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Comment by redleggedfrog | Hacker News Reader

Why are newspapers so horrible?

My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember what I'd read, and years later it didn't matter. I've never gained any lasting knowledge from the news.

Very little has changed. News has been, and is, nearly worthless.

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This model wasn't that bad. Given this was print, the ads were somehow vetted - chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola) wouldn't exist, because even the shittiest of newspapers would say "What is this bullshit?" and put a stop to that. Even the people at the printing plant would be perplexed if they had to print that shit.

Going further, even the business model of chumboxes wouldn't exist - back in the days of print, ads were mostly used to sell a product; where as the point of chumboxes is to drive more eyeballs to other sites where they can look at other ads; the content itself is worthless.

Nowadays, ads are delivered programmatically from a third-party, which means the newspaper has no way to even know what garbage is going to be displayed to their readers. This is the real problem.

I have my Pi-hole set up to filter chumboxes. My feelings towards those companies verge on unadulterated hatred and anger. If I ever meet an employee of one of those companies in real life, I'm honestly afraid of what I might do.

Our local paper was the same but with dedicated days for certain types of ad. Thursday was jobs day, Friday was property day, etc.

Pre-internet days, Thursday was always a day you had to buy early if you were in the market for a new job - after 3pm it would be hard to find anywhere with a copy left to buy.

And this is the rare case where advertising works as it should - connects people offering something with people who actually, actively want that something.

I agree. The thing that most conversations on how to get people to pay for news miss out on the most important element: the news has to be worth paying for.

When I was in grad school a few years ago the college had a program to encourage newspaper readership that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. I can't imagine ever subscribing to a newspaper now.

There was so much in a newspaper that I have zero interest in or even if I did I would look somewhere else than dead trees (sports, stocks, fashion, travel, horoscopes, advice columns).

I grew up in a rural area and even in the local paper most of what was original, non-syndicated content was simply stating facts: the high school basketball team won/lost, there was a wreck, obituaries, births, weddings.

that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline.

No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.

Hard to call it "idle cynicism and incuriosity" if you know that most of what's in the news is at best a surface-level coverage, most likely bullshit, and also completely inconsequential for anything.

News is great as a social object - you and me both read some reporting about an event at the same time, so when we meet at a bar, we have something to talk about. It's really bad if you're trying to learn accurate information about the world.

As a general statement this seems plainly false. Just go to the Pulitzer site, to the last year's winners, skip to the "investigative journalism" category, and click around the finalists and back year over year.

Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication.

But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.

they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas

As someone with repeated direct experience with the elite corps that staffs their bureaus in Japan, I cannot provide evidence in favor of your hypothesis that they keep a special breed of Pulitzerschreck around for that purpose. They still call me for Japanese domestic political analysis on the basis of a) in Japan b) speaks English c) was in the NYT in 2011.

I believe that you got contacted by a dumb reporter about a Japanese political story by an NYT reporter, but I also know that there are people like Tom Wright getting paid by major news outlets to cover Asia; the evidence I have suggests that those outlets do a great deal of important investigative journalism.

I agree there's good journalism being done but Chricton's observation is not completely off either. The nature of _most_ reporting requires that journalists talk about stuff without being adequately informed. They have to produce stuff on demand and there's little penalty to getting stuff wrong.

In any field there's going to be variability in quality and it's not fair or wise to tar the whole field with the same brush but I think journalism sometimes attracts people who have a different relationship with facts and ideas than I do.

I read a piece by a moderately famous journalist a while ago (and I've been trying to figure out who even since with no luck) who when talking about his practice said that sometimes there _are_ no experts in a particular subject and the journalist has to do a 'deep dive' and become the expert. Now he didn't say exactly what constitutes a 'deep dive' but it struck me as profoundly arrogant and symptomatic of this problem.

Sometimes they're talking about becoming experts at linear algebra† and we roll our eyes and fair enough, but sometimes they're talking about becoming "the" expert about disability compensation for West Virginia coal miners, and they aren't fucking around, that is for real.

But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe stay away from the opinion section.

What's annoying is how hard these dumb barbs are to rebut, even when they're plainly fatuous. Like, I had to go navigate through the Pulitzer categories and relay back to the thread how to do it, and all the original commenter had to do was write "the NYT and USA Today are the same thing and both are just superficial made-up trash".

† though I'm sort of waiting to spring a little quiz on the next person who takes a shot at Gladwell for "Igon Values".

I have to admit, since I'm tut-tutting at other people, that I like spoken-Gladwell much better than written-Gladwell. And it's the same style and the same stuff. It's disturbingly subjective (although it would have kept him out of Igon trouble).

He's really quite excellent at what he does, which is "writing and speaking". I don't know why it was ever supposed to be a sick burn that he didn't know what a characteristic polynomial was.

I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.

> But of course, that's a silly thing to argue.

I don't see how that's a silly thing to argue. Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different. You don't just call "Gell-Mann Amnesia" upon spotting a simple jargon mistake and call all news bullshit. But people have different expertise. You, me and others here know our CS; many of us also know our maths & physics, and derived specializations ranging from batteries to rocketry. We can routinely spot nonsense in news stories within those domains. Then, we all have friends who are knowledgeable in other areas. Myself, I have a historian in my circle, whose pastime is debunking nonsense written within his field of expertise. If you ask around, between yourself and your friends, you can spot the same reporting problems emerging across many domains. A pattern emerges.

That's not to say that good journalism doesn't exist. I maintain that good stories, and good journalists, are few and far between. You may read a solid, trustworthy[0] report on an important topic every year. Or every month, if you're good at curating your news experience. But these good stories are not what majority of people read most of the time; using them as defense of modern journalism is just plain motte-and-bailey. Regular people read regular news, with clickbait headlines, bad reporting, lowest-effort articles and no attempt at being accurate.

[0] - But then, if it's not in your field, is it trustworthy or just good sounding? How can you tell?

Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different.

Hah, you can't try to sneak out of this using the tangential Gell-Mann lifeline. You said something along the lines of 'Hard to call it idle cynicism and incuriosity because [overt expression of idle cynicism and incuriosity]'. That's plainly silly.

As to this 'effect' itself, I've always found it strange it's given the weight and consideration that it sometimes is. I'm no Crichtonoscopist and I've never seen the full text of his remarks but given it was a bit in a speech delivered at the "International Leadership Forum" and arrives at the conclusion media is useless, I'm guessing it wasn't meant entirely seriously. It's a little amusing anecdote and morsel for thought in a talk - not some expression of deep insight and hard-hitting media criticism. If someone had come up with it on HN, there'd be legions of black-belt logicians leaping in to check off the fallacies (appeal to authority? confirmation bias? the dreaded 'anecdata'? plain old vanity? it's got it all).

Have to, unfortunately, agree with the low value of the Sunday papers, even decades ago. Toss out the piles of ads, sports, comics, gardening, and you were left with a sliver of generic stories they could have printed any time.

One thing I suspect has been a blow to the news is that they used to be able to pretend people would look at all those ads. How many people were genuinely looking at all that? Now it's extremely easy to learn that its just not happening.

The news is horrible because journalists are almost never experts on whatever they're writing about, so whenever they write about something that might actually still have meaning in three weeks, they fuck it up.

They aren't experts at tech but are the best a local news, politics, crime, etc

Not sure I'd agree with that. I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert.

It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime.

(There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).

> I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online [1], at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert [2].

[1] Not sure about that — those "better sources online" tend to be the very journalists whom we're discussing, working for local media outlets.

[2] Assumes facts not in evidence — vetting of someone else's expertise is a non-trivial challenge, one that most of us neither want to do nor have the time to spend doing it.

[1] - better sources on-line are usually first-hand reports and the opinions of the "protagonists" of a new story.

[2] - well, a lot of people don't want to spend time vetting their sources, but this should prompt them to assign very low confidence to the things they read; of course, they frequently don't, which is why they need to be reminded that when they repeat what they read, they're most likely repeating bullshit.

So basically you don't need newspapers if you have all the qualifications to be your own journalist?

> there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert

What if someone did that for you, as a full-time professional job, and did it both online and offline? What if they actually spoke directly to the participants, from senators to the bus driver in the crash to the head of safety at the regulatory agency; and what if they interviewed leading experts and engineers; and read the court filings, etc. What if they made it their life's work to become expert in that kind of research?

That might be worth a few bucks a day. And it would be far more valuable than idle commentary from bloggers and commenters.

Might be, but then again, it's a rare thing. And the "idle commentary from bloggers and commenters" has the benefits that for any topic, you can find bloggers/commenters who are both subject matter experts, and have no incentive to misrepresent the story.

because blogs never contain affiliate links. /s

> bloggers/commenters who ... have no incentive to misrepresent the story

Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds.

> bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts

And orders of magnitude more who claim to be.

> Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation.

I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of misrepresentation, and quite frequently are the source of it.

Or: I'm not saying that if you pop on to a random subreddit you'll immediately find gold-standard, unbiased people. But I am saying that for any given domain, if you find a niche community and browse it for a bit, you'll get, on average, much better information than you'll get from reading news articles on the same topics.

Another extra feature of niche communities like various specialized subreddits, or HN, is that the experts, the pretend-experts and the wannabe-experts will engage in a discussion. This does not only help filter out obvious bullshit, but also provides extra information and can tell you when a problem is so complex it can't be accurately summarized in a headline or a short article.

That's useful to think about; I see it as a massive increase in communication channels making specialized information more available.

However, I still think it greatly underestimates the prevalence of misinformation in specialized communities (e.g., I have never found a valuable subreddit), and greatly overestimates human ability to know when they are being mislead. And the latter is far more difficult when trying to understand, as a non-expert outsider, experts in conversation about their domain. I fear what someone outside IT would walk away from HN thinking about some things. Even I have a hard time identifying the BS sometimes.

Subreddits are the answer to the philosophical question: 'Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what they're talking about?'

Although I don't know your full background, that you're on this site implies you have tech experience and so can spot reporting failures in tech. This makes me think you're just experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [0], and trust the reporting of other topics solely because you have less experience with those topics.

If you can expect reporting to be wrong on one topic, why do you trust them to be right on other topics?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

because describing quantum physics is harder than describing political activism.

Disagree. Value depends on the newspaper and the reader in question. My wife loved the ad-heavy Sunday paper inserts. I grew up reading the NYT on the subway and that (mis)set my expectations for everything else I took later (Space Coast Today for ex., the testbed of the detestable "Factoid" news). Yesterday's two threads on the death of local reporting fill in a lot of what both of us left out.

Agreed on news being nearly worthless, 99% of articles are filler and could just be summarized in a couple of sentences if not the title. In fact the title of most articles tells you everything.

Unless they lie to you in the title and debunk that lie in the middle of the article - which they damn well know most people won't read.

It gave you something to talk about and helped form your view of the world didn't it?

I thought this was going to be about the mechanics of the newspaper industry and how much the money game has changed in the last 40 years (read: Craigslist), but all in all it sounds like you just don't like newspapers.

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