7 ms·

I've always thought news could be boiled down to a few important facts, and I wonder if having all that extra copy is really important in this day an age. Why

I've always thought news could be boiled down to a few important facts, and I wonder if having all that extra copy is really important in this day an age. Why aren't news digest sites a thing?

joeguilmette 13y ago
Circa is exactly that and it's fantastic.
danieltillett 13y ago
I care less about length and more about accuracy. Every news story I have happened know about personally has been totally wrong - this does not give me much confidence in journalism as currently practiced. I guess we can look at this from a positive angle - the robots can't do any worse than the human journalists.
perlgeek 13y ago
Taking this one step further: Why aren't "factual" news sites a thing, where news are computer readable (think JSON), and you can filter for the information you want? Not all news can be made computer readable easily, but there are several classes of news that can be that way, or at least have rich, computer readable meta data (sports results, releases of software, new music albums, movies, upcoming events, announcement of road maintenance, ...). Update: Is anybody interested in working on such a system with me? If yes, drop me an email (moritz@faui2k3.org)!
- herokusaki 13y ago
  Great idea! I'm not sure something good would come out of it but another type of news that follows a predictable pattern and could be made machine-readable is celebrity gossip.
prof_hobart 13y ago
The skill is figuring out what the important facts are, and where to get them from. For an earthquake, at least for the initial announcement, it's pretty straightforward - where and how big. It's not a great deal different to "a robot" (or more precisely, my phone's weather app) telling me what temperature and likelihood of rain. Trying to do that for, say, the salient points of the banking collapse would be a lot more difficult.
pjc50 13y ago
This is basically what AP newswire, and the commercial Reuters-Thompson and Bloomberg services offer. Condensed low-latency news. A lot of news sites operate essentially by expanding wire service copy.
- thesehands 13y ago
  There's a good Chrome extension called churnalism that alerts you when stories on news sites you read appear to be copy pasted from other news sources or wikipedia
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    Both this and the parent. The local rag Tue New Zealand Herald, which is arguably the national paper publishes stories that have a headline you click on. It expands. The story is the headline - the headline text is repeated. Its awful. They are even too slack to remove American spellings (it's supposedly a New Zealand paper) or convert US dollar values into local currency, both things a script could do fairly easily. Here is an example, it's sad. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11228535 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&object...
dingaling 13y ago
> Why aren't news digest sites a thing? Oh but they are. For $$$. BBC Monitoing offers an excellent World news digest service and used to release part of the output publicly. But governments and companies will pay very handsomely for such services, so now it's only available on subscription http://my.monitor.bbc.co.uk http://my.monitor.bbc.co.uk

I've always thought news could be boiled down to a few important facts, and I wonder if having all that extra copy is really important in this day an age. Why aren't news digest sites a thing?

joeguilmette 13y ago

Circa is exactly that and it's fantastic.

danieltillett 13y ago

I care less about length and more about accuracy. Every news story I have happened know about personally has been totally wrong - this does not give me much confidence in journalism as currently practiced. I guess we can look at this from a positive angle - the robots can't do any worse than the human journalists.

perlgeek 13y ago

Taking this one step further: Why aren't "factual" news sites a thing, where news are computer readable (think JSON), and you can filter for the information you want? Not all news can be made computer readable easily, but there are several classes of news that can be that way, or at least have rich, computer readable meta data (sports results, releases of software, new music albums, movies, upcoming events, announcement of road maintenance, ...). Update: Is anybody interested in working on such a system with me? If yes, drop me an email (moritz@faui2k3.org)!

herokusaki 13y ago
Great idea! I'm not sure something good would come out of it but another type of news that follows a predictable pattern and could be made machine-readable is celebrity gossip.

prof_hobart 13y ago

The skill is figuring out what the important facts are, and where to get them from. For an earthquake, at least for the initial announcement, it's pretty straightforward - where and how big. It's not a great deal different to "a robot" (or more precisely, my phone's weather app) telling me what temperature and likelihood of rain. Trying to do that for, say, the salient points of the banking collapse would be a lot more difficult.

pjc50 13y ago

This is basically what AP newswire, and the commercial Reuters-Thompson and Bloomberg services offer. Condensed low-latency news. A lot of news sites operate essentially by expanding wire service copy.

thesehands 13y ago
There's a good Chrome extension called churnalism that alerts you when stories on news sites you read appear to be copy pasted from other news sources or wikipedia
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Both this and the parent. The local rag Tue New Zealand Herald, which is arguably the national paper publishes stories that have a headline you click on. It expands. The story is the headline - the headline text is repeated. Its awful. They are even too slack to remove American spellings (it's supposedly a New Zealand paper) or convert US dollar values into local currency, both things a script could do fairly easily. Here is an example, it's sad. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11228535 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&object...

dingaling 13y ago

> Why aren't news digest sites a thing? Oh but they are. For $$$. BBC Monitoing offers an excellent World news digest service and used to release part of the output publicly. But governments and companies will pay very handsomely for such services, so now it's only available on subscription http://my.monitor.bbc.co.uk http://my.monitor.bbc.co.uk