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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

there's also more source material: video from youtube, tiktok; emails, twitter .

Those sources are ephemeral, and don't have the same incentive that organizations might have to preserve or archive their work for the future. We basically have The Internet Archive as the sole method of archival for those sources, but they only capture a fraction of the material those sources make accessible.

If they go under, or if rights-holders have their way with them, then we're left with a Myspace, Geocities or Vine situation where tomes of content will literally be deleted from what's left of the historical record as time goes on.

I’ve become a data hoarder. It has shocked me how many YouTube videos and channels that I love have disappeared over time.

I’ve started to do this for podcasts… it’s quite shocking when seven years of content “breaks” and it’s just gone while your mid way through listening to something…

A timely reminder to refresh my favourites download!

So are they going to watch a TikTok about local legal proceedings, including interviews with relevant parties?

Newspapers do the kind of in depth investigation as their bread in butter that other mediums rarely if ever participate in.

There is a positive trend of independent journalism on Youtube. Some of the my favorite stories were presented and investigated by a single person, Coffeezilla.

Is there a YouTube channel that goes into depth about your hometown’s city council meetings, school district, etc?

In my area there isn't, but there are a handful of "independent journalists" who have been harassing the school district and teachers to expose them for being "woke".

They've got a lot of clout and use their platforms to direct their audiences to attack anyone that criticizes them and the locals that do things they don't like. It's surreal.

That's not the kind of journalism that's constructive or informative, but it isn't boring like reading board meeting minutes in a local news article.

My local news didn't cover those things either. But I did find that my high school athletics department made a youtube channel, and they have short interviews with coaches, specific games, and season highlights for certain sports. Another channel has been making highlight cuts for various high school sports. My county has a decent youtube channel that covers holidays, events, mail-in ballot instructions/voting information, and a short video about the "state of the county" executive summary. It links back to the county website. I found out the local historical society has been uploading documentaries online, about things like the constuction of the middle school. I found hour+ interviews/videos about people, who towns, roads and schools, were named after.

Right now a lot of journalism adjacent local reporting is buzzfeed style "list" videos where my town or county is mentioned. I am not sure where that falls, because it can highlight unique things about a place, but arguably not newsworthy. I don't think the incentives will ever there to cover local news in the way you are describing. On the other hand government twitter accounts have been genuinely useful for finding local events, my local news never did that for me.

s/do/did/

People pay little attention to local news, and even less now that they can get continuous updates of momentous events from all over the world. The local news is much more relevant, but far less entertaining.

Accumulation of random social media posts is not a substitute for organized collection of information.

Eh. Historians live for this random shit. A huge amount of interesting stuff in the archive is just stuff. It wasn't created to be historical or documentarian. I imagine that historians hundreds of years from now will be happy to dig through mountains of these sorts of materials rather than focus on documents created to be historical.

Is someone backing up social media posts ?? Won't they be just gone when the platform shuts down ?

> Is someone backing up social media posts ??

I backup my Twitter timeline[1], Fediverse timeline and Instagram posts but I appreciate that's an infinitesimal drop in the ocean.

[1] Also a whole bunch of other stuff like "favourites on twitter/instagram/flickr/etc" get IFTTT'd to Pinboard, Day One, Dropbox, Perkeep, etc.

Archiving digital communications is an interesting problem. I'm sure that over time a very large amount of digital communications will be lost to time. But that's true for the archive already. The large majority of communications from 500 years ago are also lost to time, but we can still do history. We'll still be able to do history in 500 years even if only a small portion of Twitter ends up being archived.

Historians have a reasonably good sense of the authenticity of "random physical shit" from 1923, in stark contrast to "random digital shit" from 2023. The digital chain of custody is super-weak, and everybody is far more media-savvy, self-aware, self-filtering, and self-promoting, which means social media doesn't give us the sense of everyday life that we might have got from, say, a postcard sent home from a WWI soldier.

Only because they've developed techniques for reasoning about documents. That'll happen for other material too. No historian reads a letter from 1923 and forgets that it was written by a person who has opinions, biases, and narratives.

My wife is a historian. A nontrivial amount of her work is reading about petty business squabbles from centuries past in various letters to state actors. Those letters contain narratives, biases, goals, and even just straight up lies. And dealing with this is a basic part of being a historian.

A historian who reads a postcard from a WW1 soldier and determines that it is a transparant depiction of everyday life without further analysis is the sort of person I'd expect to never get a faculty position.

I wonder how well youtube and tiktok will do let's say in 20 years when material has gone through a few rounds of re-encoding as someone considers saving few percentage of storage space.

Already the old Youtube videos on places seem corrupted.

But local nightly news programs often don't post the entire program. Even if they post segments I have found that stories from a few years ago have missing video. If archive.org doesn't have it then it is gone.

There is, but it’s not a replacement for actually calling people and performing news-gathering.

Articles sourced from Twitter threads and TikTok videos do not provide anything resembling objective reporting.

Sincere question: why do we consider "news" objective in this context? By any other measure it isn't.

Edit: getting a lot of down votes but not a lot of discussion below. This isn't just a "whatever maaaaaan I'm not a part of this system" post. It's also not a thinly veiled attempt to push a political view. I really am talking about objectivity.

For example, even among publications that share my general bias, it is easy to identify that they are omitting information that could be relevant in the name of cohesion and persuasion.

I am not willing to ascribe a certain motive for it because there is truthfully a lot of potential motivations. But that doesn't change the fact that the bias exists, and we cannot call it objective as a result.

Journalistic objectivity is an intentional and aspirational goal, not something that’s guaranteed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity#His...

Does that actually translate into deliverables though? I'm not convinced it does which is why the question was posed

As far as I can tell, it doesn't, but having many records with the same bias over a significant period of time (as newspapers tend to do, though not always only one - Each columnist may have their own, but that's why there are bylines) can help you distill that out.

Nobody can ever be perfectly objective, but trying to maintain objectivity gets you a lot closer than rejecting the ideal outright.

The problem is that the news business has largely failed, and for the few players left, objectivity is no longer the goal, whether that’s due to explicit choice to prioritize ideology over objectivity, and/or simply prioritizing survival. It’s expensive to produce good journalism.

While I agree with the goal of 'good journalism' I also want to posit that striving for objectivity is importantly distinct from being objective - which I think you agree with based on this most recent comment.

all news is biased. all discourse is biased. That's why you have multiple voices, multiple sources you need 2 consider always. There's no such thing as objective truth. source: English major.

I have to disagree with that statement. There is objective truth. Reporting a news item can be vastly differ based in on the end goals.

The issue with objective truth in the platonist sense is that no one can know what it is without total system knowledge, which is physically impossible (if you disagree with that last bit, Heisenberg would love to know your location to hbar/p precision).

Said another way: we can make 'logically' true statements easily, but struggle with anything physical.

It’s probably good to look at everything you think you know about history through that filter. History is a small number of people trying to build coherent stories from a random assortment of source material. 99.99% of everything that happened is left out of the stories, and what is left is told through those few people’s personal lens.

Yeah, gathering facts, presenting both sides of the argument, and determining what the facts are is dramatically different than expressing your opinion on the internet, or taking a cursory glance at the info to argue for your opinion.

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