13 ms·

Stop Reading News (2013)

211 points by galfarragem 8y ago

lazyjones 8y ago
I try not to read such self-help/life advice articles, which are just as bad as news. Why are they so popular on HN?
dagaci 8y ago
If you don't read the news then how are you supposed to make a judgement about who to vote for or understand current trends or be alerted to issues with products recalls or where the great bargins are? I stopped reading newspapers very a long time ago too, haven't watched TV in several years, and because of this i miss out on most of the above.
raehik 8y ago
closes Hacker News
stared 8y ago
Vide "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews (news as an overvalued distraction) and recent "The Welfare Effects of Social Media" http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf (on average, quitting Facebook makes one a bit happier... and much less up-to-date with news; maybe it is not just an irrelevant correlation).
nemild 8y ago
Ezra Taft Benson: "One must select wisely a source of news; otherwise it would be better to be uninformed than misinformed." My own view is that you should reduce consumption dramatically, but still read some publications. And realize that in software, we have our own form of “news” that this missive applies to. Here’s my media literacy guide: https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.... And one just for the tech industry (including HN): https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/software-engineers-media-guide.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...
- musha68k 8y ago
  Very cool. Thanks for sharing. FWIW sharing my primary global non-tech news source while we are at it: The Financial Times to me is all the important news without the fluff and very much worth the subscription price. Obviously there is a heavy focus on economic news (but not exclusively). I especially like the News Briefing which I can listen to conveniently with a "Hey Siri, play the FT News Briefing" while doing my morning routine. These podcasts as well as Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com https://ftalphaville.ft.com) are actually free. I delved into FT last year through exploration of the Media Bias Chart for the US: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Media-Bias-Chart_4.0_8_28_2018-min.jpg https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Med... I probably should read more widely but I had been disappointed by traditional outlets like the BBC or The Economist for a long while now. It also feels like the world's balance of power is shifting heavily at this time so I'm not sure where I can get high quality global news without our natural western bias (our perspective increasingly feels like wishful thinking to me).
  - SaintGhurka 8y ago
    I will second Financial Times as a great news source. It's also a great conversation starter if you subscribe ("why is your newspaper pink"?). Financial news, in general, tend to be my favorites because their biases don't tend to fall strongly along political lines, so you get fewer outrage-of-the-day stories, fewer what's-trending-on-twitter stories, and less politics in general - unless it's a really meaningful story that can affect markets.
    - SZJX 8y ago
      I always remember what Chomsky said about this: Business newspapers actually tend to be as true-to-reality and BS-free as possible, since they need to present information as accurately as possible for businesspeople to make the right decisions.
  - gowld 8y ago
    FT is fine as far as it goes, but it ignores most of the world's news except for business/finance stuff and the same mostly-useless "headline" stories you see everywhere else. Unless all you care about is the finance markets, it doesn't have much to say that is important your life and the world.
samdung 8y ago
Takeaway line from this article (for me): "The only thing it’s really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior."
skilled 8y ago
For the last 4-5 years, Hacker News has been pretty much my only source of any kind of news outside of the topics that I work with on a daily basis. This is true. Before that, I did not read newspapers or follow any kind of journalism. I still recall being around age 12 or 13 and making a conscious decision not to watch TV anymore. It has been around just as much time since I last saw a TV news report. Maybe it has something to do with mentality? Is the new generation reading news? I highly doubt it. I think the new generation is caught up in quizzes that stir up emotions, and psychological tests that determine whether a giraffe is your spirit animal. I'm not even sure if that makes sense, but I know that newspapers don't make any sense whatsoever; despite it being the livelihood of so many folks. How can anyone justify reading news that only talk about negative things? I don't have time for that kind of nonsense in my life. I know the system is broken, corrupt, beyond repair -- why remind me about it every day?
- salvadormon 8y ago
  That's the same reason I don't watch news on TV, they're always covering negative stories about how politicians are corrupt, big organizations cheat the system, etc. I just don't feel like being more pessimistic than I already are.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  > I think the new generation is caught up in quizzes that stir up emotions, and psychological tests that determine whether a giraffe is your spirit animal. Given the activism they're showing in, eg, the US, I think if you read the news, you'd be surprised how wrong you are. > How can anyone justify reading news that only talk about negative things? To be aware of them in order to help fix them?
  - nailer 8y ago
    A lot of that activism is more performative than practical, judging by voter turnout.
    - perfmode 8y ago
m0zg 8y ago
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.” ― Aleister Crowley
- oth001 8y ago
  Interesting quote coming from him
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    I heard a very interesting talk on Crowley by Robert Anton Wilson once. Crowley did have some rather far-out ideas. Also, I seem to recall him being in cahoots with the British Intelligence services at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8TZ0hYHiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8TZ0hYHiE
- icebraining 8y ago
  That comes as an explanation of the previous statements: "Good God," I said to myself, "and this is merely New York! What must Mexico be like!" I supposed that I was experiencing normal conditions, whereas in point of fact I had landed at the climax of a heat wave which killed about a hundred people a day while it lasted. I should have discovered the truth if I had looked at a newspaper; but I did not read them. In any case, that principle means we should probably refrain from reading HN too.
jychang 8y ago
Ugh, why can't rational people see how this is an instance of "black and white thinking" cognitive distortions? Life isn't a binary black and white, as much as software engineers would like it to be. One side says "don't ever read the news, it causes negative moods" and the another side says "you should always read the news to keep up to date with the world". The proper way to approach the issue is to strike a balance between consumption of news or not. The aim is moderation of information and distraction, while still keeping touch with the world.
- darkerside 8y ago
  Agreed. The whole point of news providers should be that they're filtering the "new" information down to what's actually important. But because of the engagement economy we've built, the goal is instead to make EVERYTHING sounds like critical breaking news, even when it's not. I really hope there is some kind of replacement for the 24 hour news cycle, because otherwise society will continue to polarize.
- dingaling 8y ago
  I'm not sure that a balance is generally possible without paying significant sums. On the rare occasions that I do read news articles I find them shallow, meandering and less informative than they should be. I used to read The Economist and found their reports useful. But that comes at a considerable cost. So the easier option is to just forgo news altogether.
- galfarragem 8y ago
  'Over-compensate to compensate'. To make a change, you have to be extreme. https://sivers.org/compensate https://sivers.org/compensate
jstewartmobile 8y ago
Bloomberg terminal is $24K/yr. Mainstream news is practically given away. The hidden cost--whatever that may or may not be--I leave to the philosophers.
- lwf 8y ago
  Doesn't most/all news on Bloomberg Terminal make it to the public sites, with some delay? The cost of the terminal includes expensive hardware, high quality support, multi-language API bindings, etc. c.f. https://www.quora.com/What-is-so-special-about-the-Bloomberg-terminal https://www.quora.com/What-is-so-special-about-the-Bloomberg...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
hardwaresofton 8y ago
One piece of anecdata: I subscribed to the Economist briefly last year and it was one of the best things I've done as far as advancing myself as a person. While the vast majority of what written about wasn't immediately relevant to me (compared even to a random programming-related blog post), it did a lot to enlighten me on the value of good journalism and broaden my world view as well as keeping me reasonably informed on happenings in the world. I stopped subscribing to the Economist because I couldn't find time to read every edition cover to cover, but I plan on starting again this year. I also subscribe to https://lwn.net https://lwn.net which brings up another thing -- supporting the organizations that make the news is important if you want news that is good (even if it's irrelevant right now) from being produced.
- bloak 8y ago
  It is hard to find time to read The Economist from cover to cover. I try to at least look at each article, and read at least half of them. Even The Economist has some articles that seem ephemeral: for example, a discussion of whether a particular merger will or won't happen.
  - blunte 8y ago
    The same could be said of keeping up with the front page of HN. I imagine most of us pick and choose which items to give attention to.
- PaulRobinson 8y ago
  I don't think you need to read the Economist cover to cover to get value from it. Generally when I buy a copy, it goes something like this: - News in brief at the front - Feature articles that I particularly like the sound of - Then I go through it skimming and stopping when something catches my eye based on how much time I have Getting the digital version also means you don't feel the pang of the dead tree sat there making you guilty, too.
- q-base 8y ago
  I have had their subscription twice and the only real complaint for me would be, as you also touch upon, that they almost seem to come too often. If only they had a cheaper "digital only" subscription.
keiferski 8y ago
I, for one, would love a monthly email newsletter that summarizes the top ~100 news stories of the past 30 days. Things that turned out to be irrelevant would be ignored, while things that turned out to be important would be included and briefly commented upon. Magazines like The Economist sort of fulfill this role, but they are often a little too detailed for the high-level overview I'm looking for.
- quietbritishjim 8y ago
  The Economist does include a one page summary of the week's news near the start, with just one or two sentences for each story. You can use that to decide which you wish to read a whole article about later in the paper. You can even choose not to read any, though admittedly it would be a bit expensive to buy the paper and read only one page of it. (There is also a page about business news, reflecting the publication's title, and it's often worth looking at the first couple of those.) Also worth looking at unconditionally are the letters page, which is always very good and sometimes has very famous correspondents (occasionally from tyrannical regimes making preposterous statements, with no response from the paper), and the obituary, which has an eclectic selection of very famous and very unknown individuals.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  I think of something similar but less "news" lead - for example a backlog of the most "important" global issues (yes we can out climate change at number one) but it's things like "water shortages in southern sudan" at number 18 and so on that really will give perspective - when we see things like Brexit at number 67 that we know we have a proper balance. I would start with a metric like "estimated number of excess human deaths from this issue in next year, five years fifty years" and have open transparent ways to assess the metric
  - asdff 8y ago
    How do you apply discrete metrics to topics that people value differently?
    - 8y ago
krylon 8y ago
Part of me feels kind of bad about this when I think about it too much, but I have substantially improved my well-being by drastically cutting down my news consumption. It's not about time management per se, but so much of the news either makes me feel sad or angry. On the other hand, what news I do consume these days, I do consume more deliberately.
abbiya 8y ago
If you want to reduce hn time, visit 8hrs.xyz
Chazprime 8y ago
I don't like the binary choice to either read the news or ignore it. We just need to be mature enough to curate what we read, hopefully striking a healthy balance between our personal lives and what's going on in the world outside of that.
smelterdemon 8y ago
Extremely privileged position
rimliu 8y ago
There is an amazing book written in 1925: A Heaf of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. And there is just as an amazing movie based on it. There is an exchange about not reading soviet newspapers if one cares about digestion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOE_3_Ws4y0&feature=youtu.be&t=1718 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOE_3_Ws4y0&feature=youtu.be... (English subtitles are available).
roenxi 8y ago
He could have written a much longer article on this if he wanted to; there are deeper issues related to this subject. The characterisation of this should be news-news (company releases a new wossname, generally not a problem) and politics-news where society decides what is happening and what should be done about it. The big question is really: How does "the societal discourse" handle complicated issues? I don't see much evidence that society at large can take an interest in a subject and maintain a sophisticated position like "there isn't enough evidence here to form an opinion". The closest that seems to be achieved in practice is two interest groups completely at loggerheads, preventing any action due to their strident opposition of each other. In game theory terms, is there a system where a consensus opinion and a focused group of crazies can coexist without compromising in the direction of the crazies? Because the power of a focused group of political extremists is so great that it distorts political action and has significant flow on effects to journalism as political forces vie for control of the public discourse. The type of discipline to deal with something like that is clearly beyond most citizens.
- Meai 8y ago
  I think society doesn't purposefully handle it at all currently, issues are solved by accident through simply waiting for new technologies to make all the old problems disappear. Sometimes a problem is so gigantic that no amount of spin and delusion can deny it and then things do tend to get fixed but usually with a few new problems in there as well. Regarding your game theory question: One group being immovable in thought inevitably leads to either that group gaining more members or new immovable groups forming to fight that contender at the same level.
minikites 8y ago
>The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to your life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. That's an awfully privileged position to take. I'm going to guess the author isn't likely to have their status as a person invalidated, their religion declared illegal, or their citizenship revoked any time soon. I'm going to guess he's of a race that isn't likely to be a target of a government endorsed hate crime. --- I purposefully wrote that paragraph before I looked up the author: >Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street. His self-improvement strategies appeal to his overachieving audience in elite finance, Silicon Valley and professional sports. When a member of an elite class gives you advice, consider if the advice is truly in your best interest, or if it serves to cement their elite status in society. The elites benefit from keeping "the proles" in the dark. As a member of the elite, trying to sell to other elites, Shane represents the ultimate in privilege: the type of person who is going to be just fine no matter what the government or any company decides to do. Some of us aren't so lucky.
jaabe 8y ago
I buy the bit about being critical about what news we consume, but I just don’t see a complete avoidance of news as being a good solution. To me, not reading news would remove more value from my life than reading too much. My personal fix for news media was to identify exactly what I wanted from a news paper and then identify the one which suited my needs best. This turned out to be a paper, which at the time (2017) only had a printed version. No online version at all, they do now, but I’ve never visited it. It’s a high lixcount paper with a heavy focus on society (as in statecraft not cocktails), culture and arts/literature. It’s basically the perfect paper for our cultural elite. I’m not really part of that, and I always skip the book and arts sections, so you could say the paper isn’t exactly a perfect match. It’s underlying political philosophy doesn’t even align with mine. The thing is though, it only comes out on Fridays. This means the paper only focuses on the stuff that’s actually relevant. It also means the articles have actually journalistic depth. The combination of this means I get to stay informed without being bothered by all the irrelevant noise in the regular news cycle. It’s been truly awesome, and if something critical happens I can always turn to internet news.
- lystergic 8y ago
  What is the name of this paper?
  - jaabe 8y ago
    Weekendavisen, it’s a Danish paper though.
charlysl 8y ago
If you want to understand better than 99% of the population where the world is heading, you could do a lot worse than reading a few of the titles in the Economist's books of the year list. Even better, read Machiavelli, human nature hasn't changed and it will help you interpret the news. Also watch the documentary "The Century of The Self"; most news is propaganda, and this will help you spot it. And, if you must read the news, aim for a bit of diversity (i.e. both media from the right and the left, and events in your country as seen from abroad, and triangulate), otherwise you will easily get brainwashed, censorship in dictatorships tries to block media it can't control for this very reason. Headlines are clickbait more often than not, don't believe them, and "breaking news" is abused so often that it's become a meaningless tag. Don't use social media as a news source, it's abysmal, even worse than tabloids.
Jaruzel 8y ago
Regarding Brexit, I got so fed up with all the media spin around it, that I set up a TVHeadend[1] server on my network, and started watching (rather listening to while I work) BBC Parliament live via a small window on my screen using VLC. Once you start hearing the de-facto source for news events, it's amazing how brazen the mass media are in the manipulation of how they reported those events to support their own agendas. I've been doing this now for about 1 month, and although some of the coverage is mundane, most of it is quite interesting. It's also good as background 'noise' as I work from home, which can be too quiet at times. For technical news, I follow HN, and a few other sources. I tend to cross reference the reporting and try to see through the manipulation. Beyond technical and political news (both of which can affect me directly), I no longer have an interest in other more 'general' news. Sure, an earthquake in Indonesia may be newsworthy for example, but as it doesn't affect me directly, why waste my time with it? We've all been conditioned to suck up all world news as if it is important - Most of it isn't, and only exists to fill airtime and/or sell adverts. Calculate how much time it takes for you to consume your daily news, and then ask yourself if that was time well spent. My guess is that it probably isn't. Finally, depressing news sells, and good news doesn't. People want to feel that they have a better life than the sad people shown on the news. The same thing goes for Soap Operas, they trade on this effect to keep viewers. In fact the absolute reverse happens - over time, people get more depressed watching depressing news, than they would if they didn't. The effect is more pronounced in people who 'catch up' on the news just before bedtime. --- [1] https://tvheadend.org/ https://tvheadend.org/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- indigochill 8y ago
  >started watching (rather listening to while I work) BBC Parliament live Sounds like compiling a list of sources like this, Oyez, and others (for people who just don't know these things can be found if one looks) could be of immediate practical benefit to society.
amelius 8y ago
I can't wait for the day that we have AI that can tell whether the user really wants to know X.
ajuc 8y ago
Not reading news is like constantly taking painkillers. Yes you don't feel the pain but the problems remain. Reading news more often than once a day is masochism.
kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
I would like to add the Wikipedia portal Current Events to the list of alternative news sources in this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- aboutruby 8y ago
  I like how it's short, to the point and reflects events worldwide uniformly
  - virusduck 8y ago
    and the word "Trump" isn't anywhere to be found!
pedro1976 8y ago
When I realized that "the news" have much more influence shaping mine and my friends opinion, I was shocked. It passively or they actively distract you from things that really matter in your life [0] (availability heuristic [1]). And given that 80% of its content is written by PR agencies [2] you can be sure, that every possible cognitive bias will be applied to keep you busy. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasection3 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasec...
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  > Given that a (conservative) estimate of 75% of entertainment stories and 50 to 80% of news and business stories emanate from public relations She doesn't cite any sources to back up those figures. Do you have any available?
pasta 8y ago
Also from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244 And from Aaron Swartz (2006): http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
jimhefferon 8y ago
A surprising percentage of what is up as news is placement. You'll see an interesting article about the Boer War, then a couple of days later you'll see another, which is a bit strange, and then a couple of days later you'll see an ad for a movie with a couple of big name stars that is set in the Boer War. Then you realize that you've been tricked into an ad campaign. That's discouraging.
- sametmax 8y ago
  What's discouraging me more is that people that do this find it harmless. It says a lot about the state of our society: we still think a little bit of bad is ok, forgetting what happens when everybody is doing it.
- asdff 8y ago
  More likely: "Hey journalist #213, there is this movie coming out about the boer war and it should be a hit. Why don't you and #214 and #215 get together in the conference room and research and write some articles about it. People will probably read it." "sure thing, chief." repeat each publisher. What is more parsimonious, someone writing context pieces for ad views ahead of a known impending cultural event, or some big bad advertising conspiracy trying to inception you into watching a movie about the boer war.
cleetus 8y ago
I can only consume so much information, and most of the news is presented as low-quality information or information pollution. The 24/7 news cycle makes the quality problem even worse. Here are two more similar links: http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when-you-quit-the-news/ http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when... http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/ http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/
stunt 8y ago
It has been a couple of years that I only read news after having my lunch. My only rule is to not start and finish my day with news. I do it right after lunch because I'm still distracted.
nkozyra 8y ago
Do not stop reading news. Be selective with your sources. Be a discerning news consumer. An uninformed populace is a malleable one. Controlling and limiting information has long been a strategy for despots or worse. > The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless Don't read that then. Read sources you believe are important to you and deliver information that is important. Be a discerning news consumer. > Being well informed isn’t regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. This isn't news, it's opinion. Don't read this. Be a discerning news consumer. > Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. In other words, be a discerning news consumer. > Read fewer articles and more books. This is a weird argument. Look, people hate the media, so an argument like this is an easy sell. But rejecting information from the media is a concession to power.
- holografix 8y ago
  Thank you.
- taude 8y ago
  >> Being well informed isn’t regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. > This isn't news, it's opinion. Don't read this. Sometimes this is harder than you think, even with popular news sources. I subscribe to the NY Times, but if I go by notifications on my phone for the "popular" stories, many of them are opinion pieces. In fact, I'm looking right now at "Most Popular" in my NYTimes app and I'm seeing multiple "opinion" pieces in that list (actually 5 of the top 10) and only after you click into them do you know that they aren't hard news.
- justtopost 8y ago
  You seem to mean well, but your post is also a recipie for creating a personal bubble, no matter how well spoken.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    News literacy is a critical problem today, moreso than ever before. It may seem as though I glossed over that, but my larger point is people need to understand what news is and means first. A bubble is inevitable in either event, finite time ensures that.
fsiefken 8y ago
teletext for me provides the most informative news per byte. For the Dutch 'teletekst' I use nostt on the terminal (or with geektool on the mac desktop). https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt https://github.com/zevv/termtekst https://github.com/zevv/termtekst https://twitter.com/Teletekst https://twitter.com/Teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst#101 https://nos.nl/teletekst#101 Listening to the radio news once a day works as well (5 minutes or so). I would like to have a podcast feed for that!
platz 8y ago
If you didn't read anything about the Panama papers or pfas, etc.. how will you know who to vote for in the next primaries and elections? Or will you vote how you did the last time?
barrad0s 8y ago
As far as TV goes, I made a choice about a year and a half ago to stop viewing any news on TV and haven't looked back. I like to think I'm informed, I will read certain things, or pursue things I think necessary or interesting, but I have abandoned all the nonsense on TV.
elorant 8y ago
The beef I have with journalism is that every time they write on a topic I have good knowledge of, I find their coverage to be lame and lacking depth. Which leads me to a more generalized assumption that this is probably true for any given subject, except perhaps politics. Most notable example I can think of is how the media covers A.I. issues. I don't expect newspapers to have book quality analysis but at the very least I expect some kind of integrity. If I have to wonder every time whether the journalist knows what he/she's talking about then I'd rather not read them at all.
- zazen 8y ago
  This has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect Although I think it bears saying that journalists really might be doing a better job of reporting on the politics that is their own main interest than on the science stories which are far outside their own interest and expertise, and which they may well regard as lower priority for accuracy.
- asdff 8y ago
  Only the largest publications can afford or have the clout to have experts writing their stories. I don't trust WiRED to write a biology article, but with a big story NYT will reach out to a professor in the field and publish their input on the topic, for instance.
samcday 8y ago
As an uneducated ignoramus, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I only recently discovered JSTOR Daily (https://daily.jstor.org/ https://daily.jstor.org/). Marrying current events / open policy debates / political trends to hard research is really doing it for me lately. Surface level "on the ground" reporting of who farted 15 seconds ago in the White House has its use, certainly. But I much prefer to read a thoughtful piece on the frequency at which people have historically farted in the White House. That way I can contrast it with the behaviors of the current ruling party. It can also be supplemented with analysis into how society's view on White House farts has evolved in tandem with the so-and-so Revolution or the such-and-such cultural shift. All of this being sourced from research steeped in hard evidence. Aside from JSTOR Daily, what other recommendations can people provide for this kind of quality journalism?
anonu 8y ago
The 2 principles of anonu apply here: 1. Moderation in all things 2. The devil is in the details. There's a bit more nuance to the situation. Your attention is yours. What happens in the media, Facebook, etc... Is an attempt to take your attention. For the most part your allocation is spent where the biggest dopamine hit can come from. If you start valuing your attention based more on an ROI calculation where your return is "did I learn something useful from a balanced source that can help form my world view?" Then you quickly start to cut out the BS. Here are my tips for high ROI consumption: Read long form articles about a subject. Skip over them if needed so a as not to waste time. Call BS early. Poorly written books or articles should be nixed immediately. Avoid the sugar: low ROI stuff like Instagram, Facebook, Reddit
williesleg 8y ago
Stop. Enjoy life. It's great. News polarizes people and gives them anxiety. It's stuff out of your control. Spend time improving yourself and your life. Hacker News, stop posting political crap.
Red29 8y ago
Totally Agree. I think everyone should go through a 6-12 month period of not reading newspapers and see how you feel. I did that and I felt much happier, and more knowledgeable (instead reading science,math, literature). The problem with newspapers (even high brow newspapers) is that they encourage negative emotions (anger, fear, envy), are irritatingly political / full of identity politics or are full of repetitive facts (another uniformed brexit article etc.) or plain old hot air gossip. Instead of daily newspapers take a long term view and look at the news once every quarter or two from a quality publication such as the Economist/ financial times etc. Newspapers are bunk
smoe 8y ago
Although not directly mentioning it, the post seems to imply that things were better in the past. I like this 2013 article from the Guardian better because it goes deeper into fundamental issues with news, independent from the "internet age". https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... Key points for me: News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. [...] Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. I stopped reading news around 2011, while I was working at a big news site, within a building complex of about half a dozen more publications including online, print, paid, free, weekly and daily. Seeing how the sausage is made has overall increased my respect for journalists, but decreased the one for the process of publication and the business behind it. It easy to blame corporate overloads, but the pressure for almost real time news comes in part from the readers. At first I sought to solve the potential problem of being uninformed of not reading news technically. Thinking about building an aggregator with a more objective way to judge news-worthiness and relevancy than the existing ones and news sites. But then I realized there is already a good enough solution in place: If something is important for me to care about, it will eventually reach me in some way or another trough social interactions (mostly offline since i don't use social media much). And because of the delay of information getting to me, I'm way more likely to get actual useful insights when I then dig deeper than when trying to keep up with everything live.
grecy 8y ago
After spending well over two years all over Africa (and previously 2 year all over Latin America) I've come to the conclusion that "news" today is no such thing. What is sold as "news" today is just whatever dramatic world events some producer thinks will get ratings which is important so they can keep their job. In no way does it give people a well-rounded or informed position about anything as the word "news" implies.
- gowld 8y ago
  Drop the "today", it's cleaner. wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
robohoe 8y ago
https://www.allsides.com https://www.allsides.com is a good news site to get news concerning America from more than just one (presumably biased) side. It is interesting to see how various news sources spin news using catchy titles pandering to different types of folks.
Eli_P 8y ago
If I just want to catch up, there're River5[1] and NewsBoat[2], or build-your-own-aggregator apps. The latter is a console app with a UI like Vim's; I like its fast filtering with '/'. The downside of apps is there's no grooming in comments. [1] https://github.com/scripting/river5 https://github.com/scripting/river5 [2] https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat
weliketocode 8y ago
This article is right on. - Avoiding the daily news likely will NOT make you any less informed. - Avoiding constant media consumption will NOT give power to a central authority and reduce your rights. A lot of the counter arguments here are seemingly from individuals defending the amount of time they spend consuming content. To those who read the news religiously, what was the last news item that you, personally, took action on? Can you remember it? Ok. GREAT! --> Now, be objective with yourself. What % of news items did YOU take action on? Did it give you a >0 return on invested time?
- minikites 8y ago
  >Avoiding constant media consumption will NOT give power to a central authority and reduce your rights. Are you part of a class of people who have rights that are in danger? Do you think everyone is safe from that?
- pjc50 8y ago
  If you avoid the news long enough, eventually you will find that your rights have been reduced without you noticing. You absolutely can take real action with financial implications for yourself from news items - I made £1k from a single Telegraph article on how the Royal Mail IPO was grossly underpriced. I've adjusted my pension allocation on the assumption that the pound would fall against the dollar and done quite well on that too. But for much news it's not so much "achieving a positive return" as avoiding a negative. It's the Arthur Dent effect: one day you wake up to find aliens about to bulldoze your planet, and they tell you that you were warned and should have known about it. There's a lot of that these days. I'm surrounded by people who have taken Brexit-related actions of one kind or another, especially all the Europeans who suddenly have to register to avoid deportation. I factored it in to my job change, not as a major factor, but it's convenient to be working for a US multinational rather than a company exporting or importing physical goods from the EU. I don't even seek out that much news any more, it just keeps leaking in via social media. I should make more effort to follow local news, because that really is the place where I can find out if someone's going to put a bypass through my house or disrupt my bus route, and have a chance of stopping it.
- tomjen3 8y ago
therealdrag0 8y ago
This Freakanomics episode is what got me thinking about this: "Why do we really follow the news" (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-really-follow-the-news-a-new-freakonomics-radio-episode/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-really-follow-the-...).
therealdrag0 8y ago
A neat way of getting a high-level view of current events (news) is the wikipedia page. The headlines here change much less frequently that most news-outlets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events It's also more of a log of what's happened instead of political headlines.

211 points by galfarragem 8y ago

I try not to read such self-help/life advice articles, which are just as bad as news. Why are they so popular on HN?

If you don't read the news then how are you supposed to make a judgement about who to vote for or understand current trends or be alerted to issues with products recalls or where the great bargins are? I stopped reading newspapers very a long time ago too, haven't watched TV in several years, and because of this i miss out on most of the above.

raehik 8y ago

closes Hacker News

stared 8y ago

Vide "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews (news as an overvalued distraction) and recent "The Welfare Effects of Social Media" http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf (on average, quitting Facebook makes one a bit happier... and much less up-to-date with news; maybe it is not just an irrelevant correlation).

nemild 8y ago

Ezra Taft Benson: "One must select wisely a source of news; otherwise it would be better to be uninformed than misinformed." My own view is that you should reduce consumption dramatically, but still read some publications. And realize that in software, we have our own form of “news” that this missive applies to. Here’s my media literacy guide: https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.... And one just for the tech industry (including HN): https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/software-engineers-media-guide.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...

musha68k 8y ago
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. FWIW sharing my primary global non-tech news source while we are at it: The Financial Times to me is all the important news without the fluff and very much worth the subscription price. Obviously there is a heavy focus on economic news (but not exclusively). I especially like the News Briefing which I can listen to conveniently with a "Hey Siri, play the FT News Briefing" while doing my morning routine. These podcasts as well as Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com https://ftalphaville.ft.com) are actually free. I delved into FT last year through exploration of the Media Bias Chart for the US: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Media-Bias-Chart_4.0_8_28_2018-min.jpg https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Med... I probably should read more widely but I had been disappointed by traditional outlets like the BBC or The Economist for a long while now. It also feels like the world's balance of power is shifting heavily at this time so I'm not sure where I can get high quality global news without our natural western bias (our perspective increasingly feels like wishful thinking to me).
- SaintGhurka 8y ago
  I will second Financial Times as a great news source. It's also a great conversation starter if you subscribe ("why is your newspaper pink"?). Financial news, in general, tend to be my favorites because their biases don't tend to fall strongly along political lines, so you get fewer outrage-of-the-day stories, fewer what's-trending-on-twitter stories, and less politics in general - unless it's a really meaningful story that can affect markets.
  - SZJX 8y ago
    I always remember what Chomsky said about this: Business newspapers actually tend to be as true-to-reality and BS-free as possible, since they need to present information as accurately as possible for businesspeople to make the right decisions.
- gowld 8y ago
  FT is fine as far as it goes, but it ignores most of the world's news except for business/finance stuff and the same mostly-useless "headline" stories you see everywhere else. Unless all you care about is the finance markets, it doesn't have much to say that is important your life and the world.

samdung 8y ago

Takeaway line from this article (for me): "The only thing it’s really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior."

skilled 8y ago

For the last 4-5 years, Hacker News has been pretty much my only source of any kind of news outside of the topics that I work with on a daily basis. This is true. Before that, I did not read newspapers or follow any kind of journalism. I still recall being around age 12 or 13 and making a conscious decision not to watch TV anymore. It has been around just as much time since I last saw a TV news report. Maybe it has something to do with mentality? Is the new generation reading news? I highly doubt it. I think the new generation is caught up in quizzes that stir up emotions, and psychological tests that determine whether a giraffe is your spirit animal. I'm not even sure if that makes sense, but I know that newspapers don't make any sense whatsoever; despite it being the livelihood of so many folks. How can anyone justify reading news that only talk about negative things? I don't have time for that kind of nonsense in my life. I know the system is broken, corrupt, beyond repair -- why remind me about it every day?

salvadormon 8y ago
That's the same reason I don't watch news on TV, they're always covering negative stories about how politicians are corrupt, big organizations cheat the system, etc. I just don't feel like being more pessimistic than I already are.
zimpenfish 8y ago
> I think the new generation is caught up in quizzes that stir up emotions, and psychological tests that determine whether a giraffe is your spirit animal. Given the activism they're showing in, eg, the US, I think if you read the news, you'd be surprised how wrong you are. > How can anyone justify reading news that only talk about negative things? To be aware of them in order to help fix them?
- nailer 8y ago
  A lot of that activism is more performative than practical, judging by voter turnout.
  - perfmode 8y ago

m0zg 8y ago

“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.” ― Aleister Crowley

oth001 8y ago
Interesting quote coming from him
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  I heard a very interesting talk on Crowley by Robert Anton Wilson once. Crowley did have some rather far-out ideas. Also, I seem to recall him being in cahoots with the British Intelligence services at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8TZ0hYHiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8TZ0hYHiE
icebraining 8y ago
That comes as an explanation of the previous statements: "Good God," I said to myself, "and this is merely New York! What must Mexico be like!" I supposed that I was experiencing normal conditions, whereas in point of fact I had landed at the climax of a heat wave which killed about a hundred people a day while it lasted. I should have discovered the truth if I had looked at a newspaper; but I did not read them. In any case, that principle means we should probably refrain from reading HN too.

jychang 8y ago

Ugh, why can't rational people see how this is an instance of "black and white thinking" cognitive distortions? Life isn't a binary black and white, as much as software engineers would like it to be. One side says "don't ever read the news, it causes negative moods" and the another side says "you should always read the news to keep up to date with the world". The proper way to approach the issue is to strike a balance between consumption of news or not. The aim is moderation of information and distraction, while still keeping touch with the world.

darkerside 8y ago
Agreed. The whole point of news providers should be that they're filtering the "new" information down to what's actually important. But because of the engagement economy we've built, the goal is instead to make EVERYTHING sounds like critical breaking news, even when it's not. I really hope there is some kind of replacement for the 24 hour news cycle, because otherwise society will continue to polarize.
dingaling 8y ago
I'm not sure that a balance is generally possible without paying significant sums. On the rare occasions that I do read news articles I find them shallow, meandering and less informative than they should be. I used to read The Economist and found their reports useful. But that comes at a considerable cost. So the easier option is to just forgo news altogether.
galfarragem 8y ago
'Over-compensate to compensate'. To make a change, you have to be extreme. https://sivers.org/compensate https://sivers.org/compensate

jstewartmobile 8y ago

Bloomberg terminal is $24K/yr. Mainstream news is practically given away. The hidden cost--whatever that may or may not be--I leave to the philosophers.

lwf 8y ago
Doesn't most/all news on Bloomberg Terminal make it to the public sites, with some delay? The cost of the terminal includes expensive hardware, high quality support, multi-language API bindings, etc. c.f. https://www.quora.com/What-is-so-special-about-the-Bloomberg-terminal https://www.quora.com/What-is-so-special-about-the-Bloomberg...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

hardwaresofton 8y ago

One piece of anecdata: I subscribed to the Economist briefly last year and it was one of the best things I've done as far as advancing myself as a person. While the vast majority of what written about wasn't immediately relevant to me (compared even to a random programming-related blog post), it did a lot to enlighten me on the value of good journalism and broaden my world view as well as keeping me reasonably informed on happenings in the world. I stopped subscribing to the Economist because I couldn't find time to read every edition cover to cover, but I plan on starting again this year. I also subscribe to https://lwn.net https://lwn.net which brings up another thing -- supporting the organizations that make the news is important if you want news that is good (even if it's irrelevant right now) from being produced.

bloak 8y ago
It is hard to find time to read The Economist from cover to cover. I try to at least look at each article, and read at least half of them. Even The Economist has some articles that seem ephemeral: for example, a discussion of whether a particular merger will or won't happen.
- blunte 8y ago
  The same could be said of keeping up with the front page of HN. I imagine most of us pick and choose which items to give attention to.
PaulRobinson 8y ago
I don't think you need to read the Economist cover to cover to get value from it. Generally when I buy a copy, it goes something like this: - News in brief at the front - Feature articles that I particularly like the sound of - Then I go through it skimming and stopping when something catches my eye based on how much time I have Getting the digital version also means you don't feel the pang of the dead tree sat there making you guilty, too.
q-base 8y ago
I have had their subscription twice and the only real complaint for me would be, as you also touch upon, that they almost seem to come too often. If only they had a cheaper "digital only" subscription.

keiferski 8y ago

I, for one, would love a monthly email newsletter that summarizes the top ~100 news stories of the past 30 days. Things that turned out to be irrelevant would be ignored, while things that turned out to be important would be included and briefly commented upon. Magazines like The Economist sort of fulfill this role, but they are often a little too detailed for the high-level overview I'm looking for.

quietbritishjim 8y ago
The Economist does include a one page summary of the week's news near the start, with just one or two sentences for each story. You can use that to decide which you wish to read a whole article about later in the paper. You can even choose not to read any, though admittedly it would be a bit expensive to buy the paper and read only one page of it. (There is also a page about business news, reflecting the publication's title, and it's often worth looking at the first couple of those.) Also worth looking at unconditionally are the letters page, which is always very good and sometimes has very famous correspondents (occasionally from tyrannical regimes making preposterous statements, with no response from the paper), and the obituary, which has an eclectic selection of very famous and very unknown individuals.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
I think of something similar but less "news" lead - for example a backlog of the most "important" global issues (yes we can out climate change at number one) but it's things like "water shortages in southern sudan" at number 18 and so on that really will give perspective - when we see things like Brexit at number 67 that we know we have a proper balance. I would start with a metric like "estimated number of excess human deaths from this issue in next year, five years fifty years" and have open transparent ways to assess the metric
- asdff 8y ago
  How do you apply discrete metrics to topics that people value differently?
  - 8y ago

krylon 8y ago

Part of me feels kind of bad about this when I think about it too much, but I have substantially improved my well-being by drastically cutting down my news consumption. It's not about time management per se, but so much of the news either makes me feel sad or angry. On the other hand, what news I do consume these days, I do consume more deliberately.

abbiya 8y ago

If you want to reduce hn time, visit 8hrs.xyz

Chazprime 8y ago

I don't like the binary choice to either read the news or ignore it. We just need to be mature enough to curate what we read, hopefully striking a healthy balance between our personal lives and what's going on in the world outside of that.

smelterdemon 8y ago

Extremely privileged position

rimliu 8y ago

There is an amazing book written in 1925: A Heaf of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. And there is just as an amazing movie based on it. There is an exchange about not reading soviet newspapers if one cares about digestion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOE_3_Ws4y0&feature=youtu.be&t=1718 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOE_3_Ws4y0&feature=youtu.be... (English subtitles are available).

roenxi 8y ago

He could have written a much longer article on this if he wanted to; there are deeper issues related to this subject. The characterisation of this should be news-news (company releases a new wossname, generally not a problem) and politics-news where society decides what is happening and what should be done about it. The big question is really: How does "the societal discourse" handle complicated issues? I don't see much evidence that society at large can take an interest in a subject and maintain a sophisticated position like "there isn't enough evidence here to form an opinion". The closest that seems to be achieved in practice is two interest groups completely at loggerheads, preventing any action due to their strident opposition of each other. In game theory terms, is there a system where a consensus opinion and a focused group of crazies can coexist without compromising in the direction of the crazies? Because the power of a focused group of political extremists is so great that it distorts political action and has significant flow on effects to journalism as political forces vie for control of the public discourse. The type of discipline to deal with something like that is clearly beyond most citizens.

Meai 8y ago
I think society doesn't purposefully handle it at all currently, issues are solved by accident through simply waiting for new technologies to make all the old problems disappear. Sometimes a problem is so gigantic that no amount of spin and delusion can deny it and then things do tend to get fixed but usually with a few new problems in there as well. Regarding your game theory question: One group being immovable in thought inevitably leads to either that group gaining more members or new immovable groups forming to fight that contender at the same level.

minikites 8y ago

>The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to your life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. That's an awfully privileged position to take. I'm going to guess the author isn't likely to have their status as a person invalidated, their religion declared illegal, or their citizenship revoked any time soon. I'm going to guess he's of a race that isn't likely to be a target of a government endorsed hate crime. --- I purposefully wrote that paragraph before I looked up the author: >Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street. His self-improvement strategies appeal to his overachieving audience in elite finance, Silicon Valley and professional sports. When a member of an elite class gives you advice, consider if the advice is truly in your best interest, or if it serves to cement their elite status in society. The elites benefit from keeping "the proles" in the dark. As a member of the elite, trying to sell to other elites, Shane represents the ultimate in privilege: the type of person who is going to be just fine no matter what the government or any company decides to do. Some of us aren't so lucky.

jaabe 8y ago

I buy the bit about being critical about what news we consume, but I just don’t see a complete avoidance of news as being a good solution. To me, not reading news would remove more value from my life than reading too much. My personal fix for news media was to identify exactly what I wanted from a news paper and then identify the one which suited my needs best. This turned out to be a paper, which at the time (2017) only had a printed version. No online version at all, they do now, but I’ve never visited it. It’s a high lixcount paper with a heavy focus on society (as in statecraft not cocktails), culture and arts/literature. It’s basically the perfect paper for our cultural elite. I’m not really part of that, and I always skip the book and arts sections, so you could say the paper isn’t exactly a perfect match. It’s underlying political philosophy doesn’t even align with mine. The thing is though, it only comes out on Fridays. This means the paper only focuses on the stuff that’s actually relevant. It also means the articles have actually journalistic depth. The combination of this means I get to stay informed without being bothered by all the irrelevant noise in the regular news cycle. It’s been truly awesome, and if something critical happens I can always turn to internet news.

lystergic 8y ago
What is the name of this paper?
- jaabe 8y ago
  Weekendavisen, it’s a Danish paper though.

charlysl 8y ago

If you want to understand better than 99% of the population where the world is heading, you could do a lot worse than reading a few of the titles in the Economist's books of the year list. Even better, read Machiavelli, human nature hasn't changed and it will help you interpret the news. Also watch the documentary "The Century of The Self"; most news is propaganda, and this will help you spot it. And, if you must read the news, aim for a bit of diversity (i.e. both media from the right and the left, and events in your country as seen from abroad, and triangulate), otherwise you will easily get brainwashed, censorship in dictatorships tries to block media it can't control for this very reason. Headlines are clickbait more often than not, don't believe them, and "breaking news" is abused so often that it's become a meaningless tag. Don't use social media as a news source, it's abysmal, even worse than tabloids.

Jaruzel 8y ago

Regarding Brexit, I got so fed up with all the media spin around it, that I set up a TVHeadend[1] server on my network, and started watching (rather listening to while I work) BBC Parliament live via a small window on my screen using VLC. Once you start hearing the de-facto source for news events, it's amazing how brazen the mass media are in the manipulation of how they reported those events to support their own agendas. I've been doing this now for about 1 month, and although some of the coverage is mundane, most of it is quite interesting. It's also good as background 'noise' as I work from home, which can be too quiet at times. For technical news, I follow HN, and a few other sources. I tend to cross reference the reporting and try to see through the manipulation. Beyond technical and political news (both of which can affect me directly), I no longer have an interest in other more 'general' news. Sure, an earthquake in Indonesia may be newsworthy for example, but as it doesn't affect me directly, why waste my time with it? We've all been conditioned to suck up all world news as if it is important - Most of it isn't, and only exists to fill airtime and/or sell adverts. Calculate how much time it takes for you to consume your daily news, and then ask yourself if that was time well spent. My guess is that it probably isn't. Finally, depressing news sells, and good news doesn't. People want to feel that they have a better life than the sad people shown on the news. The same thing goes for Soap Operas, they trade on this effect to keep viewers. In fact the absolute reverse happens - over time, people get more depressed watching depressing news, than they would if they didn't. The effect is more pronounced in people who 'catch up' on the news just before bedtime. --- [1] https://tvheadend.org/ https://tvheadend.org/

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
indigochill 8y ago
>started watching (rather listening to while I work) BBC Parliament live Sounds like compiling a list of sources like this, Oyez, and others (for people who just don't know these things can be found if one looks) could be of immediate practical benefit to society.

amelius 8y ago

I can't wait for the day that we have AI that can tell whether the user really wants to know X.

ajuc 8y ago

Not reading news is like constantly taking painkillers. Yes you don't feel the pain but the problems remain. Reading news more often than once a day is masochism.

kaffeemitsahne 8y ago

I would like to add the Wikipedia portal Current Events to the list of alternative news sources in this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

aboutruby 8y ago
I like how it's short, to the point and reflects events worldwide uniformly
- virusduck 8y ago
  and the word "Trump" isn't anywhere to be found!

pedro1976 8y ago

When I realized that "the news" have much more influence shaping mine and my friends opinion, I was shocked. It passively or they actively distract you from things that really matter in your life [0] (availability heuristic [1]). And given that 80% of its content is written by PR agencies [2] you can be sure, that every possible cognitive bias will be applied to keep you busy. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasection3 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasec...

zimpenfish 8y ago
> Given that a (conservative) estimate of 75% of entertainment stories and 50 to 80% of news and business stories emanate from public relations She doesn't cite any sources to back up those figures. Do you have any available?

pasta 8y ago

Also from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244 And from Aaron Swartz (2006): http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

jimhefferon 8y ago

A surprising percentage of what is up as news is placement. You'll see an interesting article about the Boer War, then a couple of days later you'll see another, which is a bit strange, and then a couple of days later you'll see an ad for a movie with a couple of big name stars that is set in the Boer War. Then you realize that you've been tricked into an ad campaign. That's discouraging.

sametmax 8y ago
What's discouraging me more is that people that do this find it harmless. It says a lot about the state of our society: we still think a little bit of bad is ok, forgetting what happens when everybody is doing it.
asdff 8y ago
More likely: "Hey journalist #213, there is this movie coming out about the boer war and it should be a hit. Why don't you and #214 and #215 get together in the conference room and research and write some articles about it. People will probably read it." "sure thing, chief." repeat each publisher. What is more parsimonious, someone writing context pieces for ad views ahead of a known impending cultural event, or some big bad advertising conspiracy trying to inception you into watching a movie about the boer war.

cleetus 8y ago

I can only consume so much information, and most of the news is presented as low-quality information or information pollution. The 24/7 news cycle makes the quality problem even worse. Here are two more similar links: http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when-you-quit-the-news/ http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when... http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/ http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/

stunt 8y ago

It has been a couple of years that I only read news after having my lunch. My only rule is to not start and finish my day with news. I do it right after lunch because I'm still distracted.

nkozyra 8y ago

Do not stop reading news. Be selective with your sources. Be a discerning news consumer. An uninformed populace is a malleable one. Controlling and limiting information has long been a strategy for despots or worse. > The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless Don't read that then. Read sources you believe are important to you and deliver information that is important. Be a discerning news consumer. > Being well informed isn’t regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. This isn't news, it's opinion. Don't read this. Be a discerning news consumer. > Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. In other words, be a discerning news consumer. > Read fewer articles and more books. This is a weird argument. Look, people hate the media, so an argument like this is an easy sell. But rejecting information from the media is a concession to power.

holografix 8y ago
Thank you.
taude 8y ago
>> Being well informed isn’t regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. > This isn't news, it's opinion. Don't read this. Sometimes this is harder than you think, even with popular news sources. I subscribe to the NY Times, but if I go by notifications on my phone for the "popular" stories, many of them are opinion pieces. In fact, I'm looking right now at "Most Popular" in my NYTimes app and I'm seeing multiple "opinion" pieces in that list (actually 5 of the top 10) and only after you click into them do you know that they aren't hard news.
justtopost 8y ago
You seem to mean well, but your post is also a recipie for creating a personal bubble, no matter how well spoken.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  News literacy is a critical problem today, moreso than ever before. It may seem as though I glossed over that, but my larger point is people need to understand what news is and means first. A bubble is inevitable in either event, finite time ensures that.

fsiefken 8y ago

teletext for me provides the most informative news per byte. For the Dutch 'teletekst' I use nostt on the terminal (or with geektool on the mac desktop). https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt https://github.com/zevv/termtekst https://github.com/zevv/termtekst https://twitter.com/Teletekst https://twitter.com/Teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst#101 https://nos.nl/teletekst#101 Listening to the radio news once a day works as well (5 minutes or so). I would like to have a podcast feed for that!

platz 8y ago

If you didn't read anything about the Panama papers or pfas, etc.. how will you know who to vote for in the next primaries and elections? Or will you vote how you did the last time?

barrad0s 8y ago

As far as TV goes, I made a choice about a year and a half ago to stop viewing any news on TV and haven't looked back. I like to think I'm informed, I will read certain things, or pursue things I think necessary or interesting, but I have abandoned all the nonsense on TV.

elorant 8y ago

The beef I have with journalism is that every time they write on a topic I have good knowledge of, I find their coverage to be lame and lacking depth. Which leads me to a more generalized assumption that this is probably true for any given subject, except perhaps politics. Most notable example I can think of is how the media covers A.I. issues. I don't expect newspapers to have book quality analysis but at the very least I expect some kind of integrity. If I have to wonder every time whether the journalist knows what he/she's talking about then I'd rather not read them at all.

zazen 8y ago
This has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect Although I think it bears saying that journalists really might be doing a better job of reporting on the politics that is their own main interest than on the science stories which are far outside their own interest and expertise, and which they may well regard as lower priority for accuracy.
asdff 8y ago
Only the largest publications can afford or have the clout to have experts writing their stories. I don't trust WiRED to write a biology article, but with a big story NYT will reach out to a professor in the field and publish their input on the topic, for instance.

samcday 8y ago

As an uneducated ignoramus, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I only recently discovered JSTOR Daily (https://daily.jstor.org/ https://daily.jstor.org/). Marrying current events / open policy debates / political trends to hard research is really doing it for me lately. Surface level "on the ground" reporting of who farted 15 seconds ago in the White House has its use, certainly. But I much prefer to read a thoughtful piece on the frequency at which people have historically farted in the White House. That way I can contrast it with the behaviors of the current ruling party. It can also be supplemented with analysis into how society's view on White House farts has evolved in tandem with the so-and-so Revolution or the such-and-such cultural shift. All of this being sourced from research steeped in hard evidence. Aside from JSTOR Daily, what other recommendations can people provide for this kind of quality journalism?

anonu 8y ago

The 2 principles of anonu apply here: 1. Moderation in all things 2. The devil is in the details. There's a bit more nuance to the situation. Your attention is yours. What happens in the media, Facebook, etc... Is an attempt to take your attention. For the most part your allocation is spent where the biggest dopamine hit can come from. If you start valuing your attention based more on an ROI calculation where your return is "did I learn something useful from a balanced source that can help form my world view?" Then you quickly start to cut out the BS. Here are my tips for high ROI consumption: Read long form articles about a subject. Skip over them if needed so a as not to waste time. Call BS early. Poorly written books or articles should be nixed immediately. Avoid the sugar: low ROI stuff like Instagram, Facebook, Reddit

williesleg 8y ago

Stop. Enjoy life. It's great. News polarizes people and gives them anxiety. It's stuff out of your control. Spend time improving yourself and your life. Hacker News, stop posting political crap.

Red29 8y ago

Totally Agree. I think everyone should go through a 6-12 month period of not reading newspapers and see how you feel. I did that and I felt much happier, and more knowledgeable (instead reading science,math, literature). The problem with newspapers (even high brow newspapers) is that they encourage negative emotions (anger, fear, envy), are irritatingly political / full of identity politics or are full of repetitive facts (another uniformed brexit article etc.) or plain old hot air gossip. Instead of daily newspapers take a long term view and look at the news once every quarter or two from a quality publication such as the Economist/ financial times etc. Newspapers are bunk

smoe 8y ago

Although not directly mentioning it, the post seems to imply that things were better in the past. I like this 2013 article from the Guardian better because it goes deeper into fundamental issues with news, independent from the "internet age". https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... Key points for me: News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. [...] Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. I stopped reading news around 2011, while I was working at a big news site, within a building complex of about half a dozen more publications including online, print, paid, free, weekly and daily. Seeing how the sausage is made has overall increased my respect for journalists, but decreased the one for the process of publication and the business behind it. It easy to blame corporate overloads, but the pressure for almost real time news comes in part from the readers. At first I sought to solve the potential problem of being uninformed of not reading news technically. Thinking about building an aggregator with a more objective way to judge news-worthiness and relevancy than the existing ones and news sites. But then I realized there is already a good enough solution in place: If something is important for me to care about, it will eventually reach me in some way or another trough social interactions (mostly offline since i don't use social media much). And because of the delay of information getting to me, I'm way more likely to get actual useful insights when I then dig deeper than when trying to keep up with everything live.

grecy 8y ago

After spending well over two years all over Africa (and previously 2 year all over Latin America) I've come to the conclusion that "news" today is no such thing. What is sold as "news" today is just whatever dramatic world events some producer thinks will get ratings which is important so they can keep their job. In no way does it give people a well-rounded or informed position about anything as the word "news" implies.

gowld 8y ago
Drop the "today", it's cleaner. wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

robohoe 8y ago

https://www.allsides.com https://www.allsides.com is a good news site to get news concerning America from more than just one (presumably biased) side. It is interesting to see how various news sources spin news using catchy titles pandering to different types of folks.

Eli_P 8y ago

If I just want to catch up, there're River5[1] and NewsBoat[2], or build-your-own-aggregator apps. The latter is a console app with a UI like Vim's; I like its fast filtering with '/'. The downside of apps is there's no grooming in comments. [1] https://github.com/scripting/river5 https://github.com/scripting/river5 [2] https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

weliketocode 8y ago

This article is right on. - Avoiding the daily news likely will NOT make you any less informed. - Avoiding constant media consumption will NOT give power to a central authority and reduce your rights. A lot of the counter arguments here are seemingly from individuals defending the amount of time they spend consuming content. To those who read the news religiously, what was the last news item that you, personally, took action on? Can you remember it? Ok. GREAT! --> Now, be objective with yourself. What % of news items did YOU take action on? Did it give you a >0 return on invested time?

minikites 8y ago
>Avoiding constant media consumption will NOT give power to a central authority and reduce your rights. Are you part of a class of people who have rights that are in danger? Do you think everyone is safe from that?
pjc50 8y ago
If you avoid the news long enough, eventually you will find that your rights have been reduced without you noticing. You absolutely can take real action with financial implications for yourself from news items - I made £1k from a single Telegraph article on how the Royal Mail IPO was grossly underpriced. I've adjusted my pension allocation on the assumption that the pound would fall against the dollar and done quite well on that too. But for much news it's not so much "achieving a positive return" as avoiding a negative. It's the Arthur Dent effect: one day you wake up to find aliens about to bulldoze your planet, and they tell you that you were warned and should have known about it. There's a lot of that these days. I'm surrounded by people who have taken Brexit-related actions of one kind or another, especially all the Europeans who suddenly have to register to avoid deportation. I factored it in to my job change, not as a major factor, but it's convenient to be working for a US multinational rather than a company exporting or importing physical goods from the EU. I don't even seek out that much news any more, it just keeps leaking in via social media. I should make more effort to follow local news, because that really is the place where I can find out if someone's going to put a bypass through my house or disrupt my bus route, and have a chance of stopping it.
tomjen3 8y ago

therealdrag0 8y ago

This Freakanomics episode is what got me thinking about this: "Why do we really follow the news" (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-really-follow-the-news-a-new-freakonomics-radio-episode/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-really-follow-the-...).

therealdrag0 8y ago

A neat way of getting a high-level view of current events (news) is the wikipedia page. The headlines here change much less frequently that most news-outlets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events It's also more of a log of what's happened instead of political headlines.