Hacker News Reader

> UK "journalism" is simply stunningly bad now.

The Guardian[0] has done some great reporting in recent years[1]:

Notable scoops include the 2011 News International phone hacking scandal, in particular the hacking of murdered English teenager Milly Dowler's phone. The investigation led to the closure of the UK's biggest selling Sunday newspaper, and one of the highest circulation newspapers in the world, the News of the World. The newspaper also released news of the secret collection of Verizon telephone records held by US President Barack Obama's administration in June 2013, and subsequently revealed the existence of the PRISM surveillance program after it was leaked to the paper by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2016, it led the investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing the then British Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian

No mention of The Guardian? I have a pretty high opinion of their newsroom, and donate regularly. They’ve been doing solid investigative work lately, even on American topics.

Big problem with the Guardian is not making clear enough visual differentiation between their blogs — where anyone can write any old shit — and their actual reporting and editorial

Opinion pieces have a bright orange banner and use that same colour elsewhere in the articles, it's also used on the links to the opinion pieces. What else could they be doing to point out the difference? How could they make it more clear than heavy use of colour coding?

It was such a stupid decision for them to combine their opinion and editorial section with Comment Is Free. The latter being pretty trashy most of the time.

How do you know the difference? Is it in the banner or the url?

I think the only real way nowadays is whether /commentisfree/ appears in the URL and it isn't clearly marked as an Editorial.

I have a hypothesis that if the breadcrumb says "home › opinion" with no third level then you're in CIF, but I have no real evidence that that is actually reliable.

The Intercept [1] is arguably British. It has a focus on UK/US/BR, with a Brazilian version as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept

I did and still do have a high opinion of the guardian, but that perception has been shifted somewhat when one of the senior tech editors tried to argue with me that foss is dead and no one cares about it anymore...

Not everything is well in Germany.

The "Stern", one of the big German magazines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_(magazine), took a big nosedive in quality in my opinion.

3 or 4 years ago (i am not sure when this exactly happend) they did a "redesign" - and since then many hard topics and inconvienient stories where left behind for soft topics and lifestyle articles.

I really enjoyed reading it but right now I won't bother most of the time.

They even changed their, in my opinion hilarious, but sarcastic album reviews to album reviews which sound like a rehash of the PR text from the record company.

The most important thing is the picture of the lead journalists at the end of the story and how they "connect to this story". And the guy who writes 3 pages about his cooking. And the boring "I am so edgy and showing two sides of my personality" PR interview with a celebrity. Yesterday I've read one of these interviews with the question "do you enjoy wearing suits?"

To be fair, sometimes they still have well made articles, but many times it is just boring feel-good-journalism.

The same thought crossed my mind the other day, but thinking through it I remembered, for print journalism: the Financial Times (which I think has a claim on 'best journalism in English'), The Guardian, and The Economist. In the U.S. a country ~4 times the size, there is only the New York Times and the Washington Post on that level (IMHO; there's also Time, Bloomberg, and others; and we're omitting Reuters, the AP, and many more in other categories).

I think the situation in the UK is similar to the US for print journalism (whatever that means these days), with a few large blocks:

* A few top-notch publications

* Far right propaganda, substantially from Murdoch / News Corp.

* A bunch of middling, substantially ineffectual stuff

(I know these are broad generalizations, with many exceptions.)

The Economist is terrible. It's just the same neo-liberal slant on everything. Read one article of theirs and you are done.

FT is really weak. Go check out the FT comments some time - none of their readers understand how markets work nor how prices are set. You know why? Because they read the FT and the FT never talks about any of this. All they have is what appears to be in depth but is simply parroting numbers.

Guardian I have more time for but they are frustrating. They tell the truth right up to the point where it comes to talking about the banks and how land is used to extract labour, then they melt away. Which in the UK is everything.

UK journalism has fallen so far. Telegraph for example you could label propaganda - it's right wing. But it's so trashy now. And this is mirrored across all publications.

One big difference between The Economist and German papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) is: The Economist is capable of admitting that it was wrong in the past. The financial news section of the FAZ, on the other hand, will deride anyone who does not agree with them ideologically, and then, when it turns out they had been wrong from the get go, pretend they were on the other side of the argument.

I have the feeling journalists in Germany still think there is something like completely objective reporting. A kind of gold standard you achieve by adhering to a certain method, with everyone coming to the one and only correct conclusion. Anyone who does not must be inept or not a real journalist in the first place.

>The Economist is capable of admitting that it was wrong in the past.

Just like every economist in the history of economics

> The Economist is terrible. It's just the same neo-liberal slant on everything

That's a really common prejudice, and not born out by the actual paper, in my view. As just one example, in the US presidential elections, The Economist has endorsed G W Bush, but then Kerry, Obama, Obama, and Clinton.

It's still the best newspaper around, in my view, for concise, opinionated updates on a wide range of global issues.

FT is better than WSJ, but that's not saying much.

Guardian has some good reporting, and is worth supporting, though I disagree with some of their editorialising.

US also has the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers, and a few other very good monthlies.

I read an article in the New Yorker recently about a guy chasing info on squid, just excellent. So well written.

Unfortunately they do mix paid content in. I built it in to one of their apps after much complaining about what it was going to do to the user experience, but they have to pay for the publication somehow.

What about the BBC? Are they bad now as well?

The BBC is a total shadow of its former self. Radio included. 9 o'clock news is like it's for kids.

The BBC is pretty much okay with accurate reporting.

Yes, but they let the newspapers set the agenda.