12 ms·

News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest

46 points by ycdxvjp 3y ago

thisisauserid 3y ago
Except for every single person I encounter parroting back whatever happens to be in the news like automatons?
- nativeit 3y ago
  Did you hear? The Secretary of Defense was missing after getting sucked out of a faulty emergency door on a Boeing 737X while flying to testify that Ukraine needs more arms with which to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in a Trump trial.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
My generation seems to read headlines on social media and nothing else. I wonder if it was the same back in the newspaper days. Would your average person see the headlines in the paper and stop there?
- bentcorner 3y ago
  Probably. There's a reason "above the fold" is a term.
  - kurthr 3y ago
    And burying the lede: to delay sharing the essential information in a story, and beginning with secondary details instead. or "one weird thing"
- JohnFen 3y ago
  What I learned in journalism classes: yes, they mostly did. People would read the headline and, if the story was of some interest to them, the first paragraph. Most readers wouldn't read the full story unless it was something of particular interest to them. We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that. Also, people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone, despite that being obviously nonsensical.
  - NortySpock 3y ago
    > people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone Well, when the headline is "Lost hiker found using Apple Watch" or "Airline grounds fleet due to loose bolts" or "potential presidential candidate says something that sounds stupid" or "AMD says their new chips are faster than last year's chips", then I don't really need to read anything further to know the gist of the story, do I?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Yes, you do, unless the story isn't important to you. Even then, you shouldn't let the knowledge of a headline lead you to think that you know what's happened. Headlines are not written by the person who wrote the story, and are often misleading. The only thing a headline informs you about is the general topic of the story. Thinking that the headline is a summary of the story or accurately reflects what the story says is risky. The two primary ways that bias sneaks into news reporting are through story selection and through the choice of headline.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
      Unfortunately, headlines are frequently contradicted by the text in the article. For the headlines that are enticing enough to get high on social media, it seems like more than half are misleading.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    > We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that. Also because it's better writing. For that purpose, anyway. One can find readable images of e.g. late 19th and early 20th century papers that followed this style like it was the word of God, and they are so nice and effortless to read.
seeknotfind 3y ago
> I cannot stress enough how clear the structural trends are, and how fundamentally they will change journalism from serving the broad public to serving, basically, people like me who are affluent, highly educated, privileged, and middle-aged or older. Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  It seems like often times articles of this type are the exegesis of an idealism that has been dashed
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I also found this sentence to be oddly self-aggrandizing. He has determined that only cultured elites like himself are interested in knowing what's going on in the world, apparently. Even if all only people who are affluent, highly educated, privileged (aren't all affluent people privileged?), and middle-aged or older read the news, that's still way more people than care about art. Plenty of people I know who fit these criteria don't care at all about art, but definitely read the news.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    For a certain idea of what's going on in the world –– the author mentions horserace coverage, “behind the scenes” features, and punditry –– that's true.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  Kinda serious, but self centred. TLDR journalism is expensive. Accurate journalism even more so, investigative 10 x that. if its only for rich people, then only rich people problems will get exposed. Longer: As you know journalism costs, "journalism" is cheaper, and often more popular. What do I mean? Big paid for news systems have the budget to let people investigate stuff, peer in, check sources and generally have specialists in different areas (transport, health, science, trade, business, environment, law , etc). This means that its harder to sneak bullshit past them, and use that platform as a free advertiser. What does this mean in practice? Well, lets look at tech coverage. the free sites are basically a thin veneer over tech company's PR. Certain sites will be given exclusive access if they are nice and well behaved. Tech companies are almost never tackled on their bullshit. Thats down to financial news sites or the like. Theranos was obviously pulling some bullshit, but it wasn't until the WSJ put some effort in before consequences actually happened. but how could that be? because up until the finance news papers got involved, Theranos was operating in a pull model, sending invites to tech journalists who know that if they say bad things, they won't be called back. Apple and Tesla do this as well, along with others. This means that if you want eyeballs, you need to be nice to the tech companies and print bullshit. So what does that mean? It means that rich people's news sources are doing the majority of investigative journalism, which means there are scandals that affect the average person, going unpunished. For the UK that means things like the collapse of the NHS, Adult and social care, the halfing of all local council budgets, along with education for kids with any kind of extra need. Most of that is known, but its never a front of centre by the news sources. Which means the government can ignore it. (see the post office scandal, it was known about, but never front page. it took a fucking drama to shame the state into action.)
NegativeLatency 3y ago
I’ve been reading NPR along with some foreign sites like the guardian and Al Jazeera and it really feels like the US is drinking its own koolaid WRT what gets covered and what doesn’t. Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives. Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.
- taeric 3y ago
  To think this is somehow a US problem is not doing your view any favors. Listing other popular news sources, just means you are seeing other popular news. That can tell you little about how factual or relevant it is. Just how popular it is.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time Why should they? In the news, I mean. (With electeds is a separate question.)
- mesofile 3y ago
  > the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
forinti 3y ago
> It could end up akin to classical music, contemporary art, and literary fiction — important for a few in the upper crust, marginal to the lives of the majority of the public. Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new. You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed. The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.
- Solvency 3y ago
  We don't need "news". We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped. Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected. Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.
  - FrankyHollywood 3y ago
    That 'log' is generated by journalists, and the only reason why I have a paid subscription to a newspaper. Imagine living in a world without journalists and politicians and enterprises can do whatever they like without anyone ever writing about it...
    - ejb999 3y ago
      as opposed to politicians doing whatever they want, and journalists providing cover and/or distractions for them?
    - wharvle 3y ago
      You'd need journalism to dig out the parts & trends that matter given historical and current context anyway. "Murders up 10% in [city]"—is that statistical noise? Was there a policy change that may be connected? Does it follow historical trends for current economic conditions, so is perhaps a "natural" variation? Is below or above statewide trends? National? International? If it's below or above any of those, what might be the cause? Which sorts of policies have a history of being effective under these particular circumstances, to reduce a murder rate? Do any of the policies being proposed by various political figures have a history of being effective, or a history of being ineffective, or any history at all? Do any of the political figures stand to profit from their own proposals, or otherwise personally or professionally benefit in some maybe-questionable way? All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).
drcongo 3y ago
News has always been, and always will be, only important to the elites. They feed it to us to make us feel like we have agency.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  You've copped some downvotes but I think your first sentence rings true. I think your second sentence is bullshit because why would any "they" care what "we" feel like. The news industry is built around making money from peoples attention. Like many other things in this world that seem planned it's just the product of business satisfying a human desire.
  - Geisterde 3y ago
    "Show me the incentives and ill show you the outcome". That is more or less what you are saying, but I don't know why you would preclude the possibility of a deliberate strategy in achieving those ends.
  - drcongo 3y ago
    I'm a little surprised at the downvotes, but then reading my comment back the brevity leans it toward pithy, so probably deserved. To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about. All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped. The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.
soneca 3y ago
I don’t know who the author considers “elite”, but I do consider News very marginal to me already (for several years actually). To keep the analogy, Art is much more important to me than News. But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?
- BoxFour 3y ago
  Without diminishing your achievements, the term 'elite' often refers to individuals possessing substantial societal influence, through wealth or similar channels. This usually means the top 0.01%.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > the term 'elite' often refers to individuals possessing substantial societal influence, through wealth or similar channels It’s used variously. In terms of elite overproduction, it’s anyone with an education. In terms of social policy, it’s anyone with philanthropic wealth; top 1% is easily in this category. Top 5%, depending on one’s community.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    That’s an unreasonably narrow definition of “elite” for any purpose which you’d want to talk about the elite. The top 0.01% depend on armies of top 5% people. The incomes of people at the 95th percentile have continued to grow at consistent rates throughout the 20th century, while the median income stagnated: https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3 https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos.... For example, I’m not in the 0.01%, but as a corporate attorney I make multiples of what I would make in Europe. Is that because American lawyers are smarter? No. It’s because the sheer profitability of American companies means they have a ton of money to fight legal battles with each other. The same is true for everyone from accountants to software engineers. Why are Silicon Valley salaries so high? Because Google and Facebook have profit margins comparable to Standard Oil back in the day. And whether they think about it or not, all of these people have a strong incentive to maintain the system that enables them to capture an outsized share of the economy. Thus, properly defined, the elites include the ordinary wealthy whose livelihoods are intertwined with those of the super wealthy. In Scandinavian countries, the top tax bracket starts around 1.5x the median income. I think that’s a pretty fair definition of “elite”—these are people who would be worse off under a more equitable system. The term also properly includes the educational elites who staff various bureaucracies and organizations that have high degrees of social influence. If you look at the folks who exercise decision making authority over the lives of ordinary people (everyone from judges to regulators), they overwhelmingly come from a handful of elite schools. DOJ attorneys might not be rich, but they went to school with and are friends with the CEOs and hedge fund guys. The same is true for journalists at national-level outfits like the New York Times.
kukkeliskuu 3y ago
The first job AI will replace (this has already partly happened) is the "journalist". Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around. They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of "journalism" is easy to replace with AI. Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don't see it disappearing, because the consumers of the "news" provide value to those who have an agenda to push.
- zilti 3y ago
  Oh there still are good journalists around. People just don't care enough about quality journalism that they'd spend a few bucks on it a month when there's crappy free journalism.
  - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
    Care to share some examples? There are some good investigative journalists in my country, but that is about it. I have seen very close (family member) how even the excellent investigative journalists have difficulties, because they are making power structures uncomfortable, and media ownership is too close to the power structures. In my country, there is even a platform for deep and slow journalism, but the content is crap, because even when journalists get the resources to do quality journalism, they are no longer able to do it. It appears to me that they are so used to pushing agendas, that the only kind of journalism they can do is agenda journalism.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  In cases like this I think it's better to say AI is eliminating jobs, not replacing them. As you note, the tech can't do the job, but it can do a job, for profit, that will result in other jobs going away. Much like the computer eliminated the job of the newspaper typesetter. Some newspapers already have no local staff, and just publish content generated at some distant office by the owner, like Gannet. Give Gannet access to sufficient LLM resources and they'll churn out crappier crap. Even Sports Illustrated was caught using generated, complete with fake author biographies.[1]. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/28/sports-illustrated-ai-writers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/28/sports-illustr...
kikokikokiko 3y ago
Am I the only one that read the name of the author at the top of the page, "Rasmus Kleis Nielsen", and thought it was a joke on Rasmussen, Nielsen etc, the usual poll companies? It's even more on the nose, since trust on opinion polls maybe the only thing lower than trust on mainstream news.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> But people in the U.S. can still access online news from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, and many others for free. These are all TV/radio channels. Somehow newspaper brands work better on the web then TV brands.
vlucas 3y ago
This is the natural result of cable news becoming increasingly biased and even outright and completely false and/or misleading. There is almost no tolerance for asking even the most basic critical questions of the prevailing narrative or having an honest conversation with dissenters of mainstream views. Watching mainstream news feels increasingly like watching propaganda instead of "news". There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer/reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  We need to go back to the regulated news model. I.e. when independent news organizations were mandated for broadcast channels. Dry facts. Balanced commentary. They're doing it wrong if it's not boring, because it shouldn't be playing your emotions. If the for-profit sector wants to continue to air partisan-pro-wrestling-masquerading-as-news... fine. But the average viewer/reader needs to have an easily accessible and comprehensive alternative. Most countries have some form of this, but it needs to be recognized as a critical democratic institution in a post-gen-AI world, and funded as such.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Even if this were mandated/accomplished, it still wouldn't solve the coverage bias issue, which is a large part of the problem.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Absolutely, but not-for-profit and for-profit have substantially different starting levels of bias. That not-for-profit still needs to guard against it isn't a reason that we can't immediately improve on the low bar that is for-profit news.
  - parineum 3y ago
gooob 3y ago
i was thinking about something similar last night: that what we call "news" is obsolete. this narration of human-social-events. we have the tech to observe the world as it is, and if something interesting happens, save that. like, the only important news is scientific discovery. read about an experiment that someone did and what was proved or disproved or gained by that experiment. watch a video of the experiment, look at the data, whatever. idk, there is an ideal state of affairs that i'm thinking of where "geopolitics" isn't really a thing, because we no longer find the concept of a "country" useful, because we've established an optimal method of resource allocation and distribution. but that would only really happen once everyone becomes enlightened i guess.
DudeOpotomus 3y ago
Its 100% due to ad tech. When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters. The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures. Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it's profitable, all boundaries are lost. The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It's all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.
edflsafoiewq 3y ago
The current title ("News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest") is difficult to parse. An improvement would be "News could end up like Art, important to few elites, marginal to the rest".
- leetrout 3y ago
  Its not even the title of the article. We're "not supposed to editorialize". Anyway, this got hit by the flamewar trigger and is off the front page now
taeric 3y ago
I'm curious how this is different than the past? World news, in particular, has always been of very marginal value to most folks. Indeed, with the level of understanding and agency that most of us have, I'm struggling to see what an alternative would be.
snakeyjake 3y ago
News is already of marginal utility to most people, except as entertainment. The top headlines on my version of Google News are: * an update on Trump's trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses * a story about France's new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France * more trump trial * more trump trial * a piece on Age of Emprires * whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer * an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info * news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I'm an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available * crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess Minimally important. The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting. Everything else is just information/misery/voyeurism pornography. It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news. That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.
- taeric 3y ago
  Agreed. Even the "news" listed on this site is usually of dubious value. I enjoy it, but I couldn't claim that a large percentage of it is "important." I think people are under the odd impression that news used to be akin to national intelligence. But that was always far more detailed than news agencies were able to report. And, hopefully, more actionable. But most of the "actionable" comes from the greater agency of the government. Not from knowing the data.
melagonster 3y ago
I don't know the condition in worldwide, but in my hometown newspaper companies spend more resources collecting news from everywhere. TV news rely on newspapers, YouTube "news channels" rely on TV. I don't what will happen when everything fail apart.
cratermoon 3y ago
This article seems as out of touch about the real problems with journalism. All he observes is "much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer", yet all he talks about is election coverage. News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2] 1. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/loss-of-local-news/the-rise-of-the-ghost-newspaper/ https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/... 2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-salinas-californian-withers-a-city-yearns-to-know-its-stories https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-s...
_fat_santa 3y ago
What I increasingly see is that mainstream news is in it's own bubble, they report on things that they think are very relevant from their point of view, but the rest of the country really couldn't give a damn about. The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn't matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy. Again if you are in DC then it's an important issue but if you're the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally. And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren't really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
It depends on what we mean by “news”. I think there are three levels for looking after prod - monitoring - modelling - machining This applies here I think Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it? Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red? Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs. This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week. News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator) But Murrows news has been disaggregated. The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well) The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models. We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions What we need are great journalists.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  On a related thought, the model approach would be a interesting OSINT feature - imagine a Snow Crash style CIA Factbook containing a Wikipedia like feed of continuous real time data - not stock prices but shipman’s airplane movements, estimates of cargo and bills of material for cars being shipped. Laying bare this world trade, will have an impact on similar way laying bare the politicking of parliaments did. Would look cool too
incomingpain 3y ago
>However gratifying, no amount of speechifying about how journalism serves the public interest will save the profession and the business if the public isn’t interested. A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy. In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad. But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more. >So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge. We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.
mikhael28 3y ago
Most news isn't worth paying for. I subscribe to the Economist, and read Politico. That's it - I could care less about anything else. Sometimes I read The Hill.

46 points by ycdxvjp 3y ago

thisisauserid 3y ago

Except for every single person I encounter parroting back whatever happens to be in the news like automatons?

nativeit 3y ago
Did you hear? The Secretary of Defense was missing after getting sucked out of a faulty emergency door on a Boeing 737X while flying to testify that Ukraine needs more arms with which to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in a Trump trial.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago

My generation seems to read headlines on social media and nothing else. I wonder if it was the same back in the newspaper days. Would your average person see the headlines in the paper and stop there?

bentcorner 3y ago
Probably. There's a reason "above the fold" is a term.
- kurthr 3y ago
  And burying the lede: to delay sharing the essential information in a story, and beginning with secondary details instead. or "one weird thing"
JohnFen 3y ago
What I learned in journalism classes: yes, they mostly did. People would read the headline and, if the story was of some interest to them, the first paragraph. Most readers wouldn't read the full story unless it was something of particular interest to them. We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that. Also, people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone, despite that being obviously nonsensical.
- NortySpock 3y ago
  > people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone Well, when the headline is "Lost hiker found using Apple Watch" or "Airline grounds fleet due to loose bolts" or "potential presidential candidate says something that sounds stupid" or "AMD says their new chips are faster than last year's chips", then I don't really need to read anything further to know the gist of the story, do I?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes, you do, unless the story isn't important to you. Even then, you shouldn't let the knowledge of a headline lead you to think that you know what's happened. Headlines are not written by the person who wrote the story, and are often misleading. The only thing a headline informs you about is the general topic of the story. Thinking that the headline is a summary of the story or accurately reflects what the story says is risky. The two primary ways that bias sneaks into news reporting are through story selection and through the choice of headline.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    Unfortunately, headlines are frequently contradicted by the text in the article. For the headlines that are enticing enough to get high on social media, it seems like more than half are misleading.
- wharvle 3y ago
  > We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that. Also because it's better writing. For that purpose, anyway. One can find readable images of e.g. late 19th and early 20th century papers that followed this style like it was the word of God, and they are so nice and effortless to read.

seeknotfind 3y ago

> I cannot stress enough how clear the structural trends are, and how fundamentally they will change journalism from serving the broad public to serving, basically, people like me who are affluent, highly educated, privileged, and middle-aged or older. Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
It seems like often times articles of this type are the exegesis of an idealism that has been dashed
gnicholas 3y ago
I also found this sentence to be oddly self-aggrandizing. He has determined that only cultured elites like himself are interested in knowing what's going on in the world, apparently. Even if all only people who are affluent, highly educated, privileged (aren't all affluent people privileged?), and middle-aged or older read the news, that's still way more people than care about art. Plenty of people I know who fit these criteria don't care at all about art, but definitely read the news.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  For a certain idea of what's going on in the world –– the author mentions horserace coverage, “behind the scenes” features, and punditry –– that's true.
KaiserPro 3y ago
Kinda serious, but self centred. TLDR journalism is expensive. Accurate journalism even more so, investigative 10 x that. if its only for rich people, then only rich people problems will get exposed. Longer: As you know journalism costs, "journalism" is cheaper, and often more popular. What do I mean? Big paid for news systems have the budget to let people investigate stuff, peer in, check sources and generally have specialists in different areas (transport, health, science, trade, business, environment, law , etc). This means that its harder to sneak bullshit past them, and use that platform as a free advertiser. What does this mean in practice? Well, lets look at tech coverage. the free sites are basically a thin veneer over tech company's PR. Certain sites will be given exclusive access if they are nice and well behaved. Tech companies are almost never tackled on their bullshit. Thats down to financial news sites or the like. Theranos was obviously pulling some bullshit, but it wasn't until the WSJ put some effort in before consequences actually happened. but how could that be? because up until the finance news papers got involved, Theranos was operating in a pull model, sending invites to tech journalists who know that if they say bad things, they won't be called back. Apple and Tesla do this as well, along with others. This means that if you want eyeballs, you need to be nice to the tech companies and print bullshit. So what does that mean? It means that rich people's news sources are doing the majority of investigative journalism, which means there are scandals that affect the average person, going unpunished. For the UK that means things like the collapse of the NHS, Adult and social care, the halfing of all local council budgets, along with education for kids with any kind of extra need. Most of that is known, but its never a front of centre by the news sources. Which means the government can ignore it. (see the post office scandal, it was known about, but never front page. it took a fucking drama to shame the state into action.)

NegativeLatency 3y ago

I’ve been reading NPR along with some foreign sites like the guardian and Al Jazeera and it really feels like the US is drinking its own koolaid WRT what gets covered and what doesn’t. Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives. Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.

taeric 3y ago
To think this is somehow a US problem is not doing your view any favors. Listing other popular news sources, just means you are seeing other popular news. That can tell you little about how factual or relevant it is. Just how popular it is.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time Why should they? In the news, I mean. (With electeds is a separate question.)
mesofile 3y ago
> the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

forinti 3y ago

> It could end up akin to classical music, contemporary art, and literary fiction — important for a few in the upper crust, marginal to the lives of the majority of the public. Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new. You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed. The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.

Solvency 3y ago
We don't need "news". We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped. Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected. Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.
- FrankyHollywood 3y ago
  That 'log' is generated by journalists, and the only reason why I have a paid subscription to a newspaper. Imagine living in a world without journalists and politicians and enterprises can do whatever they like without anyone ever writing about it...
  - ejb999 3y ago
    as opposed to politicians doing whatever they want, and journalists providing cover and/or distractions for them?
  - wharvle 3y ago
    You'd need journalism to dig out the parts & trends that matter given historical and current context anyway. "Murders up 10% in [city]"—is that statistical noise? Was there a policy change that may be connected? Does it follow historical trends for current economic conditions, so is perhaps a "natural" variation? Is below or above statewide trends? National? International? If it's below or above any of those, what might be the cause? Which sorts of policies have a history of being effective under these particular circumstances, to reduce a murder rate? Do any of the policies being proposed by various political figures have a history of being effective, or a history of being ineffective, or any history at all? Do any of the political figures stand to profit from their own proposals, or otherwise personally or professionally benefit in some maybe-questionable way? All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).

drcongo 3y ago

News has always been, and always will be, only important to the elites. They feed it to us to make us feel like we have agency.

badcppdev 3y ago
You've copped some downvotes but I think your first sentence rings true. I think your second sentence is bullshit because why would any "they" care what "we" feel like. The news industry is built around making money from peoples attention. Like many other things in this world that seem planned it's just the product of business satisfying a human desire.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  "Show me the incentives and ill show you the outcome". That is more or less what you are saying, but I don't know why you would preclude the possibility of a deliberate strategy in achieving those ends.
- drcongo 3y ago
  I'm a little surprised at the downvotes, but then reading my comment back the brevity leans it toward pithy, so probably deserved. To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about. All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped. The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.

soneca 3y ago

I don’t know who the author considers “elite”, but I do consider News very marginal to me already (for several years actually). To keep the analogy, Art is much more important to me than News. But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?

BoxFour 3y ago
Without diminishing your achievements, the term 'elite' often refers to individuals possessing substantial societal influence, through wealth or similar channels. This usually means the top 0.01%.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > the term 'elite' often refers to individuals possessing substantial societal influence, through wealth or similar channels It’s used variously. In terms of elite overproduction, it’s anyone with an education. In terms of social policy, it’s anyone with philanthropic wealth; top 1% is easily in this category. Top 5%, depending on one’s community.
- rayiner 3y ago
  That’s an unreasonably narrow definition of “elite” for any purpose which you’d want to talk about the elite. The top 0.01% depend on armies of top 5% people. The incomes of people at the 95th percentile have continued to grow at consistent rates throughout the 20th century, while the median income stagnated: https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3 https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos.... For example, I’m not in the 0.01%, but as a corporate attorney I make multiples of what I would make in Europe. Is that because American lawyers are smarter? No. It’s because the sheer profitability of American companies means they have a ton of money to fight legal battles with each other. The same is true for everyone from accountants to software engineers. Why are Silicon Valley salaries so high? Because Google and Facebook have profit margins comparable to Standard Oil back in the day. And whether they think about it or not, all of these people have a strong incentive to maintain the system that enables them to capture an outsized share of the economy. Thus, properly defined, the elites include the ordinary wealthy whose livelihoods are intertwined with those of the super wealthy. In Scandinavian countries, the top tax bracket starts around 1.5x the median income. I think that’s a pretty fair definition of “elite”—these are people who would be worse off under a more equitable system. The term also properly includes the educational elites who staff various bureaucracies and organizations that have high degrees of social influence. If you look at the folks who exercise decision making authority over the lives of ordinary people (everyone from judges to regulators), they overwhelmingly come from a handful of elite schools. DOJ attorneys might not be rich, but they went to school with and are friends with the CEOs and hedge fund guys. The same is true for journalists at national-level outfits like the New York Times.

kukkeliskuu 3y ago

The first job AI will replace (this has already partly happened) is the "journalist". Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around. They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of "journalism" is easy to replace with AI. Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don't see it disappearing, because the consumers of the "news" provide value to those who have an agenda to push.

zilti 3y ago
Oh there still are good journalists around. People just don't care enough about quality journalism that they'd spend a few bucks on it a month when there's crappy free journalism.
- kukkeliskuu 3y ago
  Care to share some examples? There are some good investigative journalists in my country, but that is about it. I have seen very close (family member) how even the excellent investigative journalists have difficulties, because they are making power structures uncomfortable, and media ownership is too close to the power structures. In my country, there is even a platform for deep and slow journalism, but the content is crap, because even when journalists get the resources to do quality journalism, they are no longer able to do it. It appears to me that they are so used to pushing agendas, that the only kind of journalism they can do is agenda journalism.
cratermoon 3y ago
In cases like this I think it's better to say AI is eliminating jobs, not replacing them. As you note, the tech can't do the job, but it can do a job, for profit, that will result in other jobs going away. Much like the computer eliminated the job of the newspaper typesetter. Some newspapers already have no local staff, and just publish content generated at some distant office by the owner, like Gannet. Give Gannet access to sufficient LLM resources and they'll churn out crappier crap. Even Sports Illustrated was caught using generated, complete with fake author biographies.[1]. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/28/sports-illustrated-ai-writers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/28/sports-illustr...

kikokikokiko 3y ago

Am I the only one that read the name of the author at the top of the page, "Rasmus Kleis Nielsen", and thought it was a joke on Rasmussen, Nielsen etc, the usual poll companies? It's even more on the nose, since trust on opinion polls maybe the only thing lower than trust on mainstream news.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> But people in the U.S. can still access online news from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, and many others for free. These are all TV/radio channels. Somehow newspaper brands work better on the web then TV brands.

vlucas 3y ago

This is the natural result of cable news becoming increasingly biased and even outright and completely false and/or misleading. There is almost no tolerance for asking even the most basic critical questions of the prevailing narrative or having an honest conversation with dissenters of mainstream views. Watching mainstream news feels increasingly like watching propaganda instead of "news". There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer/reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.

ethbr1 3y ago
We need to go back to the regulated news model. I.e. when independent news organizations were mandated for broadcast channels. Dry facts. Balanced commentary. They're doing it wrong if it's not boring, because it shouldn't be playing your emotions. If the for-profit sector wants to continue to air partisan-pro-wrestling-masquerading-as-news... fine. But the average viewer/reader needs to have an easily accessible and comprehensive alternative. Most countries have some form of this, but it needs to be recognized as a critical democratic institution in a post-gen-AI world, and funded as such.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Even if this were mandated/accomplished, it still wouldn't solve the coverage bias issue, which is a large part of the problem.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Absolutely, but not-for-profit and for-profit have substantially different starting levels of bias. That not-for-profit still needs to guard against it isn't a reason that we can't immediately improve on the low bar that is for-profit news.
- parineum 3y ago

gooob 3y ago

i was thinking about something similar last night: that what we call "news" is obsolete. this narration of human-social-events. we have the tech to observe the world as it is, and if something interesting happens, save that. like, the only important news is scientific discovery. read about an experiment that someone did and what was proved or disproved or gained by that experiment. watch a video of the experiment, look at the data, whatever. idk, there is an ideal state of affairs that i'm thinking of where "geopolitics" isn't really a thing, because we no longer find the concept of a "country" useful, because we've established an optimal method of resource allocation and distribution. but that would only really happen once everyone becomes enlightened i guess.

DudeOpotomus 3y ago

Its 100% due to ad tech. When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters. The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures. Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it's profitable, all boundaries are lost. The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It's all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.

edflsafoiewq 3y ago

The current title ("News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest") is difficult to parse. An improvement would be "News could end up like Art, important to few elites, marginal to the rest".

leetrout 3y ago
Its not even the title of the article. We're "not supposed to editorialize". Anyway, this got hit by the flamewar trigger and is off the front page now

taeric 3y ago

I'm curious how this is different than the past? World news, in particular, has always been of very marginal value to most folks. Indeed, with the level of understanding and agency that most of us have, I'm struggling to see what an alternative would be.

snakeyjake 3y ago

News is already of marginal utility to most people, except as entertainment. The top headlines on my version of Google News are: * an update on Trump's trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses * a story about France's new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France * more trump trial * more trump trial * a piece on Age of Emprires * whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer * an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info * news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I'm an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available * crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess Minimally important. The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting. Everything else is just information/misery/voyeurism pornography. It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news. That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.

taeric 3y ago
Agreed. Even the "news" listed on this site is usually of dubious value. I enjoy it, but I couldn't claim that a large percentage of it is "important." I think people are under the odd impression that news used to be akin to national intelligence. But that was always far more detailed than news agencies were able to report. And, hopefully, more actionable. But most of the "actionable" comes from the greater agency of the government. Not from knowing the data.

melagonster 3y ago

I don't know the condition in worldwide, but in my hometown newspaper companies spend more resources collecting news from everywhere. TV news rely on newspapers, YouTube "news channels" rely on TV. I don't what will happen when everything fail apart.

cratermoon 3y ago

This article seems as out of touch about the real problems with journalism. All he observes is "much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer", yet all he talks about is election coverage. News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2] 1. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/loss-of-local-news/the-rise-of-the-ghost-newspaper/ https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/... 2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-salinas-californian-withers-a-city-yearns-to-know-its-stories https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-s...

_fat_santa 3y ago

What I increasingly see is that mainstream news is in it's own bubble, they report on things that they think are very relevant from their point of view, but the rest of the country really couldn't give a damn about. The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn't matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy. Again if you are in DC then it's an important issue but if you're the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally. And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren't really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

It depends on what we mean by “news”. I think there are three levels for looking after prod - monitoring - modelling - machining This applies here I think Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it? Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red? Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs. This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week. News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator) But Murrows news has been disaggregated. The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well) The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models. We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions What we need are great journalists.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
On a related thought, the model approach would be a interesting OSINT feature - imagine a Snow Crash style CIA Factbook containing a Wikipedia like feed of continuous real time data - not stock prices but shipman’s airplane movements, estimates of cargo and bills of material for cars being shipped. Laying bare this world trade, will have an impact on similar way laying bare the politicking of parliaments did. Would look cool too

incomingpain 3y ago

>However gratifying, no amount of speechifying about how journalism serves the public interest will save the profession and the business if the public isn’t interested. A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy. In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad. But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more. >So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge. We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.

mikhael28 3y ago

Most news isn't worth paying for. I subscribe to the Economist, and read Politico. That's it - I could care less about anything else. Sometimes I read The Hill.