Comment by jrwoodruff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrwoodruff | Hacker News Reader

I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic.

Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in front of millions of people while getting effectively compensated for your time.

Here's 10 minutes of checking top news sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/aftershocks-keep-japanes...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-earthquake-and-tsu...

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1104ap_as_japan_earthquake...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-03-21-japan-earthqua...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22predict.html?ref...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-ag...

edit to add links

There are two quite different possible complaints.

1. "I want good journalism but can't find it."

2. "The general public is being fed a diet of bad journalism."

To someone who's making complaint 1, it's very reasonable to reply "It's out there, you're just looking in the wrong places" (assuming that's true, which seems plausible).

To someone who's making complaint 2 -- which is how I read Tim Bray here -- that doesn't seem like such a helpful response. Telling Tim to look for better news won't do anything to raise the overall level of journalism.

(Of course a good response to complaint 2 may be "This is an insoluble problem; people will watch and read what they want to watch and read, and it turns out they don't want what you consider good journalism".)

The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as conservation of angular momentum.

If anything, I suspect that mainstream journalism has never been orders of magnitude better than it is now. It's just that back in the day, we didn't have bloggers with photo essays showing us what we could be reading instead, so our standards were different.

I never consume or discuss things in the mainstream media. I got my news coverage of 9/11 entirely from the Onion. But distortions about this topic are far too damaging to our future to go unchallenged. Energy policy failure is the only credible existential threat to post-Malthusian society I can think of.

I disagree with your second point in one sense - overall, journalism might be worse than in years past. However, the problem is that the editorial standards for journalism have been relaxed because the news organizations need to publish news stories 24/7 on tv and the Internet to compete.

There are still great journalists doing excellent work. However, their contribution has less impact because of the overall signal-to-noise ratio and also because we don't have enough great journalists to fill up a 24-hour news day.

It's similar to expansion in professional sports leagues. It's wonderful that new markets may get teams but that waters down the quality of the overall product because adding more teams doesn't mean you're adding more great players.

If people are complaining about #2, it doesn't make any sense to give credit to people who produce good work but don't manage to get their work widely read.

How is it counterproductive? By what mechanism does complaining about the mainstream media actually make it worse? Complaining about the mainstream media may indeed fail to improve it, but saying nothing will certainly have no effect.

Complaining about mainstream media on mainstream media would be fine. Complaining about mainstream media on alternate media pollutes the alternate media with the problems of the mainstream.

> but saying nothing will certainly have no effect.

Of course it will. Don't consume it.

Part of our frustration probably stems from the reality that the large media businesses will get by just fine without the readership of the elite clientèle of YC. [eye roll]

However, most of us probably do tend to influence the opinion of a few others. A little complaining (in a constructive way) might be useful, albeit in an indirect way.

I like to think of preaching to the choir (or disagreeing with them) as being a way of polishing one's persuasion prior to the full congregation (or converting the masses).

The New York Times front page story has been a poor source of information since this crisis began, basically being a disjointed summery of "who said what" with a sensationalist headline. When radiation levels were falling (according to other sources), the Times headline stood as "nuclear meltdown near imminent" or something to that effect.

IMO,!f you came looking for realistic analysis or summarization of the facts as known, you had to scour both mainstream and non-mainstream sources and piece it together above the melodrama.

I agree. Cable news is horrendous. On the other hand, the photos of the tsunami devestation published by the Boston Globe alone tell a story that is deeper and richer than anything else I've seen or read on the matter.

Agree entirely. It's never been for the news consumer; my mind boggles when I read opinions like this, things like criticism of techcrunch. With today's high competition, countless aggregation services and worldwide audience, _you no longer are stuck with reading mainstream media from your country!_

I get my daily news from Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian, and a host of US daily and weekly news sites. Tech news is aggragated for me by HN and techmeme. Niche topics are read in my google reader. I can send all these sources to my ebook reader for later comsumption. Read something of which I question the veracity? I'm a google search away from differing opinions, original sources, intelligent discussion and critique. We have sites like wikileaks, governmental websites, Guardian's 'Data Is Free' and others putting out free datasets to enable anyone to dig deeper and find the stories.

How awesome is all this! And the vast majority is free!

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