5 ms·

Ignore the news

51 points by cstross 14y ago

jkldotio 14y ago
This is why I am trying to build a non-profit news site with no adverts. I don't believe there is a real way around the corrupting influence of trying to maximize clicks when there are ads. My site is looking to bring in the underused resources of think tanks, academics, NGOs and partisan blogs to put flesh around the bones of the core journalistic reporting on politics and economics. As the old proverb goes "small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas". We can select against people (celebrity) with classifiers, and surround events (broadsheet news) with deeper discussion of ideas (policy, research, philosophy). However, if you don't have ads you don't have money. So my project, http://igg.me/at/jkl/ http://igg.me/at/jkl/ , is largely unfunded. You can see a very basic prototype here as well: http://jkl.io http://jkl.io
- andyking 14y ago
  > This is why I am trying to build a non-profit news site with no adverts. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
  - lvturner 14y ago
    BBC is only entirely 'non-profit' within the confines of the UK. Flip on a VPN and you hit the BBC World version of the BBC news, complete with adverts. Besides which, competition is healthy - so I applaud the creation of another another non-profit news site.
  - jkldotio 14y ago
    Not quite the same as that's mostly just news/events in the middle of the spectrum. Having Will Self on to rant about things occasionally doesn't really equal bringing in think tanks, academics and NGOs. So if I am funded I will go well beyond the BBC site for politics and economics. Considering I am only asking for $40k and they have a budget of four billion pounds I think it's a reasonable proposition. That said - because the UK spends four billion on the BBC, Australia spends one billion dollars on public broadcasting and there are things like PBS, subsidized journalists in France etc. - I think it's not unreasonable to use them as the backbone for the news part. Going up the continuum though they are unequipped to do the higher policy/ideas part. Edit: The BBC also has its own biases, they refuse to release the Balen Report for example. Also, as a British citizen not in the UK, I can't access a huge amount of political content without a VPS because iPlayer is restricted.
Tosh108 14y ago
He's making some valid points. But it's far too black and white. And insulting for a lot of journalists who do care about their work.
- joelrunyon 14y ago
  He's making criticism of the media as a whole. It's not an indictment of the individuals as much as it is the system although the individuals are complicit in creating the atmosphere & programming. They might "care" about their work, but the fact that they all-too-commonly deteriorate into fear-mongering & tragedy porn means nothing more than a startup with great employees and really nice guys with great intentions who fail to create revenue. > There probably won't be any meaningful updates for a couple of days: but the TV channels and newpapers have to fill the dead air somehow, to keep the eyeballs they've attracted on the advertisements, so they cobble together anything they can grab—usually talking heads speculating without benefit of actual information. Calling out people for doing a poor job of their job isn't being "mean" as much as it is stating facts - no matter how much said employee "cares" about their work.
- cstross 14y ago
  I speak as someone who spent several years as a freelance magazine columnist and got quite a close look at how the news is made. What makes you think I'm insulting journalists? Moreover, a short sound bite isn't the place for nuanced analyses of how the media works. But it is maybe the right place to try and help people who're feeling overloaded right now by the glut of bad news spinning up around the bombings in Boston. Not to mention the other bomb deaths of April 15th -- Iraq (55), Afghanistan (37), Somalia (30), Syria (18), and Pakistan (4).
bpatrianakos 14y ago
This "No news"/"News is bad for you" fad needs to end. New is not bad for you. News is good for you. Knowing what's going on your world and the world is important. What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle. The correct attitude would be something more like "be an intelligent consumer of news" rather than "news is bad, stick your head in the sand and ignore it". If you understand that news is entertainment then that's just about all you need to know to be able to pick out the relevent information and go about your day. The news media may do a lot of terrible things but journalists themselves still exist and are still ethical. It's just that they're beholden to their bosses who turn their reporting into something other than a report of the facts. News is not bad for you. The inability to think critically about what you see on the news is bad for you.
- wonderzombie 14y ago
  What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle. So how about most news is bad for you? ;) I mean, you're right that news qua news isn't terrible. But very little of what's branded as news is actually news; you said it yourself that it's entertainment. And while news can be entertaining (e.g. Daily Show), news which exists solely to perpetuate itself and garner more eyeballs is bad. I agree with the author that it's depressing and it's a waste of time. I'm not actually disagreeing with your practical suggestion; I think the right idea is to find out the facts and move on. But I absolutely think that it's a mistake to "feed the beast," so to speak, any more than is necessary. (Edit: fixed formatting.)
- joshkaufman 14y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to assume that mass media news consumption can (or should) be an entirely rational process, in which a person should be able to exert enough willpower to ignore the emotional content of news stories. It doesn't work that way. Our cognitive threat detection systems create very real biological responses to the information we receive from the news, prompting shifts in cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones. That automatic threat response has very real effects on your short and long-term health and mental/emotional well-being. [1] The potential for sudden, dramatic, unexpected loss of life or property (called Loss Aversion) is one of the most attention-pulling things in the world. Once you start paying attention, it's extremely difficult to stop, even if you can't do anything with the information. It's easy to be sucked in by modern news media, and spend way too much time and energy ruminating on situations you can't influence or control. You're burning the limited amount of attention, focus, and energy you have each day on something that ultimately provides zero value. I'm all for being informed about what's happening in the world at a baseline level, provided you focus on information you're in a position to act upon - by avoiding a local threat (weather/earthquake/wildfire/etc), donating to a non-profit in the event of a disaster/tragedy, educating yourself before an impending election, etc. Otherwise, the best way to handle most news media is not to pay attention to it at all. Treat it as a tabloid: best to be avoided if you want to preserve your focus for more important matters. [1] See "The Science of Fear" by Dan Gardner, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295467/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295467/

51 points by cstross 14y ago

This is why I am trying to build a non-profit news site with no adverts. I don't believe there is a real way around the corrupting influence of trying to maximize clicks when there are ads. My site is looking to bring in the underused resources of think tanks, academics, NGOs and partisan blogs to put flesh around the bones of the core journalistic reporting on politics and economics. As the old proverb goes "small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas". We can select against people (celebrity) with classifiers, and surround events (broadsheet news) with deeper discussion of ideas (policy, research, philosophy). However, if you don't have ads you don't have money. So my project, http://igg.me/at/jkl/ http://igg.me/at/jkl/ , is largely unfunded. You can see a very basic prototype here as well: http://jkl.io http://jkl.io

andyking 14y ago
> This is why I am trying to build a non-profit news site with no adverts. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
- lvturner 14y ago
  BBC is only entirely 'non-profit' within the confines of the UK. Flip on a VPN and you hit the BBC World version of the BBC news, complete with adverts. Besides which, competition is healthy - so I applaud the creation of another another non-profit news site.
- jkldotio 14y ago
  Not quite the same as that's mostly just news/events in the middle of the spectrum. Having Will Self on to rant about things occasionally doesn't really equal bringing in think tanks, academics and NGOs. So if I am funded I will go well beyond the BBC site for politics and economics. Considering I am only asking for $40k and they have a budget of four billion pounds I think it's a reasonable proposition. That said - because the UK spends four billion on the BBC, Australia spends one billion dollars on public broadcasting and there are things like PBS, subsidized journalists in France etc. - I think it's not unreasonable to use them as the backbone for the news part. Going up the continuum though they are unequipped to do the higher policy/ideas part. Edit: The BBC also has its own biases, they refuse to release the Balen Report for example. Also, as a British citizen not in the UK, I can't access a huge amount of political content without a VPS because iPlayer is restricted.

Tosh108 14y ago

He's making some valid points. But it's far too black and white. And insulting for a lot of journalists who do care about their work.

joelrunyon 14y ago
He's making criticism of the media as a whole. It's not an indictment of the individuals as much as it is the system although the individuals are complicit in creating the atmosphere & programming. They might "care" about their work, but the fact that they all-too-commonly deteriorate into fear-mongering & tragedy porn means nothing more than a startup with great employees and really nice guys with great intentions who fail to create revenue. > There probably won't be any meaningful updates for a couple of days: but the TV channels and newpapers have to fill the dead air somehow, to keep the eyeballs they've attracted on the advertisements, so they cobble together anything they can grab—usually talking heads speculating without benefit of actual information. Calling out people for doing a poor job of their job isn't being "mean" as much as it is stating facts - no matter how much said employee "cares" about their work.
cstross 14y ago
I speak as someone who spent several years as a freelance magazine columnist and got quite a close look at how the news is made. What makes you think I'm insulting journalists? Moreover, a short sound bite isn't the place for nuanced analyses of how the media works. But it is maybe the right place to try and help people who're feeling overloaded right now by the glut of bad news spinning up around the bombings in Boston. Not to mention the other bomb deaths of April 15th -- Iraq (55), Afghanistan (37), Somalia (30), Syria (18), and Pakistan (4).

bpatrianakos 14y ago

This "No news"/"News is bad for you" fad needs to end. New is not bad for you. News is good for you. Knowing what's going on your world and the world is important. What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle. The correct attitude would be something more like "be an intelligent consumer of news" rather than "news is bad, stick your head in the sand and ignore it". If you understand that news is entertainment then that's just about all you need to know to be able to pick out the relevent information and go about your day. The news media may do a lot of terrible things but journalists themselves still exist and are still ethical. It's just that they're beholden to their bosses who turn their reporting into something other than a report of the facts. News is not bad for you. The inability to think critically about what you see on the news is bad for you.

wonderzombie 14y ago
What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle. So how about most news is bad for you? ;) I mean, you're right that news qua news isn't terrible. But very little of what's branded as news is actually news; you said it yourself that it's entertainment. And while news can be entertaining (e.g. Daily Show), news which exists solely to perpetuate itself and garner more eyeballs is bad. I agree with the author that it's depressing and it's a waste of time. I'm not actually disagreeing with your practical suggestion; I think the right idea is to find out the facts and move on. But I absolutely think that it's a mistake to "feed the beast," so to speak, any more than is necessary. (Edit: fixed formatting.)
joshkaufman 14y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to assume that mass media news consumption can (or should) be an entirely rational process, in which a person should be able to exert enough willpower to ignore the emotional content of news stories. It doesn't work that way. Our cognitive threat detection systems create very real biological responses to the information we receive from the news, prompting shifts in cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones. That automatic threat response has very real effects on your short and long-term health and mental/emotional well-being. [1] The potential for sudden, dramatic, unexpected loss of life or property (called Loss Aversion) is one of the most attention-pulling things in the world. Once you start paying attention, it's extremely difficult to stop, even if you can't do anything with the information. It's easy to be sucked in by modern news media, and spend way too much time and energy ruminating on situations you can't influence or control. You're burning the limited amount of attention, focus, and energy you have each day on something that ultimately provides zero value. I'm all for being informed about what's happening in the world at a baseline level, provided you focus on information you're in a position to act upon - by avoiding a local threat (weather/earthquake/wildfire/etc), donating to a non-profit in the event of a disaster/tragedy, educating yourself before an impending election, etc. Otherwise, the best way to handle most news media is not to pay attention to it at all. Treat it as a tabloid: best to be avoided if you want to preserve your focus for more important matters. [1] See "The Science of Fear" by Dan Gardner, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295467/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295467/