Hacker News Reader

Comment by ballooney | Hacker News Reader

I strongly urge UK-base HNers to subscribe. It is one of the few national publications still doing proper long-term investigative journalism into local government (in a way that local papers haven’t had the resources to do for years) and usually signals important stories before the main papers pick them up, especially wrt stories about the rest of the news media. Many people stuck in large media orgs leak to the Eye so they can report that e.g. the Telegraph hasn’t been allowed to report on something that might damage the financial interests of its owners.

And it’s quite funny.

View on HN

Agreed. I think their level of investigation is peerless. They go where others fear to tread. They ruffle more feathers in every single edition than the FT does in a year.

I can't think of any other UK publication that comes close.

It's an overall excellent and very dense UK-specific read (~40 pages of editorial, cartoons and letters every fortnight). Several stories broken by Private Eye have ended up featuring on Hacker News much later too such as Horizon - an IT system for the UK's Post Office which somehow executives managed to persuade the courts was infallible, so if a bug in Horizon said your Post Office ought to have £10k of cash that it didn't you (the "Postmaster" of that office, typically a small local store owner making a little bit of extra money offering this vital service) might literally go to prison for stealing this money that never even existed.

It does have its own unique culture you'd need to spin up on to really grok what's going on. For example it just calls the Queen "Brenda", and various government agencies get more apposite names like the "Fundamentally Supine Agency". And there are a lot of running jokes after existing for so long.

It's basically what the press looks like when they are doing their job. They are privately owned and on a mission to tell the truth, not to make as much money as possible.

Hislop and before him Cook are actual real people trying to do something good instead of just attempting to get rich for the sake of it before dropping dead.

There are lots of in jokes and also "code phrases", such as "tired and emotional" == drunk, more here [1].

I used to subscribe to it but cancelled it after I left the UK.

The UK press are an absolute disaster. Most are partisan, including:

Telegraph: torygraph Daily mail: torygraph FT: bankers times Guardian: with you until you need actual help then it's back to mi5 Sun/Times: Murdoch incorporated

Private eye is literally carry everything on their shoulders. There is nothing else.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com