Hacker News Reader

Comment by knapcio | Hacker News Reader

I would risk to say that nowadays any news suck which implies that it’s not a problem of science but journalism in general.

View on HN

Science is hard, slow, there's lots of negative results, and also sometimes it's very abstract and how a bit of research connects to a persons lived experience.

Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The attention economy is destroying everything of substance, because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard consume.

I don’t disagree that it may be worse in case of science but just pointing out that the problem is possibly broader and science news is just one of the victims. IMO news may be one of the areas where pure capitalism doesn’t work well.

It's also not a new phenomenon. Watch this BBC documentary that covers the history of news reporting and it goes back to the early days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0

yeah, I tend to agree with capitalism not being a good fit for the 4th estate. For something that is required so essentially by democracies I've always been surprised we don't publicly fund more news.

I remember when all the news papers were folding up around the early naughts, there was talk about making them all non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.

It probably always sucked but it was our only source of information before so we didn't know better

True but news media also knew less more slowly because everyday people on the ground had no way to make stories public through cell phone or a video on social media. And before the 24 hour news cycle, there was less expectation for the most immediate reporting.

Or not. They had a lot more resources before everybody started leeching the newspapers' contents, and offering free escapism. Yes, the internet is certainly to blame for the decline in journalism.

People have been saying the same about journalism for decades, long before the Internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com