? Like HackerNews but for non-tech/other topics.
pwinnski 10y ago
He has previously written about his belief that tech more or less owns news distribution[0], which seems to be important background for his views in this piece. [0] http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html
CM30 10y ago
Have to be honest, I expected an article about the issues facing newspapers and media outlets, not trending news on Facebook. Something about how hard it is to monetise news, or an article about the ever increasing issues of inaccuracy and politicial bias. That said, it's depressing how Facebook's trending news list is basically the equivalent to those 'related' articles you see at the bottom of some news sites. The ones which have a ton of low quality blogspam without any real substance behind the headline.

13 points by PretzelFisch 10y ago

Is this even a Technology issue or just the journalist business model resetting to a point where their voice could reach anyone that can read and competition was fierce. To me it seems like we have reverted back to the yellow press.

bonobo3000 10y ago
Its both. Now news is mostly consumed online, and everyone is competing for eyeballs. I think technology exacerbates the problem - earlier a newspaper could have a bunch of eyeball grabbing headlines, AND real, informative, boring content in the later pages (or a mix). Now only the eyeball grabbing content gets shared and seen. It is driven by the same competition, but with article-level tracking rather than newspaper sales, the problem got worse. I don't know how to fix it either, but I agree with the author that its a huge problem. News and entertainment are basically the same thing now.
imglorp 10y ago
It's more like Aldous Huxley: give the people the sweet stimulation they want and they'll both ask for more and also ignore more important problems.

Cypher 10y ago

The only question this post raises for myself is: why is this in MY news feed? its not interesting, its not news. I gave up facebook in 2009 and I don't care at all for the Zukerman empire.

gavinpc 10y ago
Seriously. I also quit Facebook many years ago, and—based on regular posts here—the extent to which apparently intelligent people confound Facebook with "the world" is troubling. edit: Yes, I'm confounding HN with "the world" in some sense.

danso 10y ago

What does the headline, "News doesn't work", have to do with the actual topic: Facebook's Trending Stories sucks (whether it's human-curated or completely by algorithm). Or is this supposed to be a meta-joke about how news headlines often don't deliver (which I would agree with)? edit: to be fair, Winer seems to be arguing that tech companies can't solve the news problem, so newsmakers (or those affiliated with civic improvement) need to wake up: > We don't have anything remotely like the answer to how news works in the age of the Internet. We're running around in circles, confused, ineffective, and all the while we need a good news system. Evidence: the way we're making political decisions. Also: we're going in reverse on race equity. I guess I just see this as a very, very hard problem. Winer lambasts the media for living too much on the adage, "if it bleeds, it leads": > Get informed. You can't. All you get is sensation. Feelings. Pushes in this primal direction or another. Fear dominates. The people who do what we call news know how this works and they make fear. And that's a rush and it feels good, but what about when you really just want to know what's happening? But what's fear-mongering to one person is often vital information to another. The current police-involved-shootings controversy being the prime example. And news and tech companies face a similar problem -- they often have to create deliverables that users didn't know they needed/wanted.

Joeri 10y ago

Is it really news that news is not informative? To get informed, read a book. To get the latest gossip, read the news. By definition news cannot be proportional, because proportional reporting of almost any story is 99% history and 1% current events.

reidacdc 10y ago
This is huge, and if you're interested in an issue, these days it's often not all that difficult. The conceit that you can "get informed" by just reading current news is just plain false, and probably has been for as long as there have been newspapers. These days, we have Wikipedia and the websites of trade journals and magazines of many stripes, and lots of good bloggers, where you can go for backgrounders on a lot of topics which are relevant to public policy. There's often bias, but it's easy to read past that -- read a couple of essays from various viewpoints, read a few other essays by the same authors to get a sense of their level of hysteria, and hey presto, you've got a deeper understanding. Of course, you do have to put in the time, and you won't be able to do it for every trending topic, but you can do a hell of a lot better than all the news sites put together.

arjie 10y ago

Jesus Christ. Get it together, man. There's no need to be so shrill. "we need to get moving whether the tech industry is ready or not". Wtf does this even mean? Like the tech industry needs to be ready for you to do better news story picking. Just go and do it, it doesn't need an industry wide shift in order for you to do it. Bizarre. Some things don't need a movement. For me, the WSJ covers my news needs adequately. I switched from the NYT but they're both somewhat equivalent in terms of news I'm interested in.

njloof 10y ago

I was hoping he was going somewhere much more interesting: how can I reliably detect whether the news I am reading is truthful? We all have to make that assessment every day if we are at all mindful as news consumers. And we do so in part by examining the source of the news, the same story as presented in other media, and ultimately in how the event is recorded in the history books. Being able to do this (including transcending the language barrier -- many unique perspectives on current events exist only in certain languages) would greatly improve our ability to evaluate the news. And as we have all learned, the news is what drives us to constructive or destructive action, even to the point of waging war, throughout history.

advertising 10y ago

What other sites do people here browse for more curated news? Like HackerNews but for non-tech/other topics.

pwinnski 10y ago

He has previously written about his belief that tech more or less owns news distribution[0], which seems to be important background for his views in this piece. [0] http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html

CM30 10y ago

Have to be honest, I expected an article about the issues facing newspapers and media outlets, not trending news on Facebook. Something about how hard it is to monetise news, or an article about the ever increasing issues of inaccuracy and politicial bias. That said, it's depressing how Facebook's trending news list is basically the equivalent to those 'related' articles you see at the bottom of some news sites. The ones which have a ton of low quality blogspam without any real substance behind the headline.