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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I like reading the newspaper -- print, rather than online -- specifically because it comes out only once a day. It's not an endless stream of pretend-immediate attention-grabbers, but a curated collection of the important stuff that happened yesterday.

If the print newspaper were invented today, it would grab hundreds of millions of VC money in Silicon Valley as the cure for news overload. (I guess the pitch would have to include some silly AI or IoT angle though.)

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You could replace the AI bit with 'reporters' who are trained to collate and edit the news, in order to give it a human touch.

>I like reading the newspaper -- print, rather than online -- specifically because it comes out only once a day. It's not an endless stream of pretend-immediate attention-grabbers, but a curated collection of the important stuff that happened yesterday.

If that was true, newspapers would have variable length. But they don't.

They fill in the same BS arbitrary number of pages day-in, day-out.

Edit: Downvoting as if this isn't self-evident?

Newspapers do vary the number of pages on a daily basis, so I don't really know what you mean.

(If they were set to a fixed number of pages, they wouldn't have the flexibility to sell more ads when there's a busy occasion such as an election...)

>Newspapers do vary the number of pages on a daily basis

That have quotas that they fill day-in, day-out, and they add some additional pages based on special occasions (elections, some huge crime, attack, holidays, and such). But they will never give you e.g. a 12 page newspaper even if there is nothing happening. They'll use any BS story to fill pages.

I read an app that updates once a day with 6 short news items. Takes less than 5 minutes to read when I'm on the pot and I'm done with news for the rest of the day. Works pretty well, I don't think I'm less informed than other people I interact with.

Economist Espresso?

Yes

I use the teletext service for that, around 18 items per day. Titles have 34 characters max, body max 100 words. http://nos.nl/teletekst#101 Radio news takes 5 minutes, and 1.5 speed television news takes 10 minutes. I prioritize local news. It would be nice if you could have such a format for social 'news', twitter comes to mind, but few use it that way - a few newsworthy oneliners a day.

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