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Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools
- Blikkentrekker 26d agoI don't understand. The way I read the text one group was simply given a free subscription no? They weren't made to read anything?
- eightysixfour 26d agoFree subscription + a media education module for their teachers. Without making them read it, they showed high usage of the free subscription.
- Blikkentrekker 26d agoYeah, I got that from the abstract too. I just don't understand where the “making teenagers read newspapers” angle comes from.
- neehao 26d agogood point about the title.
- jelly 26d agoThere's a more subtle form of 'make' where you set conditions to induce a result. The fact is, giving anything away for free will increase its consumption.
- Blikkentrekker 25d agoYes it will. But that doesn't mean that “making students read” doesn't arouse a very different impression. “Making students do homework.” does not imply “Making it free for them to do it.”.
- eudamoniac 25d agoLike just having a broom in the house makes my kids sweep the floors? There's no way to interpret the headline that makes any sense as truth.
- SoftTalker 26d agoMajor newspapers and even local ones (if they still exist) have been so dumbed down in the past few decades. I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. Worse, news often seems to be written to elicit outrage or fear (probably because "engagement").
- neehao 26d agofair. plausibly tested what's easy enough to do and still seems like a win. we need a separate treatment for increasing informativeness of news.
- berytos_storm 26d agoIt’s admittedly been a long time since I looked at a local newspaper, but I do seem them occasionally. Kinda seems like the local ones are just the local news segment in text format. Fine, but I can read that on my phone or watch it on the TV with much more convenience. Maybe there’s some interesting stuff left in classified ads or whatnot, but a lot of that shit so on marketplace now.
- bluGill 26d agoLocal is where getting the news is the hardest. My local school board meets at the same time as the local zoning board... My town publishes city meeting minutes - "debated to change zoning regulations in [development], it passed 2-3". What changes were made? What were the debate points? Once I get that information who do I vote for/against in the next election if I care about the change. I really want a local news paper that covers the above types of things. I can't find it and in turn I have no idea who to vote for. Town positions are partizan so I at least I know democrat/republican (for whatever that means...). I also know all candidates are married and have kids - and the family picture was taken by someone who knows how to make them look good. They all will "fight for me" as well, but never do they promise anything that might be controversial (unlike their opponent - they are obviously biased against their opponent and yet they are my best source of information about their opponent) National news I will hear about and I can form opinions. However local it is much harder. The newspapers I have access to are not helping.
- delichon 26d ago"A Nationwide Experiment in Mainstream Media Indoctrination in French High Schools" Fixed it for you.
- neehao 26d agoare kids so easy to indoctrinate? i suppose tiktok self-indoctrination is fine ...
- altcognito 26d agoYou would think that any sort of reading was immediate indoctrination with comments like these.
- newspaper1 26d agoReading MSM newspapers is definitely indoctrination. With Europeans getting more and more hawkish on Russia (and other things), this seems like a great way to get everyone thinking "right".
- thesuitonym 26d agoNewspapers are mainstream again?
- jmspamerton 26d agoAgain, what does this have to do with hacker news. This isn't reddit.
- thesuitonym 26d agoFrom https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- jll29 26d agoIn Europe, The Economist and The Guardian are about the only serious in-depth sources left, at least for those that can read English.
- TheMatten 26d agoThat feels a little bit reductive, at least given that non-English news is precisely what big part of population is going to consume. There isn't even an unified market for news content given the language boundaries. Not to say there aren't many shallow, clickbait sources, but there're good ones as well.
- bluGill 26d agoThe better educated somebody is, the more likely they are to have reasonably fluency in English. There are some great non-English sources out there, but English is the most read language by well educated people. Not saying there are not great news content in other languages. However English should be expected to dominate over the whole world.
- KPGv2 26d agoThis is a bizarre take. Newspapers, even really good ones, generally don't target international readers. They target their home country's readers. How many Englishmen are interested in the machinations of unions in Paris? How many Frenchmen? Obviously the best coverage will be in the country's majority language.
- bluGill 26d agoThe best coverage for a country will be in that countries language. However for world events coverage English is the more likely language. For niches that might interest you English might be the only option since odds are someone in every country speaks English and reports on that niche. (odds, but no guarantee)
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- newspaper1 26d agoHow about making teenagers seek out independent media? We've seen the results of people being raised reading MSM newspapers and it's not pretty. Propaganda packaged as "serious news", is some of the most dangerous media that exists.
- cjs_ac 26d ago> Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education. They taught the teenagers how to question and interrogate the claims presented in the newspapers, which is far more effective than blindly branding 'MSM newspapers' as propaganda. (The study was conducted in France; are you sure that conventional French newspapers are propaganda of any inclination?)
- dfxm12 26d agoI used to get the newspaper everyday before highschool. I mostly got it for sports, comics and puzzles, but many days I ended up reading it cover to cover. Unfortunately, that paper folded while I was in college. Hopefully, this is a good program for highschoolers and newspapers both...
- wsloth514 26d ago'Local newspapers' in my area are majority advertisement for local businesses or coupons. Like the content of reading a newspaper could be condensed to maybe 2 pages, if that. The first page is like what volunteers or schools are doing. While another half a page contains maybe a township schedule or something similar. I don't think there is much content to 'read' that would change much to be honest.
- bluGill 26d agonews papers have always been 80% ads. However they used to have a lot more content (and a lot more ads)
- econ 26d agoAt work I have access to all newspapers big and small, I use to read all of them but I haven't touched one in a decade. Not one article that isn't infantile nonsense or outright propaganda of a quality that falls appart in the first sentence.
- KPGv2 26d agoThe fact you can't find a quality newspaper to read says more about you than the state of journalism. The Guardian, AP, Reuters, NPR, etc. Hell, the New York Review of Books is crazy good, although their world news coverage usually is slipped into book reviews.
- econ 25d agoThe budget obviously isn't what it use to be. I use to search for random blogs. One day I ran into something truly special. Their first post was an extremely crude draft for a book the size of a tweet. All following postings described what part of the book they worked on, the information they found, the decisions they had to make, spreading things over chapters and naming them, details that didn't make the cut. The RSS feed has 2-4 updates per day. In the end he deleted it all, thanked the readers and pointed at a page where the result of his effort could be purchased. The news today all to often describes some event in isolation while it is really part of a context involving many events. Reading the articles doesn't inform you about what is going on. I get that from other places and the papers don't compliment it. I hope this says something about me :)
- bityard 26d agoHa. Not knowing any better, I took a class in high school that turned out to be actually reading the daily newspaper and writing a one-page report _every single day_ about international issues that literally never impacted our day-to-day lives in rural Podunk, USA. It was the most boring and soul-crushing class I've ever taken in my life. After that remote learning course about Quality Assurance in college, of course.
- throwitaway222 26d agoWe need more things like Ground news. We're either propagandized by reading the news or watching it on TV OR we're holed up in a confirmation biased world by social media (which is also propagandized).
- paulryanrogers 26d agoDon't look too closely into Ground News. It's more like controlled opposition
- BrandoElFollito 26d agoA friend of mine briefly managed a "celebrities and ovni" kind of newspaper. His first decision was to distribute papers to generic people asking them to highlight the words they did not understand. He then proceeded to having these words added to the spellcheckers so that they are flagged as incorrect. His time was a nice success for the newspaper and a sad addition to the average stupidity of the world.
- BrandoElFollito 26d agoSince I cannot find any mention of this in the French press and after asking a few friends who have children in high school (hopefully this is lycée, a tad too late to push people to reding) -- it is very likely not a nationwide experiment at all
- vinni2 26d agoI remember in my school days each day one student was responsible for summarising headlines from the newspapers in the school assembly to encourage us to read newspapers.