
Wake up: News doesn't work - PretzelFisch
http://scripting.com/2016/07/10/1368.html
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danso
What does the headline, "News doesn't work", have to do with the actual topic:
Facebook's Trending Stories sucks (whether it's human-curated or completely by
algorithm). Or is this supposed to be a meta-joke about how news headlines
often don't deliver (which I would agree with)?

edit: to be fair, Winer seems to be arguing that tech companies can't solve
the news problem, so newsmakers (or those affiliated with civic improvement)
need to wake up:

> _We don 't have anything remotely like the answer to how news works in the
> age of the Internet. We're running around in circles, confused, ineffective,
> and all the while we need a good news system. Evidence: the way we're making
> political decisions. Also: we're going in reverse on race equity._

I guess I just see this as a very, _very_ hard problem. Winer lambasts the
media for living too much on the adage, "if it bleeds, it leads":

> _Get informed. You can 't. All you get is sensation. Feelings. Pushes in
> this primal direction or another. Fear dominates. The people who do what we
> call news know how this works and they make fear. And that's a rush and it
> feels good, but what about when you really just want to know what's
> happening?_

But what's fear-mongering to one person is often vital information to another.
The current police-involved-shootings controversy being the prime example. And
news and tech companies face a similar problem -- they often have to create
deliverables that users didn't know they needed/wanted.

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arjie
Jesus Christ. Get it together, man. There's no need to be so shrill. "we need
to get moving whether the tech industry is ready or not". Wtf does this even
mean? Like the tech industry needs to be ready for you to do better news story
picking. Just go and do it, it doesn't need an industry wide shift in order
for you to do it. Bizarre. Some things don't need a movement.

For me, the WSJ covers my news needs adequately. I switched from the NYT but
they're both somewhat equivalent in terms of news I'm interested in.

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PretzelFisch
Is this even a Technology issue or just the journalist business model
resetting to a point where their voice could reach anyone that can read and
competition was fierce. To me it seems like we have reverted back to the
yellow press.

~~~
bonobo3000
Its both. Now news is mostly consumed online, and everyone is competing for
eyeballs. I think technology exacerbates the problem - earlier a newspaper
could have a bunch of eyeball grabbing headlines, AND real, informative,
boring content in the later pages (or a mix). Now only the eyeball grabbing
content gets shared and seen.

It is driven by the same competition, but with article-level tracking rather
than newspaper sales, the problem got worse. I don't know how to fix it
either, but I agree with the author that its a huge problem. News and
entertainment are basically the same thing now.

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njloof
I was hoping he was going somewhere much more interesting: how can I reliably
detect whether the news I am reading is truthful?

We all have to make that assessment every day if we are at all mindful as news
consumers. And we do so in part by examining the source of the news, the same
story as presented in other media, and ultimately in how the event is recorded
in the history books.

Being able to do this (including transcending the language barrier -- many
unique perspectives on current events exist only in certain languages) would
greatly improve our ability to evaluate the news. And as we have all learned,
the news is what drives us to constructive or destructive action, even to the
point of waging war, throughout history.

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Joeri
Is it really news that news is not informative? To get informed, read a book.
To get the latest gossip, read the news. By definition news cannot be
proportional, because proportional reporting of almost any story is 99%
history and 1% current events.

~~~
reidacdc
This is huge, and if you're interested in an issue, these days it's often not
all that difficult. The conceit that you can "get informed" by just reading
current news is just plain false, and probably has been for as long as there
have been newspapers.

These days, we have Wikipedia and the websites of trade journals and magazines
of many stripes, and lots of good bloggers, where you can go for backgrounders
on a lot of topics which are relevant to public policy. There's often bias,
but it's easy to read past that -- read a couple of essays from various
viewpoints, read a few other essays by the same authors to get a sense of
their level of hysteria, and hey presto, you've got a deeper understanding.

Of course, you do have to put in the time, and you won't be able to do it for
every trending topic, but you can do a hell of a lot better than all the news
sites put together.

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Cypher
The only question this post raises for myself is: why is this in MY news feed?
its not interesting, its not news. I gave up facebook in 2009 and I don't care
at all for the Zukerman empire.

~~~
gavinpc
Seriously. I also quit Facebook many years ago, and—based on regular posts
here—the extent to which apparently intelligent people confound Facebook with
"the world" is troubling.

edit: Yes, I'm confounding HN with "the world" in some sense.

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CM30
Have to be honest, I expected an article about the issues facing newspapers
and media outlets, not trending news on Facebook.

Something about how hard it is to monetise news, or an article about the ever
increasing issues of inaccuracy and politicial bias.

That said, it's depressing how Facebook's trending news list is basically the
equivalent to those 'related' articles you see at the bottom of some news
sites. The ones which have a ton of low quality blogspam without any real
substance behind the headline.

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pwinnski
He has previously written about his belief that tech more or less owns news
distribution[0], which seems to be important background for his views in this
piece.

[0]
[http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html](http://scripting.com/2016/07/02/1343.html)

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advertising
What other sites do people here browse for more curated news? Like HackerNews
but for non-tech/other topics.

