16 ms·

Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change

rootusrootus 7mo ago
I feel like the best advice I could give to young news audiences is to stop. Just stop. What little value the news may offer to make you a more informed citizen is completely outweighed by all the negatives. Or if you must watch the news, local only.
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
  Local US television news is coöpted by conservative media empires that routinely insert propaganda pieces into the stations they control.
- tigerlily 7mo ago
  How else are young people supposed to cultivate their own cynicism though?
  - littlexsparkee 7mo ago
    That, and being prepared - either let macro phenomena like recession, AI, etc wallop you in the face or be able to spot it in the distance and adapt.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      The "news" warns people about impending recessions every single day. You can open up the Stocks app right now and there will be multiple conflicting "articles" on the SP500 having reached its top or bottom. Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.
      - littlexsparkee 7mo ago
        The benefit of media literacy is being able to tell apart issues of import vs false alarms. That career ladders could be changing due to AI; food and oil could spike / be unavailable due to Hormuz so stock up ahead of time; financial risks of BNPL, meme stocks, and crypto; and potential recession due to hiring patterns, AI bubble, private credit - those are not actionable?
        lotsofpulp 7mo ago
        I would separate out current events from "breaking news", the latter of which I think is pretty useless for 99% of people living in a developed and safe country. Trends are important to learn about, but the regular person would be well advised to prepare for emergencies in advance of the emergency. Most of the stuff you listed is probably covered under general financial education like not going into debt for frivolous purchases or not gambling on investments you know nothing about. Inclement weather is probably the most pressing thing to know about, but again, you should probably be prepared at home anyway so you're not affected by people clearing out the grocery stores. I'm looking at nytimes.com right now, and it's pretty much all meaningless in terms of what I am going to do today, tomorrow, next week, or next month. It's entertainment at best, which is fine, if you can mentally handle it. But if it's getting you down, then I see no negative consequence from skipping most of it. Obviously, come time to vote, it's important to be informed, but day to day, spending one's brain cycles thinking about stuff that will not affect them and they will not be able to affect does not seem like a good use of time.
- littlexsparkee 7mo ago
  There's some drawbacks to the news, certainly, but I can't imagine not being aware or interested in what's happening around the world. Surely it's better to follow AP and Reuters and tune the rest.
- modeless 7mo ago
  Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.
  - littlexsparkee 7mo ago
    Prediction markets miss all the experts, whether academic or laypeople wonks, who simply don't care to have a financial stake in the decision. I can't imagine how it'd be representative. In any case, the people weighing in are getting their information from somewhere and it's not thin air. How can you understand an issue without knowing motivations/vested interests from all sides, history leading up, etc?
    - sefrost 7mo ago
      Polymarket publishes accuracy statistics https://polymarket.com/accuracy https://polymarket.com/accuracy
      - littlexsparkee 7mo ago
        Thanks - I wish it could be drilled into by category, i.e. what are the stats for categories of import (filter out sports, crypto, etc). My worry is the average could appear rosier if the share of trivial events are high.
    - modeless 7mo ago
      If I have a specific interest in a topic I can do extensive research over many hours and come to my own conclusions. But for the vast majority of news headlines I see, including almost all "national" or "world" news, I don't have the time to do hours of research. In this case, reading or one or three news articles is far more likely to give me a biased and ultimately incorrect take than looking at a prediction market, which takes all the available information and condenses it into one number that matters.
  - 7mo ago
- Animats 7mo ago
  There are solid news sources, but they're hard to find and differ by the subject. For example, war maps are hard to find. Al Jazeera publishes maps of what's been hit in the Middle East, which makes sense because their readers are on the receiving end. understandingwar.com contributes to an interactive war map.[1] (The site says to view it with Firefox; Chrome has bugs on mobile.) ops.group, which is for people operating aircraft internationally, has a frequently updated map of where to avoid and what the problems are.[2] They have a GPS spoofing map. A sizable chunk of Eurasia is currently unsafe for aviation. "For flights between Europe and Asia, the normal Gulf corridor is effectively unavailable. Overflying traffic is rerouting either north via the Caucasus-Afghanistan, or south via Egypt-Saudi-Oman." Nobody wants to overfly Afghanistan. Almost no ATC, no radar, and an emergency diversion to Kabul means dealing with the Taliban. "For most operators, landing at an Afghan airport would be akin to ditching in oceanic airspace." You have to dig that hard to find out what's going on. Neither the mainstream media nor the podcasters and influencers go that far. [1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f13bd31324 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f... [2] https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operational-picture/ https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operatio...
- thesumofall 7mo ago
  And with that dismantle the fourth power which is nothing without an audience? Just let the powerful do whatever they want to do?
- techgnosis 7mo ago
  This is bad advice. Local news is not some noble pursuit. It's helpful but so is national news. It's good to know how the world is evolving. Burying your head in the sand is not a solution.
rectang 7mo ago
A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy. In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference. Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.
- thesumofall 7mo ago
  I don’t know. Is a random YT channel more trustworthy considering their reliance on sponsorships? And once they do interviews, they face the same issue I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …
  - rectang 7mo ago
    It's not that the random YT channel is actually more trustworthy, but that it exposes the audience to adversarial perspectives which mainstream access journalists hide — thereby eroding the trust of young audiences for mainstream journalist outlets compared to previous generations for whom such adversarial perspectives were less available.
    - justonceokay 7mo ago
      I miss when Christopher Hitchens could get on CNN as a self-identified socialist and have 10 minute discussions /in good faith/ with callers who disagreed with him. Sometimes he would put us silly Americans in our place, sometimes (less often) he would end up looking the fool. And he kept doing it regularly for a decade. Imagine that happening today
- Barrin92 7mo ago
  >when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference. sure because they're just making shit up. If you don't have access to a source you're by definition speculating. The fact that they can do it in an abrasive way or in attack mode is a performance of authenticity, not actual reporting. You believe them because they're "just like you". It's the biggest curse of our time and emotional manipulation. Journalists sometimes have to navigate how they talk to people but a skilled reader can at least extract real information from it even if it requires reading between the lines. The Youtube 'reporters' add nothing, it's entertainment. They're popular to the extent that they reinterpret publicly available information in a way that confirms the biases of their audiences. The journalist pays for access but the youtuber pays with audience capture, the difference is consumers of mainstream journalism are aware of it. Someone who reads an interview in the NYT with a mainstream politician know in advance that they'll have to be critical, 18 year old's watching youtube don't. Youtubers are infinitely more deferential to their audience than a journalist is ever going to be to an individual subject because the latter is professionally employed and the former is a cancelled subscription wave away from flipping burgers.
Drunkfoowl 7mo ago
[dead]
supliminal 7mo ago
“Most people across generations favour the idea of impartial news, but young people more often (32% compared with 19% of those 55+) think it ‘makes no sense for news outlets to be neutral on certain issues’, such as climate change or racism.” Unfortunately it’s documentarians such as David Attenborough that carefully curate a picture of nature as some playful, curious thing. It would behoove schools that prepare students for post-secondary education to put on actual video recordings of how animals go at it and how the strong kill the weak (and their offspring) in the most savage and cruel of ways with complete disregard. And then ask them if they would rather not know this is how the world really is. Because that’s what taking a side means here, is being wilfully ignorant.
- layman51 7mo ago
  This is tangential, but what you wrote about nature reminded me of a biology professor once saying how at least in nature it seems like other animals generally kill in a quick, efficient way where hopefully the prey won’t suffer too much.
  - rectang 7mo ago
    Humans are by far the most vicious animal species, because the sophistication with which they apply torture is off-the-charts. Felines and orcas may consume their prey alive or play with them, but it's not in their capacity to keep their victims alive indefinitely with the express goal of inflicting maximum suffering.
- decae 7mo ago
  Attenborough narrated documentaries are filled with death and carnage, shot by the most patient cinematographers in the world. What a nonsense take.
  - supliminal 7mo ago
    No, it is unfortunately very romanticized and carefully narrated. It gives a very skewed impression of reality. It is closer to a staged scene and less of a documentary, which is why some of those cinematographers wait for so long. Actual nature, and its cruelty, is so banal as to be boring that without the storytelling, you wouldn’t want to see it. I suggest you see some raw video footage, without music, additional sounds, careful DOF camera work and color correction, of one animal killing another. Watch the whole thing if you can sit through it - it takes quite awhile for an animal to die while it’s screaming in pain unable to move.
Animats 7mo ago
Useful study. UK-based. The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting. It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't. “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front. Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem. Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-influencers-war-messaging/686329/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...
- rectang 7mo ago
  I would argue that reading discussion of "CEO says" "journalism" on HN will often better inform you than reading a mainstream journalist puff-piece interview of a CEO. Many journalists will not provide adversarial viewpoints, because to do so would stanch the flow of interview subjects.
  - i80and 7mo ago
    "Access" is the filthy dirty word here. Can't be anything other than a stenographer because you might lose your ACCESS, with which you can do MORE stenography. It's a sickness.
- rdevilla 7mo ago
  > Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah. Why is any of that necessary? LLMs can just synthesize a story for the press de novo, without reference to prior developments or indeed any 20th century style on-the-ground reporting. Reporters should in fact be pleased that this meaningless drudgery has been automated out of the profession. Besides, whatever "facts" are presented will be labelled as fake news by its detractors, who will not have their own internal narratives swayed in the slightest. The rest will rest easy in their confirmation bias, it now being confirmed once more.
jrm4 7mo ago
Anecdotally, that literally only one of my college age students knew about the Moon mission was wild. I genuinely now believe that a real barrier to (the terrible idea of) reinstating the draft is that it would actually be difficult to find and inform the public about it, in a believable way.
- guzfip 7mo ago
  Perhaps I would have heard of this moon mission if HN wasn’t busy inundating me with politics and AI product threads. I feel like I vaguely remember hearing about it a while back, with little fanfare, and then not again until just yesterday. In that time I’ve learned of all kinds of crazy developments in politics and AI companies here on HN
  - irishcoffee 7mo ago
    > Perhaps I would have heard of this moon mission if HN wasn’t busy inundating me with politics and AI product threads. Personal accountability can still be something we all strive to honor. Blaming a news aggregator website for your own ignorance is a hell of a thing.
    - jrm4 7mo ago
      I mean, this kind of just feels like reasonable criticism of HN worded a bit oddly.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- thegrim33 7mo ago
  It's not really a challenge of reaching those students, the outlets that could otherwise reach them just simply aren't interested in spreading that particular news, because it goes against their ideological beliefs. And if you ask yourself "wait, why wouldn't they want to inform people of a NASA moon mission?", you're really behind the ball on what's going on. If it was information that they actually wanted to spread, it would be spread wide and far and reach those students.
ike____________ 7mo ago
It is not about sources choices. Young people must read books. Everybody should read books. Books on liberty, like "1984" or authors like Michael Ende. Also books on history (and prehistory). That is the thing that really matters and the only via to avoid echo chambers.
NotGMan 7mo ago
>> ... Meeting the needs of this segment is crucial, not just for the current stability of the journalism industry, but also for the future of democratic societies as young individuals transition through adulthood Sure buddy. Keep telling yourself that. Mainstream media can't die quick enough.
SoftTalker 7mo ago
"Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people. Around two thirds (64%) of 18–24s consume news on a daily basis, compared with 87% of people 55 and over." I used to watch the news quite a bit in my 20s--40s or so. Read a newspaper almost every day, watched the evening news. Now 20 years later? Not at all. Traditional news sites, most newspapers, and TV news shows are all rage bait and narrative spinning. None of what they talk about affects my day to day life in the slightest way. So I spend my time on things that are more enjoyable.
- porridgeraisin 7mo ago
  I do the same in my 20s :) We actually had a newspaper at home and I used to sneak a peek, atleast the sports page. But that stopped during Covid and we never renewed it... No one in the house is missing it so far. And we don't really watch news channels (our TV is just a few streaming subscriptions). At max I see a few headlines on social media recommendations. And I don't use twitter. Meaning no news. Its great highly recommended.
djoldman 7mo ago
> Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people... > Young people are also less interested in news... Haven't the youth always consumed less news and been less interested? The question is if the current youth consume less and are less interested compared to when the current old people were young, no?

I feel like the best advice I could give to young news audiences is to stop. Just stop. What little value the news may offer to make you a more informed citizen is completely outweighed by all the negatives. Or if you must watch the news, local only.

kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
Local US television news is coöpted by conservative media empires that routinely insert propaganda pieces into the stations they control.
tigerlily 7mo ago
How else are young people supposed to cultivate their own cynicism though?
- littlexsparkee 7mo ago
  That, and being prepared - either let macro phenomena like recession, AI, etc wallop you in the face or be able to spot it in the distance and adapt.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    The "news" warns people about impending recessions every single day. You can open up the Stocks app right now and there will be multiple conflicting "articles" on the SP500 having reached its top or bottom. Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.
    - littlexsparkee 7mo ago
      The benefit of media literacy is being able to tell apart issues of import vs false alarms. That career ladders could be changing due to AI; food and oil could spike / be unavailable due to Hormuz so stock up ahead of time; financial risks of BNPL, meme stocks, and crypto; and potential recession due to hiring patterns, AI bubble, private credit - those are not actionable?
      - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
        I would separate out current events from "breaking news", the latter of which I think is pretty useless for 99% of people living in a developed and safe country. Trends are important to learn about, but the regular person would be well advised to prepare for emergencies in advance of the emergency. Most of the stuff you listed is probably covered under general financial education like not going into debt for frivolous purchases or not gambling on investments you know nothing about. Inclement weather is probably the most pressing thing to know about, but again, you should probably be prepared at home anyway so you're not affected by people clearing out the grocery stores. I'm looking at nytimes.com right now, and it's pretty much all meaningless in terms of what I am going to do today, tomorrow, next week, or next month. It's entertainment at best, which is fine, if you can mentally handle it. But if it's getting you down, then I see no negative consequence from skipping most of it. Obviously, come time to vote, it's important to be informed, but day to day, spending one's brain cycles thinking about stuff that will not affect them and they will not be able to affect does not seem like a good use of time.
littlexsparkee 7mo ago
There's some drawbacks to the news, certainly, but I can't imagine not being aware or interested in what's happening around the world. Surely it's better to follow AP and Reuters and tune the rest.
modeless 7mo ago
Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.
- littlexsparkee 7mo ago
  Prediction markets miss all the experts, whether academic or laypeople wonks, who simply don't care to have a financial stake in the decision. I can't imagine how it'd be representative. In any case, the people weighing in are getting their information from somewhere and it's not thin air. How can you understand an issue without knowing motivations/vested interests from all sides, history leading up, etc?
  - sefrost 7mo ago
    Polymarket publishes accuracy statistics https://polymarket.com/accuracy https://polymarket.com/accuracy
    - littlexsparkee 7mo ago
      Thanks - I wish it could be drilled into by category, i.e. what are the stats for categories of import (filter out sports, crypto, etc). My worry is the average could appear rosier if the share of trivial events are high.
  - modeless 7mo ago
    If I have a specific interest in a topic I can do extensive research over many hours and come to my own conclusions. But for the vast majority of news headlines I see, including almost all "national" or "world" news, I don't have the time to do hours of research. In this case, reading or one or three news articles is far more likely to give me a biased and ultimately incorrect take than looking at a prediction market, which takes all the available information and condenses it into one number that matters.
- 7mo ago
Animats 7mo ago
There are solid news sources, but they're hard to find and differ by the subject. For example, war maps are hard to find. Al Jazeera publishes maps of what's been hit in the Middle East, which makes sense because their readers are on the receiving end. understandingwar.com contributes to an interactive war map.[1] (The site says to view it with Firefox; Chrome has bugs on mobile.) ops.group, which is for people operating aircraft internationally, has a frequently updated map of where to avoid and what the problems are.[2] They have a GPS spoofing map. A sizable chunk of Eurasia is currently unsafe for aviation. "For flights between Europe and Asia, the normal Gulf corridor is effectively unavailable. Overflying traffic is rerouting either north via the Caucasus-Afghanistan, or south via Egypt-Saudi-Oman." Nobody wants to overfly Afghanistan. Almost no ATC, no radar, and an emergency diversion to Kabul means dealing with the Taliban. "For most operators, landing at an Afghan airport would be akin to ditching in oceanic airspace." You have to dig that hard to find out what's going on. Neither the mainstream media nor the podcasters and influencers go that far. [1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f13bd31324 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f... [2] https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operational-picture/ https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operatio...
thesumofall 7mo ago
And with that dismantle the fourth power which is nothing without an audience? Just let the powerful do whatever they want to do?
techgnosis 7mo ago
This is bad advice. Local news is not some noble pursuit. It's helpful but so is national news. It's good to know how the world is evolving. Burying your head in the sand is not a solution.

rectang 7mo ago

A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy. In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference. Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.

thesumofall 7mo ago
I don’t know. Is a random YT channel more trustworthy considering their reliance on sponsorships? And once they do interviews, they face the same issue I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …
- rectang 7mo ago
  It's not that the random YT channel is actually more trustworthy, but that it exposes the audience to adversarial perspectives which mainstream access journalists hide — thereby eroding the trust of young audiences for mainstream journalist outlets compared to previous generations for whom such adversarial perspectives were less available.
  - justonceokay 7mo ago
    I miss when Christopher Hitchens could get on CNN as a self-identified socialist and have 10 minute discussions /in good faith/ with callers who disagreed with him. Sometimes he would put us silly Americans in our place, sometimes (less often) he would end up looking the fool. And he kept doing it regularly for a decade. Imagine that happening today
Barrin92 7mo ago
>when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference. sure because they're just making shit up. If you don't have access to a source you're by definition speculating. The fact that they can do it in an abrasive way or in attack mode is a performance of authenticity, not actual reporting. You believe them because they're "just like you". It's the biggest curse of our time and emotional manipulation. Journalists sometimes have to navigate how they talk to people but a skilled reader can at least extract real information from it even if it requires reading between the lines. The Youtube 'reporters' add nothing, it's entertainment. They're popular to the extent that they reinterpret publicly available information in a way that confirms the biases of their audiences. The journalist pays for access but the youtuber pays with audience capture, the difference is consumers of mainstream journalism are aware of it. Someone who reads an interview in the NYT with a mainstream politician know in advance that they'll have to be critical, 18 year old's watching youtube don't. Youtubers are infinitely more deferential to their audience than a journalist is ever going to be to an individual subject because the latter is professionally employed and the former is a cancelled subscription wave away from flipping burgers.

Drunkfoowl 7mo ago

[dead]

supliminal 7mo ago

“Most people across generations favour the idea of impartial news, but young people more often (32% compared with 19% of those 55+) think it ‘makes no sense for news outlets to be neutral on certain issues’, such as climate change or racism.” Unfortunately it’s documentarians such as David Attenborough that carefully curate a picture of nature as some playful, curious thing. It would behoove schools that prepare students for post-secondary education to put on actual video recordings of how animals go at it and how the strong kill the weak (and their offspring) in the most savage and cruel of ways with complete disregard. And then ask them if they would rather not know this is how the world really is. Because that’s what taking a side means here, is being wilfully ignorant.

layman51 7mo ago
This is tangential, but what you wrote about nature reminded me of a biology professor once saying how at least in nature it seems like other animals generally kill in a quick, efficient way where hopefully the prey won’t suffer too much.
- rectang 7mo ago
  Humans are by far the most vicious animal species, because the sophistication with which they apply torture is off-the-charts. Felines and orcas may consume their prey alive or play with them, but it's not in their capacity to keep their victims alive indefinitely with the express goal of inflicting maximum suffering.
decae 7mo ago
Attenborough narrated documentaries are filled with death and carnage, shot by the most patient cinematographers in the world. What a nonsense take.
- supliminal 7mo ago
  No, it is unfortunately very romanticized and carefully narrated. It gives a very skewed impression of reality. It is closer to a staged scene and less of a documentary, which is why some of those cinematographers wait for so long. Actual nature, and its cruelty, is so banal as to be boring that without the storytelling, you wouldn’t want to see it. I suggest you see some raw video footage, without music, additional sounds, careful DOF camera work and color correction, of one animal killing another. Watch the whole thing if you can sit through it - it takes quite awhile for an animal to die while it’s screaming in pain unable to move.

Animats 7mo ago

Useful study. UK-based. The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting. It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't. “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front. Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem. Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-influencers-war-messaging/686329/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...

rectang 7mo ago
I would argue that reading discussion of "CEO says" "journalism" on HN will often better inform you than reading a mainstream journalist puff-piece interview of a CEO. Many journalists will not provide adversarial viewpoints, because to do so would stanch the flow of interview subjects.
- i80and 7mo ago
  "Access" is the filthy dirty word here. Can't be anything other than a stenographer because you might lose your ACCESS, with which you can do MORE stenography. It's a sickness.
rdevilla 7mo ago
> Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah. Why is any of that necessary? LLMs can just synthesize a story for the press de novo, without reference to prior developments or indeed any 20th century style on-the-ground reporting. Reporters should in fact be pleased that this meaningless drudgery has been automated out of the profession. Besides, whatever "facts" are presented will be labelled as fake news by its detractors, who will not have their own internal narratives swayed in the slightest. The rest will rest easy in their confirmation bias, it now being confirmed once more.

jrm4 7mo ago

Anecdotally, that literally only one of my college age students knew about the Moon mission was wild. I genuinely now believe that a real barrier to (the terrible idea of) reinstating the draft is that it would actually be difficult to find and inform the public about it, in a believable way.

guzfip 7mo ago
Perhaps I would have heard of this moon mission if HN wasn’t busy inundating me with politics and AI product threads. I feel like I vaguely remember hearing about it a while back, with little fanfare, and then not again until just yesterday. In that time I’ve learned of all kinds of crazy developments in politics and AI companies here on HN
- irishcoffee 7mo ago
  > Perhaps I would have heard of this moon mission if HN wasn’t busy inundating me with politics and AI product threads. Personal accountability can still be something we all strive to honor. Blaming a news aggregator website for your own ignorance is a hell of a thing.
  - jrm4 7mo ago
    I mean, this kind of just feels like reasonable criticism of HN worded a bit oddly.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
thegrim33 7mo ago
It's not really a challenge of reaching those students, the outlets that could otherwise reach them just simply aren't interested in spreading that particular news, because it goes against their ideological beliefs. And if you ask yourself "wait, why wouldn't they want to inform people of a NASA moon mission?", you're really behind the ball on what's going on. If it was information that they actually wanted to spread, it would be spread wide and far and reach those students.

ike____________ 7mo ago

It is not about sources choices. Young people must read books. Everybody should read books. Books on liberty, like "1984" or authors like Michael Ende. Also books on history (and prehistory). That is the thing that really matters and the only via to avoid echo chambers.

NotGMan 7mo ago

>> ... Meeting the needs of this segment is crucial, not just for the current stability of the journalism industry, but also for the future of democratic societies as young individuals transition through adulthood Sure buddy. Keep telling yourself that. Mainstream media can't die quick enough.

SoftTalker 7mo ago

"Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people. Around two thirds (64%) of 18–24s consume news on a daily basis, compared with 87% of people 55 and over." I used to watch the news quite a bit in my 20s--40s or so. Read a newspaper almost every day, watched the evening news. Now 20 years later? Not at all. Traditional news sites, most newspapers, and TV news shows are all rage bait and narrative spinning. None of what they talk about affects my day to day life in the slightest way. So I spend my time on things that are more enjoyable.

porridgeraisin 7mo ago
I do the same in my 20s :) We actually had a newspaper at home and I used to sneak a peek, atleast the sports page. But that stopped during Covid and we never renewed it... No one in the house is missing it so far. And we don't really watch news channels (our TV is just a few streaming subscriptions). At max I see a few headlines on social media recommendations. And I don't use twitter. Meaning no news. Its great highly recommended.

djoldman 7mo ago

> Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people... > Young people are also less interested in news... Haven't the youth always consumed less news and been less interested? The question is if the current youth consume less and are less interested compared to when the current old people were young, no?