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Comment by Loquebantur | Hacker News Reader

No, it won't.

News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given said objective.

News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so".

What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way (or rather, public) communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level.

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'What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level. '

Can't agree more, but how? Any insight?

One first needs to appreciate the many attempts failing at it. Reddit, Twitter, social media... They all were bad to begin with, but deliberately made worse still, to the point of not fulfilling their raison d'être anymore.

You need a functional format for group discussions (existed, killed off). You need functional standards for civil discussion (exist, see science, people somehow forgot). And you need to realize, anonymity is anathema to having a civil sphere (You don't need to give your real name, but for social self-regulation to work, an identity is necessary).

AI quite possibly could help a great deal with this. Sensible automated (and consistently reasoned/reviewable) moderation of internet forums is wildly underexplored.

I think they're certainly a place for publicly funded and accountable news media like CBC or BBC News, where the profit motive isn't there by the nature of funding (Of course, this model has its own separate set of issues that it needs to overcome as well. But IMO it's a better base to build off)

That’s not true for the New York Times, which makes more money from subscribers than it does from advertisers.

Investigative journalism, winding up in a newspaper, is indeed outdated. However, things like documentaries and videos and such are a modern way to use those skills

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