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I fully agree with this. Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters I still feel pret

• ecf 5y ago
  Why not skip the media by reading news directly from AP itself? Their iOS app leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s a benefit for me. I open it up and can quickly get updates for what’s happening and not be at risk of a advertisement-driven company wanting to take me down a rabbit hole of clickbait.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  My father tells me - "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?" and it kind of was eye-opening. I really don't. I wish I paid more attention to local news, local politics, and perhaps check-in on international news on a weekly basis. The internet changed all this. When I was growing up, my dad read local newspaper daily. National and international news were briefly covered in the local paper. He'd delve into the Economist and the sunday edition to catch up with the rest. This is almost unheard of today.
  • salt-thrower 5y ago
    Personally, I've subscribed to several RSS feeds for local/state news outlets in my area. That helps me stay more in touch with local stuff. Then I just do a quick scan of AP News for international stuff.
  • damnyankees 5y ago
    > "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?" In and of itself, I don't. Unfortunately, the local politicians toe the party line and ape the Big City / Big State politicians, the Cuomos and the Garcettis of the world. Suppose you could paint it at some level as "know thy enemy" (pardon the abrasiveness of the wording) because those states are something of a test bed for what to expect from the local folks, but a year or so down the line whether that's "You must wear a mask and cannot let your child use that swing set," or "policies that demoralize the police and undermine anything resembling a reasonable standard of rule-of-law, or "we must tear down statues of elder statesmen ("divisive", old, racist White men) while erecting statues of individuals that praised and sought to emulate the Haitian revolution and its genocidal outcomes." With that said, I can't stand that all of my local options routinely shove rage-bait National stories in your face. There is no true "local only" coverage.
    • LordDragonfang 5y ago
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• throwaway09223 5y ago
  About a decade ago I started reading law blogs instead of the news. They're written for other lawyers, so they're well composed, often without excessive hyperbole. The writing is far higher quality than typical journalism. They're actually informational in terms of describing the mechanisms behind power in our society. In terms of focus, if something is truly important there will always be a legal analysis. Celebrity fluff and nonsense about talking heads doesn't make the cut. Meaningful conflict and hard questions do.
  • SpringDrive 5y ago
    Do you have any suggestions for blogs that you like? Would be interested in adding some to my info diet.
    • throwaway09223 5y ago
      I used to mostly read on my commute and it's been a few years, but the most approachable is probably https://abovethelaw.com/ https://abovethelaw.com/. It has quite a bit of fluff and humor mixed in. Popehat is usually quite good, especially when there's some kind of nonsense narrative going around. Good debunking explainers https://www.popehat.com/ https://www.popehat.com/ Volokh conspiracy has very good analysis of current events as well: https://reason.com/volokh/ https://reason.com/volokh/ (was at WaPo, was independent before that. I haven't read it in a while) There's a lot of other really great stuff around as well, like the lw blog collection: https://www.lw.com/blogs https://www.lw.com/blogs
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        Popehat's Twitter is a really good source for "is legal issue x actually a big deal?" sanity checks on breaking news. Sometimes it's "yes, this is actually quite big"; other times it's "this is a breathless depiction of something that happens 20 times a day and is entirely normal procedure".
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      What types of news do you follow? Some suggestions are: - SCOTUSBlog - Law 360 - Bloomberg Law - ABA Journal News - Courthouse News The primary benefit to using legal sources for your news is that the legal news cycle does not match up with the 24 hour news cycle. For example, right now we're talking about SCOTUS's 2022-2023 case docket, and that doesn't even start until October. Also because lawyers like to cover their butts/believe in getting everything in writing, a lot of their back and forth is available to the public, which lets you get better context for arguments.
• pengaru 5y ago
  Same here, just scan news.google.com periodically, never watch anything unintentionally [0]. The incessant talking heads are such obvious brainwashers, whenever I get tricked into watching some in a clip or at a bar/taqueria it's utterly offensive and patronizing manipulative trash. I can't imagine how broken people are who constantly consume the stuff. [0] youtube-dl is a godsend for maintaining this without totally disconnecting from contemporary culture
  • mmaunder 5y ago
    Google News is filled with spam and cheap attention grabbing garbage these days IMO. It’s also highly targeted leading to a bubble. But I agree with both of you otherwise!
    • pengaru 5y ago
      I only view the main page with js disabled, but agree the quality has diminished since its earlier years. Castrating its use of js still retains visibility into the major headlines via the main page at least.
    • ethbr0 5y ago
      > highly targeted leading to a bubble I wish there were automation scripts one could leave running that literally just expanded ones bubble back to objective normalcy.
    • themacguffinman 5y ago
      I don't really understand where this comes from, if you're skimming the news periodically then the "Headlines" mobile app tab (or the "Top Stories" section in the website) is actually un-personalized. Google News explicitly pushes personalization in the separate and aptly named "For You" section.
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    > I can't imagine how broken people are who constantly consume the stuff. I would say for starters that they live in a much more frightening world than you and I live in. And that is very unfortunate.
• yojo 5y ago
  I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity when it comes to news. Google News has gotten increasingly annoying though, forcing me harder toward the "personalized" results, the kind of filter bubble I'm intentionally trying to avoid. What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist. They definitely have a bias (particularly in their editorials), but it's mostly of the "free trade" variety, which is pretty easy to account for. On the other hand, their world coverage, particularly Africa and Middle East, is leaps and bounds better than anything you'll get online for free. Plus the print medium is well suited for the wind-down time before bed, when I'm trying to disengage from screens. As a bonus, there's an exactly 0% chance you get click-baited into reading something inflammatory when you're consuming news on a piece of paper. Sadly they recently force-bundled print with digital, so you're stuck paying ~$80/year if you sign up during one of the frequent sales. $1.50/week is still well worth the cost of admission for me.
  • env123 5y ago
    I have to say this again for the Economist fan girls here. It's still news, it may be more objective in tone and content than other publications, but it still influences negative thinking. Negative thinking is part of the job of global leaders or actual economists, so unless you're one, you're not doing yourself a favor
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    I think it is a good choice, but you should also read other journals. Even the wrong ones or especially the wrong ones. Only if you can detach yourself from the message of course, but it is valuable to see another angle. At least from time to time.
  • falafelite 5y ago
    I also got frustrated with overly personalized results in Google News. I tried following a variety of sources on Twitter but that didn't work as well as I'd like either. I made my own topic-aligned news feed, and made a browser extension too (if you're reading an article online, it shows similar articles from other websites). Primarily a passion project, but I find it useful! Located here: https://www.nabu.news https://www.nabu.news
• vorpalhex 5y ago
  If being exposed to ads or super stimulating content is unavoidable, then how do you build a defense mechanism against it? Avoidance is good to the extent that you can engage in avoidance but not everything is avoidable. How do you actually build resistance to the stimuli?
  • bsedlm 5y ago
    quite simply, meditation. But sure there are many types of it, and while putting it like this it seems 'simple' it's also very difficult. more specifically, it all stems from the practice of self-observing how you react to something "virtually", without getting carried away by it. Doing this for any stimuli, good, bad, scary, exciting, is what it's all about, that way you can notice yourself getting carried away, and instead of going with it, you observe it pass by you. But this is a practical discipline, you gotta keep doing it until you get good at it and so on...
    • sumtechguy 5y ago
      That is a good method, another is actually studying the methods of advertising. The methods they have now are not much better than what they had 50 years ago. The only big differences are volume, intrusiveness, and rate. All of those have increased tremendously in the past few years. But learn about anchoring, A/B choice, timed choice, and so on. Helps quite a bit. So being conscious that most forms of video media are trying to sell you something. Nothing is on that screen/audio unless someone put it there. Cynical but there are so many different ways to advertise. One cute one I can not unsee is product placement. Ghostbusters was my first time seeing it. The pop can in the fridge. Always at the right angle to see the label. The funniest one was in a movie called Cobra. He stops in the middle of a scene to drink a beer, in front of all the signage. It was literally a commercial right in the middle of the movie and 'fit' the scene. One thing I have noticed after removing massive amounts of advertising in my life is that what does get through is much more effective. So you have to be very diligent in not being quick to buy anything. Buying something could be an idea or item. I also usually use a timeout method. Basically I set the 'thing' to the side and revisit it a few days later. It removes most of the urgency that most advertising tries to create.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  For me the real eye opener was this bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMDPql6rweo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMDPql6rweo
  • klft 5y ago
    You might like "The Century of the Self" as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
  • lenwood 5y ago
    Yikes! Lucy did a nice job talking around the ethics question at the end. She may be good at her job, but its pretty offensive that her job even exists.
• lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  We had a similar experience recently. We curate everything the kids watch so that they're not exposed to ads (as much as possible). Anyway, we had been watching the Olympics (can we please not let NBC have the Olympics anymore!?), and wow, every time the ads came on you could visibly see the kids demeanor change. They were hyper-focused. Then they started repeating the ads during the day then next day during play.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    My son just gets annoyed when he can’t find the “Skip Ad” button on the TV. That he has no experience with cable or broadcast TV is probably going to shock him eventually.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  Even Google News is too much for me now. Once in a while I'll scan the headlines. Or Apple News on my iPhone. But just the headlines alone are enough to turn me away. So much clickbait, so much outrage, so little substance.
• AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Yeah. Those people who spend a few million dollars on a 30-second-long ad during the Super Bowl? They aren't stupid. They aren't mistaken. It really is worth it to them. But... if the commercials can do that to your kids, what about the programming? If ads have the effect that you have observed, does programming that is full of sex and violence have no effect? The one mitigating factor I can see is the direction of the intended addiction. The ads are designed to make you want the product; the programming is designed to make you want more of the programming (not necessarily to want more sex or more violence). That might make it different from the ads. Still, based on the observed effect of the ads, I'm pretty incredulous of anyone claiming that the programming has no effect...
  • mellavora 5y ago
    further, if the programming has no effect, then why are you watching it? Obviously it has some impact on you... The relationship between TV viewing and violence/aggression is just as scientifically established as the link between smoking and lung cancer. And we've known about it since the 70s. See the official position of the AACAP, for one source (there are many sources, this is just from a quick google) https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Children-And-TV-Violence-013.aspx https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam... Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may: become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence begin to accept violence as a way to solve problems imitate the violence they observe on television; and identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers Extensive viewing of television violence by children causes greater aggressiveness
• galfarragem 5y ago
  The manipulative trivia flood of our times was exactly the reason I started my pet project[0]. For years I searched for something that could "solve" this but never found it. Eventually, I built something.. I want to be somehow informed: I didn't quit all news, I quit trivia. When I can/feel like I browse HN. When I find something relevant I post it there and try to make sense of it. This may mean once a week - but no timeline. I don't really care if it succeeds. It's a way of using my procrastination positively and I hope it helps others tackling this issue. [0] https://www.slowernews.com https://www.slowernews.com | https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
  • anthk 5y ago
    Thanks, good link. Also, 68k.news under Links+ or Lynx is heaven.
• strulovich 5y ago
  I avoid cable television and ads. But once in a while I’ll see them on a screen in a bar and they really grab my attention. I think not being exposed to ads, is actually slightly dangerous, since you don’t get used to ignoring them. When I watched television worth ads repeatedly I just automatically shut off my interest when ads were showing more efficiently. So while I’d like to keep my kids from seeing ads, I’m worried that no ads at all would prevent them from developing the mental muscles to ignore ads.
• vgeek 5y ago
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816159.It_s_Not_News_It_s_Fark https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816159.It_s_Not_News_It_... People from the old internet will recognize Fark, and this book humorously details how news organizations essentially fabricate "news" from non-news items and entertain rather than focusing on just informing.
• kvetching 5y ago
  [dead]
• hwers 5y ago
  We really don't talk often enough in the open about how the mental health crisis might be _caused_ by something like manipulative news (and not just social media).
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  I agree, but to quote a film, maybe it is best to spend years building up an immunity to Iocaine Powder, because surely you will be exposed to it come day. Immunity, not addiction of course.
• brightball 5y ago
  Even the streaming stuff will include it subtly though. I was watching a show on Netflix with my wife the other day, Sweet Magnolia’s and it seemed about as controversial as a Hallmark channel show. But these days I notice whenever specific catch phrases or expressions are getting used across multiple news outlets and it puts me a little bit on guard if a suddenly notice a phrase being used excessively…as if the point is to normalize it in your language. That show constantly used variations of the “Your truth” thing, which has always seemed in opposition to “the truth” or just “truth”. It’s one of the shadier expressions out there because it seems so harmless IMO.
  • Lascaille 5y ago
    >But these days I notice whenever specific catch phrases or expressions are getting used across multiple news outlets and it puts me a little bit on guard if a suddenly notice a phrase being used excessively…as if the point is to normalize it in your language. This is very very visible on reddit, where a term, phrase or expression will become ubiquitous almost overnight. The most recent one I can think of was the acronym 'BIPOC' - and from the circumstances of its use it was clear that a lot of users didn't understand what it meant, and were just using it as a synonym for 'minorities'. It leads me to conclude that there is much more centralisation of content than you would otherwise expect.
  • legulere 5y ago
    That discussion about the truth is already older and is just arriving in mainstream media. I first stumbled upon it at the chaos communication congress in 2007: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2334.en.html https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events... It’s easy to see how such an idea can become mainstream when our society is losing a common agreed upon basic understanding.
  • themacguffinman 5y ago
    News channels, especially many local news channels that are owned by the same company, can and do explicitly coordinate their messaging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
• ren_engineer 5y ago
  Mainstream news is worthless if you want to be ahead of the curve at all. Covid is a great example, I was stockpiled by mid January because plenty of places were talking about issues with suppliers in China in December 2019. Mainstream news was downplaying it until the first week of March 15 minutes per day in the right places and you'll be weeks to months ahead of the general population on major trends that actually matter
  • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    What you say is true but the problem is if you're not already in the know it's almost impossible to understand where to find trustworthy sources. It's not just mainstream media, social media is a great platform for misinformation as well. Readers fleeing traditional outlets into sphere where you don't even know the name of the authors nor who they're affiliated with is going to only accelerate the problem. I've become very aware of this over the past few months with the Covid debacle because I have in depth knowledge about China. I've seen misinformation spread directly from Chinese state sponsored outlets to Western media. People were mislead right from the start, which made many suspicious and led to them turning to Facebook, Reddit, Telegram & co. And of course there they got the full does, ranging from activists trying to inform people on the truth and to insane conspiracy theories, some of them very likely part of black propaganda disinformation campaigns. Our media is broken, we have to address this! It's not just enough to turn our backs, this is where opinions are made and it matters a lot. A mislead populace is a dangerous populace. I also disagree with the article that we don't need news media in general and can get knowledge from other sources. Information is power. Some people may not be interested in the news and that's fine. But people who want to actively part-take in democratic processes need to be up to date regarding political and legal developments. The same goes for investors, traders and many other people. Free societies only function with a free flow of information, everyone turning their backs is the authoritarian's wet dream because it means they can do whatever they like without scrutiny.
• agency 5y ago
  I think about this a lot when I occasionally go to the movies. I remember going as a kid and maybe you'd have a slideshow of low-budget local ads for a dentist's office or whatever until the movie started and then have some previews. Now it's just a non-stop barrage of ads. They will colonize every last waking moment of your attention. I think about my 4 year old niece who's never been to a movie theater and who will be completely defenseless against this kind of thing. It makes me sick to my stomach.
  • Melatonic 5y ago
    Those old local ads seem great now right? Then again the theaters were probably much smaller and localized as well. Waiting for the movie to start with a bunch of silent, repeating and unobtrusive ads ended up often being a great time to socialize before the film.
• JKCalhoun 5y ago
  We dropped cable when our first daughter was born. No regrets at all. It was only when in the hotel lobby having breakfast did we see the CNN/FOX alarmist news coverage blaring about a world spiraling out of control. I thought, why is it always when we're on vacation that the world begins to teeter on the brink of destruction? And then I remembered what cable news was like before we cut the cord.
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    I find reading more history (preferably: dead person-ago history) to be a healthy tonic. When my more liberal friends were ringing in the end of days at Trump's election, my take was "Do you know how many terrible Presidents the United States has had? And how openly corrupt politics was for the first century of our country? And yet, we're still here." This too shall pass, indeed.
    • jumpkick 5y ago
      I agree but the danger of this is being too dismissive of actual threats. I don't know how to draw that line.
      • ethbr0 5y ago
        Fair! Imho, there's two classes of actual threats. (1) A sudden, well-prepared realignment of the status quo, enforced afterwards on an ongoing basis. (2) The slow realignment of expectations (aka boiling the frog slowly). It seems like people often see (2), when in reality few groups are farsighted and patient enough to successfully carry that off. In reality what they're seeing is the normal sausage-making of a democracy groping towards a compromise over a point of disagreement, which has always happened. As for (1), it's the scarier but less common class. Aka the January attacks on the Capitol, if they'd been better orchestrated and had a post-attack plan. To me, weighing the severity of both is a question of "If this is successful, what will change?" As I told my conservative friends when they harp on an issue du jour: if one school district in New York state is mandating critical race theory education, what will that actually change about our country? In a democracy, people are doing ignorant / crazy / inept things somewhere constantly. But there's an important distinction to be made between "somewhere" and "sufficiently large or important places."
• bduerst 5y ago
  Scanning news aggregators like Apple and Google News also shines a light on the bias in multiple news sources, just from the headlines.
• BeetleB 5y ago
  > Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters I still feel pretty well informed I once spent several years diving deep into news, and one of the lessons I learned was that scanning headlines (or even summaries) is a very good prescription for being misinformed. There's the obvious selection bias - you only see the headlines they put on top. But it's fairly common that the body of the article undercuts the headline. The headline will be stated definitively, whereas the nuances in the details will make you doubt the certainty of the headline. In a few cases, it would even negate the headline! And this is from well regarded news sources (NY Times, WaPost, etc), not crappy click bait farms on the Internet. “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” - Mark Twain I'm a firm believer that one should either dive deep or not read the news. The moderate path leads to the most misinformation.
  • chris_va 5y ago
    Copy editors generally write the headlines, and reporters write the body. ... probably one of the worst industry practices of all time.
• Melatonic 5y ago
  Family member of mine wanted to turn on TV news the morning of Thanksgiving just to get an update on "the weather". The immediate and visceral negative reaction of everyone under the age of approximately 40 was pretty hilarious. After not having cable for 10+ years broadcast news just feels like an incredibly arduous waste of time compared to what I can read in just a few minutes. I started subscribing to a fairly large but local newspaper (as in, actual Sunday delivery) and I get a lot of weird looks but it is genuinely a mostly enjoyable experience. I tried to contact the newspaper to see if they could skip sending all of the extra junk adds (separate leaflet thankfully) but their support could literally not comprehend what I was talking about even after multiple reply emails. In their minds the only ads apparently are online.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > After not having cable for 10+ years broadcast news You mean cable news right? Broadcast news preceded cable news, when you got your news at 6PM during the prime time news slot or at 11PM during the late night news slot, and was broadcast over radio/TV waves rather than cabled into your house.
  • gopher_space 5y ago
    The newspaper makes a ton of money off of those inserts and agreements about them happen at the top of the org chart. Nobody you can reach has any power here. In addition, if their support was young enough they'd have no idea what you're talking about. "That crazy guy who thinks there's a conspiracy to print off ads and put them in his mailbox called again today!"
    • wholinator2 5y ago
      Well I would imagine any individual old enough to rent and/or shop at bed bath and beyond would be fairly familiar with the concept of receiving print ads in the mail. Those Valpack things are pretty common where I live and they're essentially exactly the same as the newspaper inserts, just like 50 of em in a branded envelope
      • 5y ago
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  If you're scanning BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters, you're not getting a balanced mix.
• kodah 5y ago
  There are very few things, I've found, that I need to be informed of by an authority. I read whatever the CDC's latest guidelines are, I read some papers that have been replicated and thoroughly vetted, and blog posts. The people that I know that stay tapped into news either nationally or globally are almost always "concerned" with something. It's their topic of the day and leaks into their speech, attitudes, and values. I've previously phrased it as, "Sometimes I feel like I'm speaking to an RSS feed more than a friend. Maybe there's more to our friendship than my opinion on the latest social issue and whether it aligns with yours?" As a consequence, I rarely talk about news or current events with anyone. While my views may not be heard or represented much I'm at least not arguing over hegemony.
• kenjackson 5y ago
  The manipulation part is what I find fascinating. And not just the way people use the term now about "fake news". But more about how the news cycle needs to keep you constantly engaged. If you follow the news, especially political news, it seems like the sky is falling constantly. I was always up in arms about something. As the author notes, when I do pay attention to the news I feel better. Again, political news in particular. I still will watch sports news. I actually feel better when I watch that -- I love seeing sports highlights, and great comebacks -- even when I don't know a single player or team involved. The stakes are so low, but the enjoyment so high.
  • Lascaille 5y ago
    >If you follow the news, especially political news, it seems like the sky is falling constantly That's because political news is advertising for the political class. You're meant to feel like there's a crisis so that you: 1. vote for them to do something about it and 2. not begrudge them their tax money.
  • kenjackson 5y ago
    I meant to say, "when I DON'T pay attention to the news I feel better"
• salty_biscuits 5y ago
  That was really shocking for me the first time I went to China and watched their version on state sponsored television, around 2005. The contrast between the doom version of the news back home, to china's overly positive "15 people are missing in a coal mine but we are trying our darnedest to get them out" was really confronting. Made me realise that it has entertainment/manipulation as a goal, not providing information.
  • ROTMetro 5y ago
    Oh wow, I found the Imams preaching on TV in China the most surprising, and only now in your context realize they were probably trying to establish Party authority of the religion.
  • ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    I didn't watch TV in China, but was struck by how all the subway ads were "public service", like "here's a picture of our traditional culture." It felt calm and reflective in comparison to those of Korea or Europe, but of course the goal of the ads was to build a sense of collective consciousness.
    • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      If you can read some Chinese, the red banner slogans they have hanging from foot bridges and on buildings everywhere have the best comedy value, like “let’s all work hard for a harmonious society.” Very old school.
  • physicles 5y ago
    Really shows how the news basically sets the background music for everyday life around the entire country. My Chinese friends have said that the evening news always comes in three parts: 1. Chinese leaders are busy; 2. Chinese people have good lives; 3. People outside China have not-so-good lives
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    There is a joke in China that a foreigner calls the hotel desk to tell him his TV is broken, it is stuck on the same channel. “No sir, it’s just the 7PM national news, which is required to be broadcast on every channel right now.”
• timq 5y ago
  In 2016 Google News was great because with a 5 minutes glance you coudl hved all the necessary news. However this strategy doesn't work anymore thanks to Google News trying to be smart by adapting news to your browsing history. I haven't been able to find a good alternative to the old Google News. I tried subscribing to one or many newspapers, but they all have too many useless articles inbetween valuable news such that filtering noise takes too much time. So in the end I still read Google News but I'm getting a sens of negativity and frustration that wasn't there in 2016. And it takes more time to have all the necessary news. Since "Time spent on Google News" is probably an important metric for Google, the situation is not going to improve anytime soon.
  • falafelite 5y ago
    What did you like about the "old Google News"? A good number of comments here seem to have a similar sentiment, so I'm genuinely curious. Was it simply the aggregation without personalization?
  • Spooky23 5y ago
    Honestly, paper newspaper. Grab it when you get gas, beer, etc. Typically it’s like $1-3 and takes a few minutes to read. Much better experience overall.
  • themacguffinman 5y ago
    I don't really understand where this comes from, if you're glancing at the news then the "Headlines" mobile app tab (or the "Top Stories" section in the website) is actually un-personalized. Google News explicitly pushes personalization in the separate and aptly named "For You" section.
• throwaway5486nv 5y ago
  I did not think "Al Jazeera" anywhere close to BBC or Reuters. It is too polarized.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
  For anyone looking for them, I have some recommendations. Written news (real time): https://www.reuters.com/ https://www.reuters.com/ I mostly read the headline stories, and it's mostly just facts. Just like the founding fathers intended. Written news (daily): https://join1440.com/ https://join1440.com/ An old-fashioned email subscription! Just facts, it seems. This may be the endgame for some people. Video news: https://www.newsy.com/ https://www.newsy.com/ I watched them a bit back when they were new and I was pretty impressed. Just a bunch of short news segments on demand. When the whole "stop the steal" thing was going on I sensed a bit of a leftward bias (like me!), but it was never very thick.
• balabaster 5y ago
  I love the Reuters app for my phone. I can listen to the roundup once in the morning while I'm getting ready or in 10 minutes on my way to the gym. It's all the basic headlines with a little blurb. Read to you with very little in the way of emotion, passion or hype. It plays in the background while I do other things and it's done. It doesn't drone on and on like the radio does until you realize you've heard this story 3 times already like on CP24 or whatever other news channel keeps blathering on while quietly promoting their hidden (or not so hidden) political agenda and gradually sapping at your will to live. I've cut off my cable/satellite TV. I don't listen to any other news sources. I read BBC's headlines once a day. Cutting off the "mainstream" media and advertising from my life has done more for my mental health than my gym membership, diet, meditation and fresh air combined. Not to say those things aren't important, but they didn't have nearly the impact that cutting off the constant drama, heightened emotion and propaganda have.
• balaji1 5y ago
  Why not let it filter through to you via a group of friends who are well informed? And will highlight whatever is interesting, funny, urgent or important. Kinda like HN front page. Each person in my group has slightly different sources they subscribe to: YT channels, Twitter, Insta, Reddit, HN. And slightly different topics. And they share stuff in the chat group.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  > And then they were watching a kids show at a hotel once and the ads came on and the effect it had on them was crazy. They suddenly desperately needed all the toys in the commercials and were repeating catch phrases from ads after only seeing them a couple of times. The contrast in their behavior was insane. And they HAD to keep watching it like I hadn't seen before. I spent a week off-grid with my parents a while back and it was great. We came home and my Mom put on the news suddenly everything was terrible and she was angry, but she had to keep watching. The comparison between childrens' responses to toy ads and adults' responses to cable news is insightful. We all think we're too smart to be fooled, but we're all children at the core. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." (Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science) Research shows, IIRC the details, that people who think they are smarter are easier to fool. But don't worry, you and I can comfort ourselves that it wouldn't apply to us. :)
• jazzyjackson 5y ago
  In the fourth grade my history teacher was idly passing back tests and sang the first half of a phone number melody in a commercial, some portion of the class felt obliged to complete the phone-number-melody and my teacher laughed and muttered, “and they say the kids aren’t being programmed by TV”
• sumedh 5y ago
  > (and confident that there's usually nothing of immediate consequence to me) Those sites are not going to cover your local news which will have an impact on your life.
• andrei_says_ 5y ago
  There’s a documentary, Consuming Kids, showing how psychologists work with child focus groups to iterate on maximizing the impact of TV commercials targeting young audiences. Immoral doesn’t even begin to describe this phenomenon.
  • mvdwoord 5y ago
    Interesting bit in "The Corporation" iirc about a phony research on how to make kids nag more efficiently which was presented as neutral research for parents about raising kids. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
• ksec 5y ago
  Recent Supply Chain News, Holy mother of god, the basic fabric of our society and they could not have been more wrong. Commodity Prices and fluctuation, My god they really dont have a clue about commodity. Tech, Foundry. Repeated mainstream news that follow like an echo chamber. We are now looking at Qualcomm X65 Modem switching to TSMC 6nm. ( In case you are wondering, NO it is not true. ) And Stocks. Using Bottom Up Analysis we figure out Google is paying $15B to Apple when the actual company annual report only state $13.5B in CAC ( Customer Acquisition Cost ) in total. ( Not all CAC goes to Apple, I mean Mozilla has a small trunk of it for example ) I am not sure if it is related, but because of how much BS coming from mainstream news, people are fed up and actually provide insight on Youtube Channel. How is something being done, why it is done this way. They are still high level overview, but they are directionally much closer to the truth than anything else. And it is the same with PodCast. I now mostly just skim read news on my RSS-Feeds. The worst thing about all of these is how people trust those number, figures, analysis. This makes online discussions on these topic 95% of times useless. Like I recently said to Dr. Ian Cutress where we agree, most media are only here for attentions and clicks, they are not here to inform their readers. The sad state of things.
• bradgessler 5y ago
  That just scratches the surface! The other crazy thing about news websites is how much invasive garbage they inject into their content: ads, everything is “BREAKING!”, subscribe for alerts, etc. I basically wrote a manifesto about it at https://legiblenews.com/about https://legiblenews.com/about and built a news website that strips away all the insanity and link to source material and Wikipedia articles. It’s absolutely insane that it came to that, but it did. I'm currently working on a weekly news digest that people can view on the web or get emailed to them so they can skim the news even less. If there's something you'd like to get out of the news that's not insane please open an issue at https://github.com/legiblenews/community/issues https://github.com/legiblenews/community/issues.
• tapatio 5y ago
  Google News is the news. If you still read that then you haven’t actually quit.