A Gym Chain Is Banning Cable News | Hacker News Reader

A Gym Chain Is Banning Cable News

nytimes.com

128 pointsartur_makly119 comments

This is so fantastic, I wish my gym would do this. Whenever I go to my chain gym, I try to find a cardio machine as far as possible from the TV's running CNN and Fox News all day. If I'm not able, I take off my glasses so I can't easily see what is happening and focus on the book or podcast I am listening to.

If and when I want to watch the train wreck that is cable news, it is very easy to do so - it would nice not to have it forced into my field of view when I'm on a treadmill.

It's a nice start, definitely. I used to use a gym that ran CNN constantly, and during the Casey Anthony trial I realized I was actually being put off working out by the thought of seeing more lurid garbage about the case.

That said, the article still offers:

> The big-screen TVs at all clubs will now air “USA, A&E, Discovery and HGTV, in addition to local stations and ESPN”

I'm delighted to have found a gym that simply doesn't have massive TV screens within every line of sight. Put optional ones in cardio machines, sure. But I don't actually want to watch anything while I'm working out, and it's strange to me that screens are so omnipresent in gyms.

> I'm delighted to have found a gym that simply doesn't have massive TV screens within every line of sight.

I like shopping at Aldi because they don't play music.

The worst are chains which don't just play pop music but also have pseudo radio jockeys which talk about gossip and try to be funny. It's insultingly stupid.

The gym I'm currently at doesn't have any TVs. Unfortunately, they play some music. The volume is very low, though.

You know what's even worse? Gas station TV (GSTV.com). Utterly awful content that nobody ever wanted, spewed at you by the pump while you're filling up your car.

Speedway doesn't bother with that. They just play an endless loop at high volume hawking the highest margin products from the store with happy, smiling faces. It's turned me off from buying gas from them actually.

They also used to play loud pop music in the stores until the clerks couldn't stand it themselves and lowered the volume. Every time the district manager visits he makes them crank it up high and the minute he leaves the volume goes back down again ;<)!

At least you can hit the second button down on the right to mute it.

There was a gas station that I used that had that annoying GSTV stuff going, but one day the machine refused to give me my receipt until the video stopped playing. Amusingly, that location closed less than a month after that. Good riddance.

A new one opened in its place with none of that nonsense.

I actively avoid those gas stations solely because of those screens. I hope enough of us do so that it impacts their bottom lines.

It always seemed to me that was sponsored content that probably subsidizes the gas station a bit. Kind of like the crap software that comes preinstalled on PCs to give a little extra kick back to the bottom line for the manufacturer.

> The worst are chains which don't just play pop music but also have pseudo radio jockeys

I'll one-up you - the grocery story nearest my house has abandoned all pretense, and just plays a non-stop ad loop over the PA. It's easier to tune out than bad pop, granted, but it feels like absolutely shameless abuse of my attention.

As for music in gyms, I suppose I'm cheating - the rock gym I go to plays music that could easily have been from my Pandora station, so I don't actually worry about how annoying it might be.

> It's strange to me that screens are so omnipresent in gyms

Same with bars. I want to go have a drink and chat with people. I just don't understand the need for TV in places like these.

that would make for a great A/B test of these environments for some outcome. With a bar maybe the number of drinks/food ordered, who knows. Might be a great surprise the outcome.

Sports, basically

And some people go to the bars to watch sports with their friends

Honestly, I don't object to muted sports in bars - even ones that aren't nominally sports bars. Sports-watching is more social than news, and less intrusive if you're not interested. Just turn the damn things off if there's nothing to watch, and maybe have a few bars without TVs.

I might be spoiled, though. In a city this size I can find most any type of bar I want - when I lived in a spot where Buffalo Wild Wings was considered a 'good' bar, I felt a bit differently.

What else are you going to look at while you sit hogging a station for 5 minutes waiting for your next set?

The usual reason I hear is that talking distracts from drinking, so loud music and captivating screens raise drink revenues. I'm not convinced that's right, though.

As a reason for deafening music in clubs, sure. As a reason for screens and volume-on in pubs? I've definitely left bars early, or avoided them altogether, specifically because it was too hard to have a chat with friends.

My 'local' has one small TV, muted, and the rest is live music, talking, and posters on the walls. It's a proper "third place", and doing incredibly well for it - so much so that I wonder if most bars are just scared of taking the risk.

Is this a regional thing? Where I live, neighborhood bars and sports bars have TVs, but everything else doesn't.

Agreed, and I wish other types of businesses (restaurants, bars, airports) would do the same. Cable news is mostly garbage entertainment gossip or alarmist nonsense, and I would love to eliminate it from my life completely!

Now if they would only ban music. Nearly every person in a gym now has a smart phone and wearing earbuds. And for some reason gyms insist on blaring some god-awful awful generic "workout music." The net result being that customers have to compete with the gym's music in order to hear their own preferred music.

I tried to explain this to a manager at a gym last summer and he just stared at me blankly. It did not compute.

It's probably because the sound of a hundred people grunting and panting in a silent room would be weird

What about using white noise?

That would open them up to hundreds of copyright infringement claims!!!

Even 4'33" of silence might!

Were I a member of staff, or even a frequent user who doesn't want his own music, I'd hate having to listen to white noise for extended periods.

They play white noise in my building at work and, your first week you really notice it but, once you get used to it being there you don't notice it all.

Except maybe when something happens and it turns off and then it's so loud that you wish it was on again.

It's a f...ing gym! If people can't deal with the sound from other people working out they can get earplugs or get a headset.

"can't deal with" seems like an unnecessarily personalized argument. Maybe they just like music better?

Ift's fine if they like music better but their need can easily be satisfied by wearing earphones. It's harder for people who don't want music to remove it.

if you listened to your arguments for the "other" people, you might consider getting ear plugs or noise-canceling headphones yourself.

Music at the gym should be opt-in, not opt-out.

There's still always going to be some "opt-out" sounds at the gym. I'd prefer it be any kind of music rather than "Hnnnggg, urrgghh" and clink-clanks.

Or just ban the grunters... sigh.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/no_grunting_allowed_at_the_...

Wow imagine getting publicly scolded and thrown out of a gym after having successfully benched 500 pounds. That’s surreal.

It's weird that a gym sounds like a gym? There's also strangers in funny clothes sweating next to yiou. This is what one expects at a gym.

There's a difference between what you expect, and what you like. It doesn't mean it can't be a little better. Having something playing in the background makes the other noises less weird. It also makes me less self-conscious when I make my own grunting noises.

You're telling me if they invented a machine that stopped anyone in a room from sweating or smelling, you wouldn't want your gym to have them?

>"Having something playing in the background makes the other noises less weird. It also makes me less self-conscious when I make my own grunting noises."

Which is presumably why the overwhelming majority of people in gyms are wearing earbuds and and enjoying their chosen music.

Okay, but unless I can get every single person to wear earbuds than it will still make me self-conscious to grunt in front of the ones that aren't. Also the gym staff. Etc.

If you have your own earbuds in, why does it matter if the gym is playing music?

Do you really believe that if I am working out next to you that I can't hear you grunting if the gym is playing music?

If you read the discussion you can see that the issue if you have to compete with the house sounds system which is much more powerful than your earbuds.

> Do you really believe that if I am working out next to you that I can't hear you grunting if the gym is playing music?

Not that you can't hear me. But that I'm not the only thing you hear.

It's a psychological thing. I'm no longer worrying that the only sounds for people near me to hear are my grunts. The music lets both of us tune it out. If you want to focus on me and listen, you can still do that, but it's weird.

> If you read the discussion you can see that the issue if you have to compete with the house sounds system which is much more powerful than your earbuds.

I've never been to a gym that I couldn't comfortably speak at a quiet level above the music, and wouldn't work out at one that does. This isn't actually a discussion about gym music, it's crappy gyms vs non-crappy gyms.

>"This isn't actually a discussion about gym music, it's crappy gyms vs non-crappy gyms."

It seems like its more a discussion about your own self-consciousness.

Correct. A crappy gym doesn't try to accommodate members needs like self consciousness or an overbearing music volume. A good gym does, among many other things.

I meant weird in the sense of unpleasant/unsettling, not unusual or surprising.

Plenty of ways to cancel that out from an owners' perspective.

Number one would be fans. Number two would be a noise-masking solution.

Music is a pretty widely-accepted noise masking solution, though.

My gym has TVs with sound muted, and subtitles enabled, and the music is heavy-metal. It works just fine for me, on those rare days when I forget to pack my headphones.

That would drive me crazy

That music is probably more for the employees nowadays.

My gym, the Sports Centre of Montréal's Olympic Stadium, very much has no music and has signs saying that if you want music, bring your own device. Most of the cardio machines also have access to various forms of entertainment, including YouTube and local TV stations, so you can just hook up your earbuds to them.

I really love that gym.

I'm an avid gym-goer and I like the music on in the background. I don't wear earbuds because I value "awareness". I like being able to hear other happenings around me without them being blocked out. Same idea for public transportation. Anyways, the employees at my gym just play Spotify Premium and are friendly enough to take requests. Maybe you can ask your gym to play some music you like?

>Anyways, the employees at my gym just play Spotify Premium and are friendly enough to take requests.

Not a Spotify user so I don't know what I'm talking about, but it sounds like this might be a feature they could implement...some sort of "Jukebox mode," whereby anyone w/the Spotify app could make requests for the local area, given the right password (put on a whiteboard or something, the way we do for wifi).

There are public playlists that anyone can edit, which are cool if the people using them generally like the same sort of music. They might not work as well if the people have widely varying tastes.

I agree, I think there is a need for one of the big music streaming services to create a geo-fenced (or Wifi-fenced?) jukebox system. Can be used for bars, gyms, house parties, etc. Similar to Chromecast, but with filters to make sure the public doesn't troll the system. Such as:

a) Having a pre-made list of songs that users can select from. Something like a list of 1,000s of Top 40s going back a few decades, or a selection of the top 10 hits from a list of grammy-winning artists, being able to split the songs into genres and select certain genres, etc. The idea is to not allow users to submit songs that fits the atmosphere of the venue (e.g. prevent ambient music in a gym, only allow country in a southern bar, etc)

b) Preventing the same song playing within the same hour, and possibly preventing the same artist from playing ~3x in a row

c) Preventing users from submitting songs consecutively, such as 1 submission per every 30 minutes d) Monetize by allowing small fees to push your jukebox songs to the top of the queue ($0.99?)

AMI Music

>"Anyways, the employees at my gym just play Spotify Premium and are friendly enough to take requests. Maybe you can ask your gym to play some music you like?"

Does this strike you as a viable solution? Everyone goes to the front desk and requests that the gym play music to suit their personal taste? How does that work out for the rest of the people in the gym that have different musical tastes?

Also wearing earbuds doesn't mean someone doesn't value "awareness." I can listen to my music and not compromise my visual awareness in the least.

99% don't care, so the one person who does doing so is viable, yes.

>"99% don't care"

Do you have some data supporting this statistic?

Just an exercise I suggest you approach the staff at your local gym and ask them to play personal DJ for you. I'm fairly confident what the outcome of that interaction will be.

I meant 99% of patrons aren't bothered by the music, if you were taking that differently. In that person's situation, apparently yes, they changed the music for him.

A jukebox app for a phone could be an interesting thing for a gym. Maybe only on certain days/times.

iTunes used to have this. You could vote from your phone for a song playing on a PC. It was pretty neat when DJing for kids parties.

You would need to pay Muzak or SiriusXM or another vetted provider of public music. Businesses (bars, hair salons, gyms, etc) cannot simply play Spotify or Pandora in their business, unless they plan on getting sued by BMI and/or ASCAP.

Muzak and SiriusXM have ready-made solutions for exactly what these sorts of businesses are looking for.

AMI Music?

I didn't say that people who wear earbuds don't value awareness. I was just describing my particular preferences. Also, yes it is a viable solution. I've seen it work at a handful of gyms. Those who don't like it wear earbuds or leave the gym.

There are many open air headphones that allow the sound through. But you can’t use them in gyms if you want to hear your own music because of what they are blasting.

Counterpoint: I've been to gyms when the music system broke, and the silence instantly makes it feel lonelier and more uninviting. This was late in the evening when there were few other patrons, so it might be ok during busier times.

Agreed. Playing some low-level white noise over the speaker system would drown out the grunting, panting, or conversations almost as well, and it wouldn't interfere with people's own music choices on their headphones.

Good! I don't understand why it's OK to blast us with mindless TV in gyms, at the dentist, gas stations and work cafeteria. Turn them all off!

There has to be some support for it either in the company or their clients.

I wouldn't be surprised if they got a kickback from the channel.

> I wouldn't be surprised if they got a kickback from the channel.

Outcome Health was a startup that put ad-loop TVs in doctor's offices. They definitely got paid by the ad runners, and were either placing the TVs for free or were actually paying for right to place them.

(They were apparently also faking their numbers, hence my past tense.)

Jesus, $600m in funding and a valuation of $5.6b. "The largest single funding round since Groupon in 2011." All to put (presumably) pharma ads in our faces.

I'm used to BS mission statements about "making the world a better place", but that one honestly made me a bit sick.

With all the issues in American healthcare, the hot new $600m startup added nothing but more advertisements - and had to fake even that. It might actually have been better for the world to pay all the employees to not build that company.

> It might actually have been better for the world to pay all the employees to not build that company.

The way you do this is to promote government regulation of the funding parties (banks, pharma, etc). Right now they can do what they want and essentially pay to have people lie for them.

That kind of stuff would not pass muster in the EU or China.

I don't think I've ever heard the suggestion of opening VCs to liability for those they invest in. Doing that, even in a very limited sense (like "VCs who fail to employ due diligence") seems like it might cool the market down significantly, but that doesn't sound like the worst thing.

I saw this in the US last summer at a filling station. They had TVs mounted on the pumps tuned into CNN at ear-splitting volume. It reminded me of Mike Judge's movie "Idocracy."

Creating a captive audience out of what would normally be two minutes of mental free time is incredibly disturbing.

It's the inspiration for "Idiocracy"! You have the same at the dentist, in hospitals and everywhere else.

I love "Idiocracy", but it is so painful to watch today. It's more a documentary than a comedy.

Oh god. Thankfully those are fairly uncommon -- I never do a repeat visit to station with that crap.

Gas station 'news' has rapidly become one of my least favorite things. It usually comes with a mute button, but frankly if it's going to exist I want a little readout telling me exactly how much money I'm saving by being turned into a captive ad audience. (I'm betting it's "0.00", but...)

I hate gas station telescreens, and in my experience they never have STFU buttons. I wonder if a high-power electromagnet could damage the speakers from outside the pump housing? :)

Most of my local stations have replaced their pumps with these things. Fortunately, one station at least has the sense to TURN THE DAMN SOUND DOWN to where it's easy for me to ignore, and (even better) it's also the last station in town to raise prices when the local price mysteriously jumps 25¢/gallon because Reasons.

"I hate gas station telescreens, and in my experience they never have STFU buttons."

Try pushing all the buttons. Whether out of some residual guilt by the developer, a general propensity towards featuritis, or perhaps some obscure regulation I've never heard of, there has always been a button mapped to mute when I tried it. And I think maybe only once was it labeled.

(In my local stomping grounds I just avoid these gas stations, but when traveling I sometimes encounter them by accident. They don't exactly put "WE BLAST YOU WITH ADS WHILE YOU PUMP!" on the billboards.)

Let's not forget the gold-standard for inappropriately placed tv screens: NYC yellow cabs.

.. and all the cab drivers wonder why they lose to car services.

Reminds me of Aaron Swartz's I Hate The News:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Honestly, most of the time I tend to agree and can't fathom what reading the news does for me. Small outlets like HN sometimes contain things that affect me directly and I can do something about, but general politics is completely out of my reach, especially politics about a country I'm not a member of.

Judging by how well-informed he was later in life, I think he reversed his opinion on the subject a lot later on.

The news makes you more poorly informed: by encouraging you to see everything in the light of whatever narrative they've invented, it makes the information you gain from other channels less useful than it would otherwise be.

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

It doesn't take a ton of time to be way better-informed than most people on current events. Background reading of big ol' books is a lot more valuable than keeping up with the headlines every day. You can catch up on the need-to-know current events with one monthly paper you scan on a lazy Sunday morning, and maybe a weekly or monthly newsletter or two. Reading about the stuff daily is 100% not necessary.

Similarly, and especially given our two-party system in the US, following every twist and turn in a political race is pure entertainment, of exactly no more value to you or anyone else than watching soap operas. You can make an as-informed-as-it-needs-to-be decision by spending that time on building up foundational knowledge instead, then catching up on the happenings of the race and the candidates' positions an hour before you go vote.

TV news mis-informs by making people think that extremely rare events are likely to happen to them. For example, it's extremely rare for children to be abducted by strangers, but it happens almost every day on cable and TV.

I sort of chuckle at this, but the truth be told .. I can't even watch the news anymore and I grew up on it.

However, my conservative nature is less about news itself, than the extreme requirements to meet revenue streams of yesteryear by legitimate news organizations (namely the ones that actually HIRE journalists). By contrasting example, my local Buffalo WGRZ news organization works closely with Investigativepost.org and they seem to be very bipartisan by all accounts. Maybe that's just my region of the country demographically speaking ... but I do enjoy the quality of news.

My point is really the de-valuation of industry on the whole because of information availability to the masses and the microphone passing to everyone on the street. As they say, the meek shall inherit the earth and as a technologist ... this is just one of the unintended consequences. I do believe in the sharing of information, ideas, and software (noting opensource seems to have done a great job, and if we could only KEEP Net Neutrality .. we'd be better off to the alternative I think).

It creeps into everyone's space of sanity, and for me ... eating chicken wings and watching the news .. has lead to the same as gym rats lifting then seeing some stuff that makes their blood boil .. you can die from that.

Stay safe my gym rats .. we will both make it through this. :)

It really is cable news that's the problem. Local reporting is often way better.

They have to obey rules related to their use of public broadcast spectrum.

I'd prefer if gyms would refrain from playing music as well.

Why? Sometimes I forget my headphones at home and I'm always thankful there is music on.

Because it's distracting, it's generally awful pap, the sound quality sucks, it's usually at a different tempo and mood than I want for the phase of workout I'm in...

I hate listening to music while working out. You can easily get music by taking your headphones but I can't opt out of music if I want silence.

You can easily get access to non-music with earplugs, though, and those are both cheaper and waterproof. ;)

I hope you are kidding! If you have problems with my bad breath and constant farting, gas masks are cheap and waterproof.

I'm only partly kidding.

The parent complained that they don't like hearing music while they work out, and advocated for _every other gym user_ to provide their own music, presumably by ensuring they have a music player + headphones on at all times.

An alternative option is for some (probably most) people to listen to the available music (or their own if they prefer), and those (presumably few) who want silence to do so by putting earplugs in to block the sound. (I think most gyms play music because they've found that doing so keeps more customers happy, but that may be a mistaken assumption.)

From an economic standpoint, the choice is between N people buying/using headphones + a media player, or M people putting in (cheap, waterproof) earplugs. The latter solution is substantially more efficient, and has the added benefit that _most people_ in the gym are probably going to have headphones-off, and more aware of their surroundings, and be easier to talk to or ask questions of.

One way gyms might cater to both views is to have set times/days where they play music, and times that they don't, so that you can adjust your workout schedule to meet your preferences.

If it matters, my personal preferences are to listen to (nice music) > (annoying music) > silence > (personal music), because I'd rather be unencumbered.

Is it weird that I really don't like wearing headphones while working out? I get sweaty and find it gross to put something I can't easily wash in or on my ears.

Going to the gym is equivalent to meditation for a lot of people and silence can be helpful for that kind of practice (it's less distracting)

Is it ever something you want to hear/doesn’t make you want to cut off your ears?

I suspect music is pretty lucrative for gyms so I think they will keep it.

At LA Fitness they play "Zoom Media", which is a station which seems entirely payola-based to promote whatever new artist the labels are interested in. (Payola is illegal for stations on the public airwaves, but since this is in-house at a private business I assume it's fine) It's even worse than Top 40; it's more like Top 7, over and over, all day.

So good. We need more silence and less distraction. It's not like it's a bad thing to have an empty wall here and there.

Can we ban them from doctor's offices and the airports too? Let's go back to reading magazines and books.

I felt like more brain cells died having Fox News shouting at me for two hours at a time while waiting at various doctor's appointments with my mom back in the South than any drinking I've done.

I specifically sought out a gym that doesn't have -any- televisions. We're too connected wherever we go, and a respite is both healthy and enjoyable. I guess some folks aren't content with the nonstop barrage of hyperbole that we're inundated by on a regular basis.

This is not a scalable solution. Learn to ignore distracting stimuli and you can be free anywhere you go.

Why don't they just remove the TVs? You can watch TV at home, you don't need to do it at the gym.

I think its a great idea. If you're lifting weights you're probably not watching TV. I get that people on the treadmills probably wanna watch TV. That's cool. There's rows of TVs at my gyms for the rows of cardio machines.

The TV provides something to distract and look at. However, the news is stressful. I was on the treadmill last night and I'm just bombarded with MSNBC, CNN and Fox from all angles and I just could not focus on working out. It was stressful to look at, none of it was anything but politicized garbage. If I could've turned them all to cartoon network I'd have done it.

Put on local news, then put entertainment on the rest. I'm not at the gym to be more immersed in the ever-present war of buzzwords between political parties.

http://www.tvbgone.com

This is good. I never understood why we have news channels wherever we go. Airports, cafeterias, etc. Why not just put on entertainment channels? Most people treat news as entertainment anyway, and the entertainment channels do a better job of it.

Just passed by a TV with CNN running. They were in "Breaking News" mode. The breaking news? Trump is touting his 2017 achievements.

This is breaking news? Doesn't he do something like this every other week or so?

This is great. Staying informed about current events is great, but cable news (a bunch of fearmongering and talking heads yelling at each other) is not the way to do it and being forcefully bombarded with cable news in a public space is definitely not the way to do it.

I really hate the fact that gyms and other spaces like this think it's a good idea to plaster TVs all over the walls and bombard you with video. Why? Who enjoys that?

Talk about noise in the gym, there is one sound that's missing lately.

My gym recently went to these 8-sided, plastic coated weight plates. They're easy to handle, they have holes to put your hand through. But I miss the old 'ching-a-ling' sound of heavy metal when you're putting a heavy load on the bar. Probably a sound that's gone forever.

I like that idea.

Honestly I see so many ipads or tablets on the cardio equipment anyways, I never saw the point of having news at the gym.

I always turn off CNN from my gyms tvs. I call it the Constant Negativity Network. This is not against CNN specific, they're all like that. Workout is supposed to be my safe space to build myself up, destress, work out _my_ kinks. With the news on it distracts and detracts from those aims.

Unlike the Gold's Gyms in the area (same ownership) the "discount" gym I go to now gets all the sports channels. So, if I want to catch a game, I can do cardio at the same time.

Otherwise, the most requested channel? HGTV!

I'm going to forward this article to my gym. Cable news really isn't news anyways. CNN is entertainment masquerading as news, and Fox is just a 24-7 confirmation bias funnel for conservatives.

Great idea! I agree it's a good holistic-health measure.

Fuck the gym, workout at home

Why does HN allow nytimes articles? They are always paywalled and I'll bet most people don't even read them.

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

http://archive.li/AtE7T

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