Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

I've enjoyed the growth of expert blogs like this one in the last few years!

I've generally felt that traditional news falls into several traps of writing style that turn me off completely:

- an insufferable mixture of informational coverage with character profiles (e.g. I come to read about the Sahel gold rush but I am confronted with paragraphs of vibe-setting introduction as the author interviews a person of interest).

- coverage that assumes the same level of contextual knowledge for complex and distant conflicts as for recent national news.

- dull "long reads" that I just don't feel like spending a hour on.

On the other hand this piece is just informative, concise, and engaging :)

View on HN

If you like this sort of coverage, I highly recommend The New York Review of Books.

Contrary to the name, their articles aren't book reviews so much as excuses to write solid, expert articles on topics that happen to be written about in recently published books. The articles are almost always interesting even when they are about books, because of their extremely high-quality contributors — Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee come to mind. They also publish lots of global, topical analysis. During the Egypt conflict of 2011-2014, they had some of the best coverage, for example.

I also enjoy the sheer lack of pretentiousness. They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do.

(Their book coverage is great, though. They also publish books, and are responsible for keeping a lot of obscure out-of-print stuff in print.)

The New Yorker does come off a bit odd because it's a middle-brow publication aimed at a mass audience and sold as 'what high society reads', hence it's motivated to try to look 'intellectual' while being as unsophisticated as possible to maintain a high school, or nowadays middle school, reading level. Since people are most comfortable at a few grades below their actual reading level.

It's a common paradigm for many 'intellectual' publications

Actual high-brow literature, such as the Physical Review Letters or the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, have no need to pretend but then they assume a bare minimum of a college graduate reading level, plus specialized knowledge on top of that for their niche. Hence they're impenetrable for the vast majority.

Physical Review Letters is not "high brow"...

"High brow" is work intended for public consumption by well educated and perhaps a bit snobby laymen. Scholarly journals by contrast are intended for specialist audiences and are considered "academic", not "high brow".

Your thinking of middle-brow.

High-brow is aimed at a much smaller audience, typically implied as 'high society' or 'the elites' but not necessarily.

I chose the two examples because they are publicly accessible and high-brow not because they are the most representative of the class.

both seem straight-up scientific journals ("the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal") for specific disciplines. Calling them "high-brow literature" and comparing them with The New Yorker (and its essays on random topics) seems... strange?

I don't care much if comments on HN seem strange, I care more about if they are correct.

FYI: The New Yorker != The New York Review of Books, which your parent talks about.

NYRB is totally different:

https://www.nybooks.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Review_of_Books

> They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do.

Did you not see this part?

Oof my bad; thanks for pointing it out. I got a bit confused about what you were referring to, since I believe that GP didn't think of New Yorker as highbrow, given the quotes on "liberal intellectual".

But yes, sorry about the mistake.

And if you want something Anglocentric instead of US-centric, there's the London Review Of Books.

Oh god that first one… It’s really nice in podcast form on the way to work or in the bathtub, absolutely terrible to keep my attention when trying to understand news in readable form, and always suspect of being mere anecdata and generally wrong. Especially when it concerns a country or industry or phenomenon I have no experience in.

In some publications it's almost a formula.

Headline: <something that sounds really interesting about the war in Ukraine>

First para: For the uninitiated, it's easy to mistake Ilya Shevchenko for an everyday middle-aged Ukrainian man. His short-cropped brown hair, mild paunch, and gentle demeanour are disarming. When we first met, he insisted that we finish our cup of tea before we discussed important matters. [And so on]

Oh gawd.

Too eerily accurate.

I think it depends a lot on where (and how) you buy your news. Here in Denmark most of the online resources are fairly terrible, even the paid ones, and a lot of their content is often just a translated Reuters brief. Sometimes it’s even an article that’s written after something blew up on a social media site, if this blog post about Sudan gets popular enough in the right places, and enough people click on their current Sudan content, then a version of this blog could end up as a story in some of our online news sites. A lot of that is sort of useless, at least in my opinion.

But there are alternatives. We have a Newspaper called Weekendavisen which only comes out on Fridays, and it has long throughly written articles. Because it only comes out once a week, it’s often also filtered away a lot of the “breaking” news that wasn’t actually important because they don’t have to deal with feeding the live stream 24/7.

This isn’t really related to the blog post, I too think it’s great to see investigative and informative journalism thrive despite of what’s been going on with a lot of news outlets, but there are still some good ones, and I doubt they are all going away.

Agree. It may make me a bad person, but I hate wanting to learn something about a complex new topic, and half of it is random quotes and interviews from people who know even less (with accompanying detail in their physical appearance, personality characteristics, employment history, and lovely anecdotes about their sister in law). There is a time and place for a human story, but I've lived long enough and experienced enough crap to understand there's human impact to everything, and sometimes I want to start with high level understanding.

(Though to be fair, now that I think about it, I've also lived through enough crap to understand how incredibly misleading and over simplifying high level overviews inevitably are :-/)

I’d go further and say that most mainstream print journalism is in a competence crisis.

I simply no longer trust journalist in places like the Guardian to have sufficient background knowledge, networks or expertise to surface dramatic stories or assess sources.

Most of what they have online are “live blogs” just repeating whatever some rando tweeted (with no context or analysis) or some clickbait-y opinion pieces that are demonstrably incorrect.

Substack is much better but then the whole task of filtering and assessing sources is put back on to the reader.

>Over 89,000 subscriber

Some experts are publisher now. How many subscriber pay?

(1970 circulation of "The Economist": 100000)

This 'expert blog' seems a bit one-sided, as it mentions Russia influence in Sudan 16 times but United States influence just once. E.g.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-is-sudans-genocidal-regime...

> "Today, new protests in Sudan are approaching a new boiling point, and Lyman’s story is history. But it suggests the still very relevant and largely untold story of the relationship between Sudan and the United States—ties largely based on the clout of the powerful intelligence services in both the Trump and Obama administrations."

> "This article is based in part on interviews and documents from 13 current and former American officials serving in the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and other areas of the U.S. government."

A more balanced perspective would note that at present, Africa is viewed as a natural resource hotspot by all the world's major industrial countries, including China, America and Russia, while African countries are themselves struggling to climb up the value chain (i.e. it's better economically to develop industry yourself rather than to just export raw materials).