Wake up: News doesn't work
scripting.com
scripting.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: Yes, I'm confounding HN with "the world" in some sense.
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.