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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.

Sure there is. There is so much news for one day that it's impossible to get it all. If 8 billion people are awake for 10 hours each day. You have 80 billion hours of people's experiences to compresses into only 24 hours.

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We're getting hung up on semantics. The parent comment said "real stuff". I said "interesting news". People took issue with both terms. But that's fine: substitute whichever term you'd like for content sufficiently attractive to make CNN competitive. The strategy Fox and MSNBC use to accomplish this --- and, again, bear in mind that their audiences are relatively pathetic, even when they're successful! --- is obvious: turning the news into a sporting event. The NYT uses another strategy: they're a broader entertainment platform, not solely reliant on the news, and have a significant cohort of subscribers who don't even care about the news. But CNN can't really do that, either.

There is an ungodly amount of editorial content that could be done on every single corporate/government scandal, collusion, bribery, corruption, you name it -- which happens on a 24/7 basis. You could fill a month with the food industry alone. Let alone chemical companies.

There is a mindboggling amount of shit that is completely and utterly ignored, or suppressed, or normalized as "business as usual".

But it's not profitable for a CNN to report on this, not because they wouldn't get eyeballs and viewers, but because the tightly enmeshed corporate stakeholders of the world in and around the infotainment sector wouldn't want it to happen.

I do a lot of local political stuff, and am acquainted with people doing serious local political corruption and mismanagement and scandal journalism, and I think you'd be surprised how small the audience is for that stuff. CNN isn't avoiding this stuff because they're part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth; they're avoiding it because it's ratings death. Which is what you're saying! But they're a business, not a public service, so that's the end of the story.

How about “real, interesting stuff that appeals to more than 2 people”.

With skilled enough story telling a writer can make almost anything appeal to a mass audience.

What does "skilled enough" mean? Do you have any examples that demonstrate this?

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