4 ms·

This is very insightful. I have considered another, somewhat related idea: to sample a news / media site, over the course of time. The idea would be to illustr

by mongol 6y ago

This is very insightful. I have considered another, somewhat related idea: to sample a news / media site, over the course of time. The idea would be to illustrate how news bubble up and down in priority. It would for example be interesting to follow how a somewhat big but also controversial piece of news would be bumped down in priority as other news are added on top. As I understand, the news home pages changes very frequently to attract people to come back soon to see "what is new". This can have the effect that you miss out on something significant because it is already bumped down. In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the biggest news is no longer the biggest.

the_duke 6y ago
With all our media resources and technology, it's crazy that there is no easy way to answer questions like "what happened politically in France in the last month?", "what were the economic developments in Africa in the last quarter?" or "what were the biggest battery technology advances in the last year?". With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions. I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...). One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum. I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still). Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mongol 6y ago
  The Economist paper edition has a spread with summarized news for the past week. I have been thinking of isolating myself from the news cycle and keeping myself up-to-date with a one week latency, using the Economist's summaries. The problem is, I have not found a suitable replacement for national (in my case Swedish) and also local news. Would also pay for a similar aggregator.
  - mnsc 6y ago
    If you can stomach Hakelius then Fokus was some good quality journalism when I was a subscriber.
    - mongol 6y ago
      Good suggestion. I can stomach Hakelius, certainly. He is one of the best writers in the editorial space in Sweden today.
- grok22 6y ago
  This is a fantastic idea! To me, it seems like this would be possible only by human curation and not using any automated system which means someone with foresight will have to invest upfront the capital, time and energy to make this a reality (as opposed to a few talented engineers go off with some ML/NLP thing to figure this out).
- Fellshard 6y ago
  There is no incentive to weigh news as proportionally more or less important. Indeed, it takes some time for some news to be shown to have had a disproportionate impact, so that is part of the problem. But news outlets are even more strongly incentivized to highlight the current as the biggest, most urgent problem, over and above curating and continuing to examine trends and events of the recent past.
- mfsch 6y ago
  I’ve often wished that journalistic institutions would also publish a more long-term view on what they think is going on in the world. I think the most important effect of this could be that it would push them to consider how much their daily coverage is in line with what they actually consider to be important developments. If you explicitly state that climate change is one of the three most important challenges on the scale of the current decade, for example, can you justify the attention (or lack thereof) you give it in your daily coverage? A daily newspaper implicitly makes these judgements of how much attention each topic deserves, but they rarely have to explicitly state and defend these judgements.
- tantalor 6y ago
  You can do that right now with Google News. Here's "what happened politically in France in the last month": https://news.google.com/search?q=when:30d+french+politics https://news.google.com/search?q=when:30d+french+politics
  - the_duke 6y ago
    Have you scanned the list? I would not describe that as giving a good overview of French politics for the last month. My two other examples are considerably worse. The query also seems to be limited to a month. When increasing the query param to 60 or 120 days, nothing changes.
    - tantalor 6y ago
      Sounds like a ranking problem; not very hard to solve.
- rcpt 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_France https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_France Does an alright job imo
techbio 6y ago
I also like/had this idea, and if someone else doesn't make it first, or wants to help on it, I'm iterating with the name Wait24News.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pp19dd 6y ago
Just to offer a bit of insight, the primary vector of entry for new and repeat visitors on news sites is now a specific article, not a section front like a homepage. So, a typical article is literally the de-facto homepage you're imagining. Unless it has a sidebar (rare in the mobile age), it'll look just as anonymous as any other article. To be sure, sections (such as a homepage) still do get significant number of visits. However, the numbers I speak of differ by an order of magnitude. Articles really are the homepages now, this isn't a blind generalization. There's a bit of a Heisenberg effect involved here. We know not to spend too much time dressing a section front, but we know we'll be judged for it by you. So we put stuff up there that might be what you think we should think to be significant, or else you'll lose your trust in our judgment. But by no means does seeing the placement tell you anything about effectiveness of placement.
- mongol 6y ago
  Okay, is it then social media that acts as the "first page" for news sites? To what extent is it the news sites own Twitter etc feed, and to what extent from sharing? Seems very arbitrary these days if there is any way to get a curated and prioritized selection at all. Seems more like a continuous stream. Keeping up to date is sisyfos work.
  - pp19dd 6y ago
    Depends on the market. But generally speaking, search engine and social (and dark social) just about evenly account for a vast majority of entry points. However, consider that social share counts can and often exceed measured view counts. As in, viral articles are not necessarily ever read by people who share them.

by mongol 6y ago

the_duke 6y ago

With all our media resources and technology, it's crazy that there is no easy way to answer questions like "what happened politically in France in the last month?", "what were the economic developments in Africa in the last quarter?" or "what were the biggest battery technology advances in the last year?". With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions. I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...). One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum. I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still). Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mongol 6y ago
The Economist paper edition has a spread with summarized news for the past week. I have been thinking of isolating myself from the news cycle and keeping myself up-to-date with a one week latency, using the Economist's summaries. The problem is, I have not found a suitable replacement for national (in my case Swedish) and also local news. Would also pay for a similar aggregator.
- mnsc 6y ago
  If you can stomach Hakelius then Fokus was some good quality journalism when I was a subscriber.
  - mongol 6y ago
    Good suggestion. I can stomach Hakelius, certainly. He is one of the best writers in the editorial space in Sweden today.
grok22 6y ago
This is a fantastic idea! To me, it seems like this would be possible only by human curation and not using any automated system which means someone with foresight will have to invest upfront the capital, time and energy to make this a reality (as opposed to a few talented engineers go off with some ML/NLP thing to figure this out).
Fellshard 6y ago
There is no incentive to weigh news as proportionally more or less important. Indeed, it takes some time for some news to be shown to have had a disproportionate impact, so that is part of the problem. But news outlets are even more strongly incentivized to highlight the current as the biggest, most urgent problem, over and above curating and continuing to examine trends and events of the recent past.
mfsch 6y ago
I’ve often wished that journalistic institutions would also publish a more long-term view on what they think is going on in the world. I think the most important effect of this could be that it would push them to consider how much their daily coverage is in line with what they actually consider to be important developments. If you explicitly state that climate change is one of the three most important challenges on the scale of the current decade, for example, can you justify the attention (or lack thereof) you give it in your daily coverage? A daily newspaper implicitly makes these judgements of how much attention each topic deserves, but they rarely have to explicitly state and defend these judgements.
tantalor 6y ago
You can do that right now with Google News. Here's "what happened politically in France in the last month": https://news.google.com/search?q=when:30d+french+politics https://news.google.com/search?q=when:30d+french+politics
- the_duke 6y ago
  Have you scanned the list? I would not describe that as giving a good overview of French politics for the last month. My two other examples are considerably worse. The query also seems to be limited to a month. When increasing the query param to 60 or 120 days, nothing changes.
  - tantalor 6y ago
    Sounds like a ranking problem; not very hard to solve.
rcpt 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_France https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_France Does an alright job imo

techbio 6y ago

I also like/had this idea, and if someone else doesn't make it first, or wants to help on it, I'm iterating with the name Wait24News.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pp19dd 6y ago

Just to offer a bit of insight, the primary vector of entry for new and repeat visitors on news sites is now a specific article, not a section front like a homepage. So, a typical article is literally the de-facto homepage you're imagining. Unless it has a sidebar (rare in the mobile age), it'll look just as anonymous as any other article. To be sure, sections (such as a homepage) still do get significant number of visits. However, the numbers I speak of differ by an order of magnitude. Articles really are the homepages now, this isn't a blind generalization. There's a bit of a Heisenberg effect involved here. We know not to spend too much time dressing a section front, but we know we'll be judged for it by you. So we put stuff up there that might be what you think we should think to be significant, or else you'll lose your trust in our judgment. But by no means does seeing the placement tell you anything about effectiveness of placement.

mongol 6y ago
Okay, is it then social media that acts as the "first page" for news sites? To what extent is it the news sites own Twitter etc feed, and to what extent from sharing? Seems very arbitrary these days if there is any way to get a curated and prioritized selection at all. Seems more like a continuous stream. Keeping up to date is sisyfos work.
- pp19dd 6y ago
  Depends on the market. But generally speaking, search engine and social (and dark social) just about evenly account for a vast majority of entry points. However, consider that social share counts can and often exceed measured view counts. As in, viral articles are not necessarily ever read by people who share them.