Hacker News Reader

If it ever feels like the news is getting you down, I strongly recommend substituting your normal news habit for watching old news bulletins on YouTube. Try it for a week or two - if you feel the urge to check the news, go and watch an NBC news bulletin from 1988 or a BBC news bulletin from 1991 instead. Lots of people have uploaded complete bulletins, which I'd recommend over isolated clips.

I found it to be a revelatory experience. The news, ultimately, is just stories. It's not a definitive or objective account of what's happening in the world, it's just industrialized gossip with a veneer of legitimacy. Without the sense of urgency that comes with newness, it's often remarkably dull. The news shows you the variance, but not the trend; someone who caught up on current events only once a year would probably have a better sense of where the world is headed than someone who checks the news every day. Some stories that were huge dramas at the time are now long forgotten; some stories that barely registered at the time eventually turned out to be part of a crucial change in society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4-_85x5k3s

I get a lot of flak for it, but this is why I stopped following the daily news. So much of it is noise. People are flabbergasted that I am not following the latest turn in some months long drama, but it is precisely because it is months long that I don’t need to follow the daily changes. My hope is that it leaves me better able to filter the noise. I couldn’t say if it is working, but it feels like it is.

> The news, ultimately, is just stories. It's not a definitive or objective account of what's happening in the world, it's just industrialized gossip with a veneer of legitimacy

Or it may be that people have a hard time to figure out what matters at any given moment in time - you never quite know how a news item will play out - will it become part of History or will it turn out to be just another detail? go figure when it is happening...

Maybe grandparent is just right: when it is all happening people may be more honest than after the fact, when positions are clear and everyone has to justify his own stake in the grand puzzle.

>Or it may be that people have a hard time to figure out what matters at any given moment in time

It's called "the news", not "the importants". Unusual, shocking and lurid stories are much more likely to be newsworthy, but by definition they aren't representative of what is actually happening in the world. Our perception of the world is much more strongly influenced by emotive anecdotes than cold hard facts. Violent crime rates in the western world have been significantly declining for decades, but most people believe that the opposite is true; multiple studies have found a correlation between news consumption and the perception of high crime. It's very difficult for the news media to usefully communicate important but gradual trends - rising incomes across the developing world, wage stagnation in the developed world, the impact of climate change, demographic shifts, the erosion of civil society etc.

I think that most journalists are well-intentioned and genuinely believe that they are seekers of truth, but they operate in a system that reflects our innate perceptual biases, our acquired cultural biases and the commercial exigencies of media organisations.

Another useful experiment is to exclusively consume another country's news media for a week or two, preferably a country you know very little about. A week of reading a Ugandan or Nigerian newspaper provides a very different perspective on world events.

News in the early 90s had not yet been fully transformed into an entertainment business; now it has.

Thank you, there is much wisdom in your comment. I'll totally try this.

It shouldn't be too hard to adapt the kind of tech behind web based map applications (tiling and zoom) to newspaper archives.

A few years ago I explored this concept and made a CMS for exactly these kinds of situations, also textbook reading, and in general any kind of endless/near-endless content that benefits from seamless space/time organization and navigation. See https://eagrereader.appspot.com/ or my website itself https://dougkoellmer.com for two uses of it.

It's open source at https://github.com/dougkoellmer/swarm if anyone wants to throw money at me to continue developing it. :)

Cool, nice work. Getting pinch-zooming on mobile to work would make it even better.

You could make something similar, but it won’t be nearly the same experience. The speed at which you can scroll through enormous amounts of visual data is staggering. Far more responsive than your average Google Maps-style tiled image app.

I believe they do exist, but behind paywalls. It makes it difficult for imaginative kids to explore history in the same way.

My local newspaper (in Sweden) does this. All subscriber has access on the web to the archive back to 1910. Very useful and fun to browse ex. birthdays or things from the world wars.

For starters: https://news.google.com/newspapers and https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

I wonder if there are any non-profit archival bodies that would partner with a tech org on such a venture. Finding a non-profit tech org that could do it in a sound way might be challenging*

Perhaps a Google project like the books scanning they did? That would be really cool.

* it doesn't have to be non-profit tech org of course (I did mention google's book project after all), but finding a for-profit that would make things freely available might be a challenge in itself since the costs would not likely be low, either for development or infrastructure/maintenance.

If you have a library card, you can get past many of those paywalls, at least in the U.S.

The library systems in the last two places I lived both subscribed to services where when you put your library card number in, you could browse the archives of hundreds of newspapers, magazines and journals. Some of them going back into the 1800's.

There's also "Chronicling America" - it's a federal government (Library of Congress) web site that has full page scans of 500 different newspapers from 1836-1922. Free and open to everyone in the world: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

Yeah in the 90s I remember using them for free to read old articles. Then once the internet comes around suddenly it's paywalled and $3 per issue.

>and can find a library that will give you access

Does any library not have this stuff? It seems absolutely standard for universities, the main/research branches of public library systems, etc. Even my small suburban branch library had a microfilm collection and a few readers.

I haven't been to a university library in many years, so things may be different there (especially with the research requirements of the institution) but at most public libraries the machines are either restricted or absent entirely. It's sad but logical. Demand was quite low.

I grew up in the Netherlands and I was only aware these existed through TV. Maybe they're around though and I just didn't pay attention.

I grew up in Poland and I have the same experience - I learned about microfilm from spy movies, and am aware of its use in libraries from the Internet.

I think library /systems/ will probably always have such an archive stack in their central repository.

However newer libraries, particularly in affluent areas, are more likely to go to a digital stack since it will be more readily searched and comprehensively indexed.

When I was a kid, the book catalogue for larger libraries was itself on microfiche (smaller libraries used card catalogues, as seen in the opening scene of the original Ghostbusters).

I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm, guided somewhat by an index. Every article was about how the government of "Mr. Lenine and Mr. Trotzky" was on the verge of collapse. It gave a very false picture - well, the Times still gives a false picture of Russia today.

If you have access to microfilm, instructive is an article from June 23, 1918 titled "Lenine ready to resign". Of course this was another false story - although he was shot two months later which caused an illness in him that caused him to slowly withdraw until his death five years after.

But there are many stories of this type. Ultimately, however, dominant communist power in Russia ended because Russian communists themselves decided to hold Multi-Party elections (to be even more tangential - some think Lenin would have had a coalition government of Bolsheviks and left socialist revolutionaries if he had not been shot and retired to Gorki).

The Times's highly inaccurate coverage of the Russian Revolution was an inspiration for Walter Lippmann's commentary on improving media accuracy, in the first decades of the 20th century:

The analysis shows how seriously misleading was the Times by its reliance on the offical purveyors of information. It indicates that statements of fact emanating from governments and the circles around governments cannot be taken as judgements of fact by an independent press. They indicate opinion, they are controlled by special purpose, and they are not trustworthy news.

Even more problematic than official sources, the authors continue, are the semi-official anyomous reports often relied upon.

All the more reason to shun official Information Ministers and Spokesmen, press briefings, and the like.

The quote comes from "A Test of the News", the researchers were Walter Lippman and Charles Merz, the publication The New Republic, and the date, August 4, 1920.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

https://archive.org/stream/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews/Lippma...

You don't need microfilm to read the NY Times; the entire archive is available on their website.

> I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm

You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?

Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent? I don't mean one link to one article, which tells us nothing about an overall trend. Ironically, there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless.

> You don't need microfilm to read the NY Times; the entire archive is available on their website.

This was not the case when I did this thirty years ago.

> You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?

I concur with your observation that if you stop reading that sentence after the first few words, it makes less sense than if you read the whole sentence.

> Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent?

I already did.

> I don't mean one link to one article

August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.

> there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless

I have received ceaseless upvotes for my comments on the lies the Times has told about Russia over the past century, and I wish to thank the товарищи who gave them to me - from wherever they are in the world.

> August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.

That doesn't establish anything in the original claim. First, the quote says the government left Moscow; it didn't say the government collapsed permanently. Similarly, saying De Gaulle fled France doesn't say that France's free government had collapsed permanently. It would have been false to say Mao and the Chinese Communists didn't flee to northwest China (the Long March); should the newspaper have reported that they were in Beijing? Are you saying the Bolshevik government didn't leave Moscow? Can you provide a basis for that? Second, it's just one headline and you had claimed a trend that lasted for years; one headline, even if mistaken, is not a sign of bias; nobody would say that newspapers are perfect and errors happen for many reasons. Finally, it's from a century ago; I don't see what it says about anything current; does the Russian government of 100 years ago tell us about the current organization? Does IBM of 100 years ago tell us how the current organization functions?

Anyone knows if I can find such an archive near Hesse, Germany?

You will find good holdings of national and international periodicals in university and higher ed libraries, in Frankfurt/Main, Marburg, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Gießen, Kassel and so on. Also, the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) is in Frankfurt/Main.

Hessisches Landesarchiv, Stadtarchive

As I kid, I squashed a recently fed mosquito between microfiche plates. The results were awesome.

I was blown away by two very similar things. The first was microfilm in my local library. The second was putting the needle on a record and hearing the music without the amplifier being on. In both cases it's just so obvious how it works yet absolutely amazing that it works so well.