7 ms·

Why are newspapers so horrible? My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local

Why are newspapers so horrible? My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember what I'd read, and years later it didn't matter. I've never gained any lasting knowledge from the news. Very little has changed. News has been, and is, nearly worthless.

dazc 8y ago
Our local paper was the same but with dedicated days for certain types of ad. Thursday was jobs day, Friday was property day, etc. Pre-internet days, Thursday was always a day you had to buy early if you were in the market for a new job - after 3pm it would be hard to find anywhere with a copy left to buy.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  And this is the rare case where advertising works as it should - connects people offering something with people who actually, actively want that something.
some_random 8y ago
The news is horrible because journalists are almost never experts on whatever they're writing about, so whenever they write about something that might actually still have meaning in three weeks, they fuck it up.
- ape4 8y ago
  They aren't experts at tech but are the best a local news, politics, crime, etc
  - CM30 8y ago
    Not sure I'd agree with that. I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert. It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime. (There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).
    - dctoedt 8y ago
      > I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online [1], at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert [2]. [1] Not sure about that — those "better sources online" tend to be the very journalists whom we're discussing, working for local media outlets. [2] Assumes facts not in evidence — vetting of someone else's expertise is a non-trivial challenge, one that most of us neither want to do nor have the time to spend doing it.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        [1] - better sources on-line are usually first-hand reports and the opinions of the "protagonists" of a new story. [2] - well, a lot of people don't want to spend time vetting their sources, but this should prompt them to assign very low confidence to the things they read; of course, they frequently don't, which is why they need to be reminded that when they repeat what they read, they're most likely repeating bullshit.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      So basically you don't need newspapers if you have all the qualifications to be your own journalist?
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      > there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert What if someone did that for you, as a full-time professional job, and did it both online and offline? What if they actually spoke directly to the participants, from senators to the bus driver in the crash to the head of safety at the regulatory agency; and what if they interviewed leading experts and engineers; and read the court filings, etc. What if they made it their life's work to become expert in that kind of research? That might be worth a few bucks a day. And it would be far more valuable than idle commentary from bloggers and commenters.
Rjevski 8y ago
This model wasn't that bad. Given this was print, the ads were somehow vetted - chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola) wouldn't exist, because even the shittiest of newspapers would say "What is this bullshit?" and put a stop to that. Even the people at the printing plant would be perplexed if they had to print that shit. Going further, even the business model of chumboxes wouldn't exist - back in the days of print, ads were mostly used to sell a product; where as the point of chumboxes is to drive more eyeballs to other sites where they can look at other ads; the content itself is worthless. Nowadays, ads are delivered programmatically from a third-party, which means the newspaper has no way to even know what garbage is going to be displayed to their readers. This is the real problem.
- russellbeattie 8y ago
  I have my Pi-hole set up to filter chumboxes. My feelings towards those companies verge on unadulterated hatred and anger. If I ever meet an employee of one of those companies in real life, I'm honestly afraid of what I might do.
howard941 8y ago
Disagree. Value depends on the newspaper and the reader in question. My wife loved the ad-heavy Sunday paper inserts. I grew up reading the NYT on the subway and that (mis)set my expectations for everything else I took later (Space Coast Today for ex., the testbed of the detestable "Factoid" news). Yesterday's two threads on the death of local reporting fill in a lot of what both of us left out.
xae342 8y ago
Agreed on news being nearly worthless, 99% of articles are filler and could just be summarized in a couple of sentences if not the title. In fact the title of most articles tells you everything.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Unless they lie to you in the title and debunk that lie in the middle of the article - which they damn well know most people won't read.
jccalhoun 8y ago
I agree. The thing that most conversations on how to get people to pay for news miss out on the most important element: the news has to be worth paying for. When I was in grad school a few years ago the college had a program to encourage newspaper readership that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. I can't imagine ever subscribing to a newspaper now. There was so much in a newspaper that I have zero interest in or even if I did I would look somewhere else than dead trees (sports, stocks, fashion, travel, horoscopes, advice columns). I grew up in a rural area and even in the local paper most of what was original, non-syndicated content was simply stating facts: the high school basketball team won/lost, there was a wreck, obituaries, births, weddings.
- pvg 8y ago
  that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Hard to call it "idle cynicism and incuriosity" if you know that most of what's in the news is at best a surface-level coverage, most likely bullshit, and also completely inconsequential for anything. News is great as a social object - you and me both read some reporting about an event at the same time, so when we meet at a bar, we have something to talk about. It's really bad if you're trying to learn accurate information about the world.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      As a general statement this seems plainly false. Just go to the Pulitzer site, to the last year's winners, skip to the "investigative journalism" category, and click around the finalists and back year over year. Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication. But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.
snow_cone 8y ago
It gave you something to talk about and helped form your view of the world didn't it?
rhizome 8y ago
I thought this was going to be about the mechanics of the newspaper industry and how much the money game has changed in the last 40 years (read: Craigslist), but all in all it sounds like you just don't like newspapers.

dazc 8y ago

Our local paper was the same but with dedicated days for certain types of ad. Thursday was jobs day, Friday was property day, etc. Pre-internet days, Thursday was always a day you had to buy early if you were in the market for a new job - after 3pm it would be hard to find anywhere with a copy left to buy.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
And this is the rare case where advertising works as it should - connects people offering something with people who actually, actively want that something.

some_random 8y ago

The news is horrible because journalists are almost never experts on whatever they're writing about, so whenever they write about something that might actually still have meaning in three weeks, they fuck it up.

ape4 8y ago
They aren't experts at tech but are the best a local news, politics, crime, etc
- CM30 8y ago
  Not sure I'd agree with that. I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert. It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime. (There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).
  - dctoedt 8y ago
    > I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online [1], at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert [2]. [1] Not sure about that — those "better sources online" tend to be the very journalists whom we're discussing, working for local media outlets. [2] Assumes facts not in evidence — vetting of someone else's expertise is a non-trivial challenge, one that most of us neither want to do nor have the time to spend doing it.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      [1] - better sources on-line are usually first-hand reports and the opinions of the "protagonists" of a new story. [2] - well, a lot of people don't want to spend time vetting their sources, but this should prompt them to assign very low confidence to the things they read; of course, they frequently don't, which is why they need to be reminded that when they repeat what they read, they're most likely repeating bullshit.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    So basically you don't need newspapers if you have all the qualifications to be your own journalist?
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert What if someone did that for you, as a full-time professional job, and did it both online and offline? What if they actually spoke directly to the participants, from senators to the bus driver in the crash to the head of safety at the regulatory agency; and what if they interviewed leading experts and engineers; and read the court filings, etc. What if they made it their life's work to become expert in that kind of research? That might be worth a few bucks a day. And it would be far more valuable than idle commentary from bloggers and commenters.

Rjevski 8y ago

This model wasn't that bad. Given this was print, the ads were somehow vetted - chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola) wouldn't exist, because even the shittiest of newspapers would say "What is this bullshit?" and put a stop to that. Even the people at the printing plant would be perplexed if they had to print that shit. Going further, even the business model of chumboxes wouldn't exist - back in the days of print, ads were mostly used to sell a product; where as the point of chumboxes is to drive more eyeballs to other sites where they can look at other ads; the content itself is worthless. Nowadays, ads are delivered programmatically from a third-party, which means the newspaper has no way to even know what garbage is going to be displayed to their readers. This is the real problem.

russellbeattie 8y ago
I have my Pi-hole set up to filter chumboxes. My feelings towards those companies verge on unadulterated hatred and anger. If I ever meet an employee of one of those companies in real life, I'm honestly afraid of what I might do.

howard941 8y ago

Disagree. Value depends on the newspaper and the reader in question. My wife loved the ad-heavy Sunday paper inserts. I grew up reading the NYT on the subway and that (mis)set my expectations for everything else I took later (Space Coast Today for ex., the testbed of the detestable "Factoid" news). Yesterday's two threads on the death of local reporting fill in a lot of what both of us left out.

xae342 8y ago

Agreed on news being nearly worthless, 99% of articles are filler and could just be summarized in a couple of sentences if not the title. In fact the title of most articles tells you everything.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Unless they lie to you in the title and debunk that lie in the middle of the article - which they damn well know most people won't read.

jccalhoun 8y ago

I agree. The thing that most conversations on how to get people to pay for news miss out on the most important element: the news has to be worth paying for. When I was in grad school a few years ago the college had a program to encourage newspaper readership that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. I can't imagine ever subscribing to a newspaper now. There was so much in a newspaper that I have zero interest in or even if I did I would look somewhere else than dead trees (sports, stocks, fashion, travel, horoscopes, advice columns). I grew up in a rural area and even in the local paper most of what was original, non-syndicated content was simply stating facts: the high school basketball team won/lost, there was a wreck, obituaries, births, weddings.

pvg 8y ago
that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Hard to call it "idle cynicism and incuriosity" if you know that most of what's in the news is at best a surface-level coverage, most likely bullshit, and also completely inconsequential for anything. News is great as a social object - you and me both read some reporting about an event at the same time, so when we meet at a bar, we have something to talk about. It's really bad if you're trying to learn accurate information about the world.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    As a general statement this seems plainly false. Just go to the Pulitzer site, to the last year's winners, skip to the "investigative journalism" category, and click around the finalists and back year over year. Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication. But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.

snow_cone 8y ago

It gave you something to talk about and helped form your view of the world didn't it?

rhizome 8y ago

I thought this was going to be about the mechanics of the newspaper industry and how much the money game has changed in the last 40 years (read: Craigslist), but all in all it sounds like you just don't like newspapers.