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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

Part of it is an audience problem.

We have good news, e.g. http://hosted.ap.org

The problem is nobody will read it. It's not sensationalized and dramatized enough. It's not edited into a series of one second video clips with an ominous soundtrack, with an occasional clip of guys in black marching with ak-47s because isis. It requires an attention span longer than 30 seconds.

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Then it's a failure of the website in their inability to deliver the message in a format acceptable to the audience. "people are stupid" is a ridiculous cop-out for their inability to understand basic human psychology. People are not stupid, this site is competing with literally thousands of websites doing the same thing. I have no words for sheer arrogance of calling people stupid when they don't read this shitty website, we get our daily moral chiding from nytimes, we don't need more of that.

Uh, most newsworthy topics cannot be articulated in a 10 bullet listicle or 30 second teaser video. Plenty of intelligent people have no problem reading longform journalism, so yes, at least one component of this is in fact "people are stupid." Or they're at least too lazy to confront the complexity of the world.

We accept that schools are boring and psychology isn't required to turn stupid people smart (or uninformed to educated if you'd like). Perhaps if we thought of news as education instead of entertainment, we'd accept it being boring and maybe get smarter.

I wish there was a way to measure if people actually are stupid and see if it is getting better or worse. I don't want to be arrogant, I want to be factual.

I don't get the impression the parent comment is saying "people are stupid". I think the point is "news != entertainment". At least it shouldn't be. If you want to be entertained go watch a movie. If you want to be informed well on a topic then read or watch the "boring" news.

If the incentive structure props up the "news == entertainment" organizations better than the "news == boring facts" organizations we have failed and will ultimately pay the price.

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