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I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it.
I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me are talking about when they discuss some iteration of the most recent outrage. To some extent it's like they're living in a different culture than I am. I still feel that it was a good decision, and I continue to ignore the news.
I might come back if enough journalism sources can take the New Yorker's suggestion to heart.
Did the same thing about 4 years ago and haven’t looked back. I find though that a lot of people are actually offended by it since I have no clue what thing they and everyone else is outraged about. I get accused of not caring, being disengaged, blah blah blah. It’s difficult to explain to people who are still deep in outrage mode, so I mostly avoid taking about it.
My life is so much better since cutting out the news. I am happier, more focused and able to actually concentrate on the things that I care about.
I prefer to think about how I can positively impact people around me and my local community, rather than embracing the culture of outrage about things happening thousands of miles away that are ultimately irrelevant.
At the risk of sounding glib, your presence on this site would seem to imply that you've not, in fact, stopped reading the news.
Be careful about what kind of news you ignore. The punishment to who ignore politics, per example, is being governed by who cares.
It needs to be pointed out that this is an option that originates from privilege. Ignoring the news means ignoring politics. Ignoring politics is tacit support of the status quo. The status quo does not put everyone on equal footing. Disadvantaged people would therefore suffer more from disengaging with the news than people of privilege.
I pay a news site and I get high quality news from them that is curated. And since they make money from subscriptions, the need for eyeballs and page views is not a factor. Something to consider.
Have you ever read the Financial Times? More broadly, in addition to FT I try to get a multitude of perspectives without straying too far into extremes (so no Fox News, no CNN) and I try to rely on single-topic sites. FT, NYT, Jerusalem Post, AlJazeera, Aviation Week, BBC, SkyNews, a handful of science and tech journals, HN, and some others. You can get a fairly balanced (not perfect) perspective without the kind of moral panicking and clickbait you’d often find. BBC and Sky being exceptions, but that’s my local news.
I'm with you that disengaging from the news can be a good idea and make one happier, but I strongly disagree that this is owing to journalism having gotten worse. I think that the point of journalism should be to find things that make people outraged, and while this may not be so healthy for an individual, it is healthy on a societal level. This is how scandals are dug up and the powerful held to account. The print news industry isn't inherently less scandal-oriented than digital (at least if you compare apples to apples), it just isn't as fast.
I had a similar reaction reading Aaron Swartz's post on why he hates the news[1]. I'm sure Thoreau would have had the same view of the news in his time. Sure, you are unquestionably better off and probably happier learning Japanese or PDE instead of the daily newspaper. But it still has an important function.
I did this about 4 years ago as well and haven't looked back either. The habits I'd formed around news reading just were not helpful or useful. If you think about it for it a second there is very little informational value given by news articles. The who, where, what, why can be done in a paragraph, the implications and future projects can be done in an opinion piece, because any forward future looking projection is 'opinion' and has error, bias embedded in it. All of this is cheekily now lumped into one. Well that's my view.
I've seen my colleagues go through the most anguishing emotional roller coaster over the the last 3 months with the brexit madness. I've seen emotions run high, I've seen the highs and lows. Everyone is stressed and I'm blissfully content.
I'm yet to experience a life altering impact from skipping the news.
I have been reading news (news on real paper) since I could barely understand what I was reading about. I read news often just for reading.
But I have also stopped reading/watching/hearing news. When election time comes, I will read the laws being proposed, do some google search and pick a candidate or yay/nay a proposition (I live in California).
Just step back and reconsider what 'news' is trying to tell you from a 3rd person view. Ultimately you are being manipulated, imho. To vote for a candidate and/or clicks so that ads can be sold.
Just check this book out. Or at least read reviews of the book.
> How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society Paperback – March 17, 1999 by C. John Sommerville (Author)
I've had several discussions about this and, as inhumane as it might sound...I'm not sure what value news has in its current form. I don't feel like I'm learning more about other humans, I'm just being spoon-fed a carefully crafted narrative.
If the purpose of news is to disseminate useful information then it has failed. It's now about opinion, entertainment, advertising and maximising engagement (usually by getting people pissed off because misery loves company).
There was a recent story in the UK about a young man from the North West who plotted to murder an MP, who also happened to be a paedophile and a white supremacist (according to reports). Most of the news is a dramatic retelling of how a young kid could get to that point so soon. Our national broadcaster, the BBC, gave him the gift of notoriety and I can't imagine what that has done to his ego except to say he was right.
That isn't news, it's fetishising a burgeoning problem in our politics and titillating readers.
Upskirting celebrities getting out of cars and getting sly bikini shots from a telescopic lens somehow has more priority over proper investigative journalism that can have a positive, legal outcome.
In a more simplistic way, we revel in the pain of other people.
Amen, faster and more frequent news is certainly broken. However, I worry that we are fighting against human nature.
The use of smartphones has demonstrated, I believe, that people will blindly chase their dopamine hits coming from a variety of formats because it is ingrained in human nature. The dopamine reward pathway gives a good feeling and people are naturally inclined to follow the path of least resistance to more hits. If an organization or app tries to fight this, then people will simply use it less. People will naturally gravitate towards (thus pushing the market towards) easy methods of getting a little dopamine rush.
The consumption of fast and frequent journalism is just a symptom of human nature and I have my doubts that there will be a unilateral disarmament by apps and companies to use such tools.
I personally try to recognize this and cut myself short when i keep scrolling, keep refreshing on my phone, etc. However, I am not that good at stopping myself and I am aware of when I do it and work on it. What about people who are unaware of their habits? Looking down at your phone and refreshing likely has become second nature for billions of people.
How can industries fight against this human nature? (I did not cite any sources I know, if I'm dead wrong on any points please let me know!)
Actually, what we need first is:
1) A common and agreed upon standard definition of news.
Facts alone are not news. News also has importance and relevance. It's not news simply because a (major) "news" outlet publishes it.
I ate eggs for breakfast. That's truth / fact. It's not news.
2) A common and agreed upon standard definition of journalism / journalist.
Again, working for a "news" outlet does not make you a journalist. Journalism is a verb. It's a series of actions. It's not a (self-anointed) title.
3) Transparency and full disclosure about what is news (objective) and what is op-ed (subjective).
True story: I've seen a friend who has formal higher edu training in journalism (major'ed or minor'ed, I don't recall) take a (political) position on FB and then back up his "facts" with an op-ed piece. This isn't uncommon.
Edit: Typos
Slow news still exists, and always has. Weeklies and monthlies are low pass filters.
In my teens I was an avid news reader and then I heard the aphorism "as worthless as yesterday's news" and I realized: if it won't be useful tomorrow I most likely don't need to know it today (obviously there are a few exceptions, like road closures). And I started to read news sources that reported with higher latency (CSM used to send its small, 7-page newspaper though the mail) and discovered I really never missed anything important.
The article and the comments express the desire for news to be an effective tool to inform and educate the public. While appealing, this idea has never worked in the past, and there's no evidence that it can work in the near future.
The reason is not that the media or the journalists do something wrong. Rather, the vast majority of the public is simply not interested in being educated or informed.
You can send the best art / math / business professor to a school, but if the students are not interested in that field and have no need for a good grade, there will be very little learning done.
The public is quite capable to take any information they are offered, and convert it to an argument in favor of their political or social beliefs; it is also very capable, when given a choice, to select the lowest quality information.
It's unclear to me how anything can be done to counteract those tendencies. And as long as these tendencies stay in place, it seems rather futile to discuss "better news".
Somewhat surprised that there is no mention of The Correspondent yet. The Dutch version has been quite successful for quite a few years now, and they're launching an international version later this year[0][1].
(Having said that, the authors of De Correspondent sometimes come across as oblivious to how their world views are shaped by living in the cultural bubble that is the Randstad[2]. There is a certain arrogance to the writing style that just makes it feel like the kind of thing that people living in Amsterdam would write, and it sometimes rubs me the wrong way. I guess that makes it the Dutch equivalent to the New Yorker.)
[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/
I think that there is an often overlooked product that solves this problem very well by it's very nature: Weekly newspapers.
Especially when you read them as paperback they take out all the haste. You can't "refresh" them. The style tends to be less lurid, because it is pointless to write an hot article with Tuesday's information if you print on Sunday. Topics are way more broad in my experience but still capture the Zeitgeist of current topics in whatever culture you live in (it has to be a good newspaper, of course). There is of course a certain desire to read everything, since you paid for it, but it's finite: It is not a permanent rat race to read all the news, when you're done, you're done.
Even if you don't use whatever paper you get to it's fullest, you will still realize: You do not actually become an "informed voter" by knowing the exact updated body count of some colorful tragedy on the other side of the world. Reading one well researched multi-perspective article with depth will do just fine!
I don't think this is a problem of the media but rather of the consumer. In the pre-Twitter time people used to be concerned about those consuming only tabloids or trash TV news. At best, possibly even none at all.
In fact the offer of "slow news" is so much larger than "fast news". The New Yorker is actually an example of very slow news ;-) Also on TV/Web streaming there is a lot of slow news like BBC News for instance. The truth is most people find this too boring, they are just not interested in Politics. Maybe new formats like VICE are improving this.
Maybe this problem didn't even got worse but it just became more visible in the age of Google News where you suddenly see that you can read the same article on 200 different news pages - sometimes just copy&pasting from Reuters.
And yes, news is always biased. That's why one should read different sources with different biases... That's a very time consuming task if you are only consuming slow news.
I noticed some time ago that I do not learn more about a topic the more frequently I check on it (i.e., multiple times a day).
So, I make it a point to only visit websites that update daily (e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) or weekly (https://asia.nikkei.com/Print-Edition). I also started to read news in the morning for 15-30 mins from a paper subscription (Financial Times).
I hope this kind of news consumption catches back on.
I subscribed to Delayed Gratification quarterly for this purpose.
I see a number of comments celebrating the choice to live in a bubble uninformed and blissfully unaware of local and global events. Admittedly, a number of news sources are quite bad at actually reporting the news. But there still are quite a number of news organizations and news reporters that take their roles seriously. You can find them, that is if you are actually interested in being informed.
I'm sure there's some virtue signalling going on here, similar to the "I don't watch TV" from years ago. It just strikes me as odd that people will gloat about their ignorance, on HN of all places.
Unfortunately this is one of those things where if 99 media companies agree and one doesn’t, all the attention will go to the one that claims to have the latest “scoop”. The story will be completely undeveloped, half the stuff they say will eventually be proven wrong but they will get all the views. And therefore, gradually, the other 99 would follow suit to stay in business.
As long as money/advertising is so lucrative when so much trash is funneled so quickly, this will be a problem. We pretty much have to find a way for companies to gain as much money some other way, e.g. “I’m a billionaire, I will give half a billion dollars to the station that wins a quality journalism award”.
If you’re an individual and not a media company, waiting awhile for the full developed story is definitely better.
Heck, waiting awhile and unplugging works for lots of things. For instance, if you can convince yourself to ignore a hot new TV show for a year (so that it’s “new to you” a year from now), it’ll probably be cheaper; and, you can benefit from average ratings and other info to tell you if the show/season turned out to be not worth watching at all.
That's what the Economist is for.
Personally, I found it helpful to view information consumption like this:
All information has a time horizon over which it is likely to be valuable. For some outrage news stories, it's just a few hours, while for more thoughtful political analyses, it's a year or two.
Even if you read voraciously, if you're consuming information with a short time horizon of value, you're going to be facing a constant downward momentum of useful knowledge, as the information you know becomes outdated or irrelevant.
Focus as much as you can on reading content that will be valuable for the foreseeable future, and you can avoid that downward momentum of information 'expiring'.
I stopped using Twitter to help slow down my news consumption.
Then I found I was reading the same thing each day on the front page of NYTimes, Guardian, my local papers (Toronto)
Now I check every few days, but I adore the sub sections on NYTimes. Wether it be food, technology, science, opinion. All fun to read and "slower"
Skip the news entirely. What value does it add to your life?
I’m happy reading blogs and periodicals with my RSS reader (feeder.co), which I check in the morning over coffee. I choose what’s in my feed, not some algorithm, advertiser, or news editor vying for clicks.
I found I liked watching news after I got a police-scanner and could listen to things as they happened. Police/Fire/Ambulance scratched the itch of "what is going on right now" better then the news of 'What happened yesterday' that the media offered.
It also had the added benefit of being LOCAL, when my local news mostly covered tidbits of national interest.
I'd still tune-in to local radio to get the followup or fuller-details of an event.
The sweet spot - like in most phenomena - seems to be in the middle: for trend correction we need informed people, not people addicted to trivia, neither people that only care about their own belly button. From a stream of 'news' to History essays, there is a place somewhere in the middle for monthly/quarterly 'digested news'. Even weekly news (like the Economist) seems to be too much.
I try and avoid the news whenever possible. Nothing good can come from it. I do however subscribe to a newspaper/magazine called 'Private Eye' that comes out fortnightly. Let's me catch up on the important news :)
I've stopped follwing the news cycle 4 years ago. I realized it wasn't a proper source of information. News needs to be published fast, so there is no time to do a proper source check. It it short, so there is no room for other views. It needs to be simple, easily understood, so it uses the dominant world view as a frame. News needs to get attention/clicks, so it is focussed on negative events, creating a skewed view of the world.
I only read analysis, long reads, investigative articles and news sites that do not focus on news, but on (global) developments. A good example is https://thecorrespondent.com (english version not active yet), I'm a member of the dutch version and I really enjoy reading investigative pieces about our tax system, healthcare, forgotten dutch histories and so on.
All in all I can say that when I stopped following the news cycle, the mental clutter really reduced and it made me feel better.
Just want to quickly namedrop https://thecorrespondent.com/ who are setting out to do exactly this (and have been doing it for some years already in the Netherlands). If you're interested in slower, less emotionally charged news, consider signing up.
A big source of the author's complaints actually is that there is a lot of news that comes out that opposes his worldview.
To me that area is more the problem. Most of what's counted as news comes from one somewhat extreme worldview or another. Usually it depends on the organization. Certain publications consistently come from the left and others consistently from the right and maybe there is a third category which is coming from a different direction. And actually left/right are not exact, but it seems as though people are polarized into two or maybe three camps, with often completely different worldviews in each of them.
It's actually like people are living in completely different universes. Each group is convinced that theirs is the true universe and the other is almost entirely false.
More in-depth articles could theoretically help by creating more opportunities for supplying factual detail and nuance. However, almost all of the in depth articles I see are clearly coming from one of the extreme worldviews.
I guess tests might be, can what you are reporting be verified in anyway, and would someone with a different worldview be able to gain information from it? Does it seem impartial.
To some degree it's an almost impossible task because even basic perception is tinted by worldview. But news can try to stick to uncontroversial facts and avoid assuming that other worldviews have no validity.
The other aspect is that the monetary incentives push them towards feeding a particular worldview rather than taking a chance of contradicting it with something too nuanced.
My guess right now is that there may be a way to improve the availability of truly primary sources of information by taking advantage if the internet. That can eliminate the bias that many news outlets would take on interpreting events.
Politics seems to be the most difficult case but also the most important.
Maybe it would help for people to realize that they are occupying parallel universes.
I have a theory that news occurs with a far lower frequency than people think, far lower than even when people try to account for their knowledge of the 24 hr. news cycle. In my theory, most of what counts for news, is either a story update (737 Max stories), or not news (say Trump "news").
My hypothetical news organization would strive to identify the unifying element of a given news item, and then keep one article about them. The article would include the following elements: a summary, a timeline, a fact set, and a commentary or critique. All subsections would be allowed to evolve, but the "story" would be one thing.
I've considered trying to self fund this somehow, but I've never convinced myself that it would really get traction.
I like the idea of "slow news." I imagine my ideal state would be a combination of slow news and rapid fire updates. You get depth on the things that deserve depth, as well as a shallow horizontal understanding of the most current happenings across the board.
From the reader side, the challenge would come in making the time for the slow news part when the rapid fire updates never stop, and in resisting the urge to equate seeing the rapid fire updates with actually being informed on the issues (i.e. "I don't need to read this in-depth look at the border situation; I've already seen a bunch of small updates on that"). From the publisher side, monetization is the ever-present issue
These links discuss "news diets" as a counter to the problem of news as low-quality information and/or information pollution:
http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when....
http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/
And here's a similar recent discussion on HN:
The Lindy effect is a concept that Taleb talks a lot about. Basically the best estimate of how long anything perishable will remain useful is how long its been around already. ie the stuff that will remain useful in 10-50 years are the ideas/texts/plays/ideas that have been around a long time already. Recent news is likely worthless in an equally short time.
So best to learn from centuries or millennia old books, rather than looking at twitter feed - or breaking news.
I would really like a big news service. These focuses might be a little morbid, but like major catastrophes (e.g. Idai), a single pre election explaining the stances, a post election on the results. Right now articles are being written on one person saying something about an event of interest. You can read 10 paragraphs a day on the Mueller report when nothing has really progressed on that front. I would love something that just lets me know when big stuff actually happens (e.g. wake me up when the report is out).
We are experience trust scarcity in online media because trust hasn't been part of social media's business model. By extension it stopped being part of the news publication's business model (everyone is forced to compete for clicks). That and because on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Ironically we are increasingly willing to get into stranger's cars and allow strangers stay at our homes because a few corporations like Uber and Airbnb were able to quantify, materialize and monetize trust. So it's not that much of a stretch to imagine an internet where trust plays a role in the way we distribute, consume and exchange information online. Hacker News is a case in point.
Ready for the shill?
We're building Relevant to make it easy to set up communities similar to HN, each with its own trust/reputation metric (based on personalized pagerank algorithm). So instead of using clicks / votes, all users and content get a trust/reputation score. The result is that rankings don't represent popularity, but relevance, resulting in better feeds and making communities easier to moderate. These trust metrics are much more resistant to sybil/sock-puppet attacks and can be used to build healthier business models, from prediction markets to advertising.
This is a harsh truth everywhere. News are being killed, as the reality, information and the data associated with it, all have been broken, categorized and used to manipulate people so that they can not conceive another reality and views. Many people is just looking through the lenses that paints better their own egocentric conception of the world or just the cases they need to rationalize what is happening on this confusing times.
News regulation has been labeled as "useless" or "censorship" too soon. The problem is the same with other industries that have some mind-shaping power, people should have some freedom to "control" the industry and the way the information flows through their processes and from/to the society in general. This is not a trivial problem and the fact that people is vulnerable to be manipulated and their biases harnessed in some non-obvious way makes it more difficult. Also we have the problem that we haven't been educated into metacognition, structured and critical thinking. Education systems should prepared people for information overload and into processes to derive the truth even when they face an adverse and hostile environment.
Much of internet news seems to follow the TV news model: lurid "breaking stories" interrupts and soundbites designed to capture your interest and trick you into watching advertising and vapid commentary. The important information is usually summarized quite adequately in a couple of headlines or sentences the next day, and it's usually easy to dig up more information if you really care.
News has been turned into an entertainment-sport where they make sure that there are always two opposing sides. It's manipulated by a few into giving you enough information to be outraged and inflamed but not informed. You can be on the right or the left it does not matter. What matters for the news business is that you get fed enough information so that you continue to watch and they make a profit.
The heads of the news channels are ex-entertainment heads who make sure that people continue to watch by feeding people more outrage.
The best thing people can do is stop reading and watching the news on a daily basis. Most of the news that is reported is useless since there is no substance to it and will disappear without any impact relatively fast. I believe that if it's important you'll hear about it eventually.
"Slower better news" will never happen since it's not in the interest of the news business to create it. We have to be the ones that need to stop consuming it and figure out how to stay informed without being manipulated.
I've been thinking about this for a while, even pitched the following:
Good news. News that makes the world better (aka journalism). Distilled deductive logical reasoning, observations and theories. Not gossip, gawking, envy, or mindless time sinks.
For me this pragmatically works out to a combination of hackernews, hackaday, massdevice, arstechnica, atlasobscura, and podcasts/pbs/npr.
I don't think it's that urgent because most people do not need to read most news. For people with particular responsibilities, it can be helpful to be up-to-date on the narrow field of news related to your responsibilities. For most people, there may only be a 5-10 relevant news events per year. The fact that you can access news from everywhere in the world instantaneously and at low monetary cost does not make it inherently useful, and if anything, it's likely to mislead you profoundly about your level of knowledge about the world and the stories that you are reading.
Stories about plane crashes and mass earthquake deaths and things like that are mostly about titillation and encouraging a morbid fascination with death. It also discourages people from focusing on the things that they can control in their life. The press doesn't like to admit it, but a lot of the 'hard news' is just /r/watchpeopledie in a necktie.
I subscribe to a paper that comes out each Friday, called weekendavisen. Until May last year it didn’t have news on the web, they do have an electronic paper now but I’ve never visited.
It’s high quality news in lengthy articles, in fact I’m not even in its demographic because it has a lot of culture stuff as well and I don’t really care about that.
I really like the fact that it’s relevant though. Because it only comes out on Fridays, only the stuff that actually mattered during the week makes it in there.
If something big happens I’ll turn to internet public service, but otherwise I mostly ignore news outside of my weekly paper. I highly recommend it if you want to stay informed but cut the bullshit and have a similar option.
The FT works well for me.
I subscribe to both the FT and the Economist precisely because slow news is what they do.
The FT tends to studiously avoid clickbait, avoid reporting every detail of 'this politician said that' and goes straight for the hard analysis of what it means.
Doesn’t slower, better news conflict with how news is primarily funded today i.e. advertising? Tabloid news has existed much longer than I’ve been alive, and their style (attention-grabbing, exaggerated titles) matches the kinds of ads they display. A newspaper on a slower circulation cycle would need to attract advertisers that market on similar cycle if the newspaper is dependent on ad revenue (e.g. month-long offers).
A subscription-only / patron-only news service makes sense for the typical customer of a Bloomberg terminal, but what about everyone else? Do they just pay for headlines or three-sentence summaries?
You might say that most people don’t need that frequency of news, and for most topics I would agree. However, there are topics like sports that create news on such a frequent basis, and topics like politics where one could argue that being accurately informed in a timely manner is a responsibility and a necessity for a well-functioning democracy.
Tl;dr I don’t think you can separate the news from the manner in which it is funded, and the issues in quality and business-viability that we’ve heard a lot about is evidence for it.
I simply buy a weekly newspaper and read it. I’m always 1-1.5 weeks behind so I never feel as “emotional” or follow things that closely. I want a general feel for some of the things happening in the world and that is it
I stopped checking 'general' news long ago.
Recently I searched for some 'valuable' news source - kinda meritum from the news - but nothing like that exists ...
... so I started my own 'news' for UNIX/BSD/Linux related stuff - Valuable News - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/valuable-news-2019...
Because various UNIX/BSD/Linux related news sites also make a lot of SPAM and no-so-much-news ...
Argh, it pains me that even professionals cannot get the word "peruse" right...
"I skim e-mail newsletters in my in-box, scroll through my Twitter feed, and peruse the news apps on my phone; later, in the office, I tap through my notifications and monitor more than a dozen news-related apps, including Facebook and Twitter, while juggling other tasks. I usually feel as though I’m managing to stay abreast of the day’s biggest news stories, but my reading tends to be fragmentary—I’m only skimming a story or absorbing a partial update."