The Fandomization of News
theverge.com
theverge.com
Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader.
drop sports
drop celebrity news unless death or court case
drop crime unless within state
prioritise presidential election
prioritise rocket launches
prioritise aviation accidents> To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.”
> “And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?” Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.” That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters.
-- Earth by David Brin
Unfortunately it feels more like we've ended up in the era of being relatively-powerless subscribers or digital-sharecroppers instead: Your "more enjoyable" experience is incompatible with what the corporation believes will maximize its profits.
That's happened. The issue is most people don't _want_ to control and configure these things; they want to outsource that to someone else.
And that's where "influences" and "creators" and such step in: they're offering to sit in front of the firehose and tune things for their audience.
> Unfortunately it feels more like we've ended up in the era of being relatively-powerless subscribers or digital-sharecroppers instead
We have more power now, not less. Businesses can be parasitic, but that's not new. Media lying to the audience isn't new. We shouldn't idealize generations past -- it wasn't all rosy.
The idea that we're still individually-empowered by personal computing and have simply outsourced some of it to "peers who care more" is a comforting thought... but it doesn't seem match the current reality.
Most of those influencers/creators/curators etc. exist at the pleasure of large service-owners, who have their hands on the controls to boost/hide/de-monetize them based on whatever makes investors happy. Not just in terms of news and opinion (Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) but also tools themselves when it comes to the encroaching "app stores".
Following someone's self-hosted blog using a content-agnostic RSS reader is the exception now, not the rule.
[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461796763162054663
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms...
But what's the point? TikTok doesn't share AD revenue, so why do all of that for nothing?
Is it in hope that these followers become readers?
I personally don't trust any single creator news source, a single person is much much easier to influence than a whole news agency.
I used to follow johnny Harris regularly, then he dropped an economic video about a supposed new economic model that's supported by many companies.
The issue is almost all the talking points in that video were taken from the WEF, the same "you will own nothing and be happy" guys.[1]
I still think news creators have a place in the news cycle, maybe for more fun stuff, like science questions maybe economics, Tom Scott style videos, or digital investigations like coffeezilla, but for real news, news agencies are still king, especially ones that are publicly funded.
The scientific article that is not quoted in the article may say “…therefore we can’t conclude that XYZ” and all your colleagues are persuaded of XYZ because the AP or Reuteurs or AFP dépèche said “Scientists conclude on XYZ.” Anything, from police arrestation reasons to diplomatic stories, is rehashed into something unrecognizable from the truth.
Did you know that “Man sues $1m from McDonalds for a coffee served too hot” was false?
> ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
I won't assume malice rightaway given the PG essay submarine but it is not journalism either. I can see how people wouldn't trust the news.
It seems that everything from mass media to small tiktokers are so biased, I can't believe anything they say.
You have always had to read or listen to several sources.
Some sources are less biased than others. E>g. in the UK the print media is biased and readers do know which way e.g. Daily Telegraph is right wing and Guardian is left wing. The broadcast media is less biased as there is legislation to form some form of control. Most of the broadcast media get complaints from both left and right wing - although GB News seems to be firmly right wing.
Bias will always exist, so identifying it and consuming the spectrum is the way to see it. Seeing bias is better than avoiding it, as it helps you understand others perspectives (as they consume biased news.)
allsides.com is good. Modo News is good.
These are the people whose job it is to make complex topics understandable for both parties of congress. Its a fantastic source if you want to set aside 10 minutes to quickly digest a complicated topic.
For a fun example, see some of their reports on Directed Energy Weapons: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/details?prodcode=R46...
Its not really a news source, but then again you did not actually specify news and I wanted to shill CRS since they do fantastic work, especially given the tightrope they probably have to walk every day.
There's the bias problem, and it's one you can do something about!
The best you can hope to do is listen to a range of smart people who are transparent about their priors.
Edit: Of course, I have no idea if Tay was a real person in the first place, or just a personality created by deep fakers.
Edit: Wikipedia (dubious of course) says that TMZ is a tabloid owned by Fox Corporation. Yeah, like I trust Fox. let alone some tabloid they own.
Do I trust TMZ if it tells me to do all my life savings into dogecoin? No. Do I believe if it tells me Michael Jackson has passed away? Absolutely.
There is nothing actionable for me with a celebrity's death but I'll take TMZ's word for it until proven otherwise and even then I'd expect tmz to publish a swift retraction.
Whether gen z trust faceless corporations I don't know but as a millennial, I know that it isn't a dichotomy. It isn't like faceless equals untrustworthy and a face equals trustworthy. I'm sure we have all listened to our CEOs and senior leaderships lie / "bend the truth" even when they know we know the truth. The only thing I'd like to urge and caution against is we don't continue the vilifying of future generations like the boomers did to us.
I also question any organization that has vulgarity in their name or title. What is the need for such a thing over civility?
I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news.
I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing.
The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are.
Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper that tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.
A few years later I was talking to my dad and he was in a state, going on about current events and how bad things are so I told him I stopped following the news years ago and felt better for it.
About six months later he called me to tell me he also stopped after our call and realised he felt much better too.
A big part for me was that it was just a barrage of sad or scary topics which left me feeling helpless, mixed in with some celebrity antics which I didn’t care about.
I keep up with what’s going on in my industry, and science and technology through sites like this, newsletter subscriptions, podcasts, etc. But in general I’m mostly clueless to what is currently happening in the news.
It makes me feel somehow ignorant, but it works for me. If someone brings up a topic from the news I normally just say “Oh I hadn’t heard about that!” rather than explain I don’t follow the news.
The other part is, do daily newspapers really inform you? Do they follow up the promises of candidates? Do they analyze effects of laws? Do they give you a neutral view of the situation?
Democracy can work fine without newspapers, maybe even better. Politicians in my country focus mostly to solve small fires without addressing the problems underneath it as those get them in the news but the big problems with complex solutions don't give them the same return of visibility in the papers versus the work required to fix it.
I think that following a Twitter or TicToc channel is getting much less information than from mass media. Most do even less follow up or question what the source politician says.
Yes books pamphlets discussions are better but social media in general is none of these it is worse than mass media. Yes there are some blogs that do more but that is rare but that is blogs where you write a thousand words which is not normal social media.
Sounds like sour grapes because it's too hard to buy enough of gen Z's influencers.
If your information diet is television, sure. If not, there are obvious and almost daily advantages from being properly informed relative to the large number of Americans, including some wealthy ones, who think they can roll their own open-source intelligence through gossip-like media.
no it hasn't, and no they don't
this is an example of a common occurrence: a loud minority incorrectly thinking that their opinions represent those of "[the] people"
some other examples are American conservatives with their incorrect ideas of what "[the] people" want, and anti-science advocates with their incorrect views that "people" don't trust science
just say "I" instead.
wow, that's sure persuasive.
Trust in the media is at an all-time low. That isn't "a loud minority."
open to hearing evidence of that claim of yours, because the article disagrees with you
“28% of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.”
According to Pew, Americans trust the media about as much as they trust “big business” (which is not very much). https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...
You must be in the minority of people who trust the media. :-)
here's a good resource helpfully shared by another poster here, showing that 61% of Americans trust national news orgs and 71% trust local news orgs: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/27/u-s-adult...
I'll need some data showing a greater percentage of people trust "gossip" before I believe the claim that that number is larger than 61 or 71%
And the NYT, MSNBC, Foxnews, Verge et al have grown beyond places people trust to keep themselves informed into delivering entertainment, going back to the early 2000s with 24 hour cable news and talking heads shows.
The earliest centralised news was local kings, lords, whatever, instructing the town crier or scribe what to tell the people. You'd be nuts to think it had anything to do with facts.
As civilisation developed, and we had things like the Roman Empire, it was the same deal, except different senators or others would pay criers to spread stories in different sectors, usually their own or a competitors, to sway things one way or another. Remarkably similar to today. And yes, it was fake news. Such as telling citizens that the Carthaginians were baby-eating deamon worshippers, to get people to support a war to wipe out an economic rival.
Then we had governments in WW1 portraying Germans as monsters in those silly posters, inventing horrific crimes against humanity.
Then we had all the media telling tall tales about Saddam Hussein and his secret invisible nuclear chemical weapons in cartoon trains in the desert where they didn't even have railway lines, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people who never harmed the USA, and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades.
It has always been nonsense.
So when you're evalutating the credibility or utility of random internerds and their "news", just be mindful of what you're comparing them against.
Even investigative reporting and historical scholarship suffer. Anyone investigating or studying anything needs to pick and choose which sources they're going to rely on, and therefore introducing intrinsic biases and only as reliable as the sources they rely on.
The over riding goal today has become attention capture/Like/View/Click collection. But this is a temporary blip.
The story is breaking down with the platforms seeing growth stall, reduction in free content (pushed behind paywalls/login screens), banks collapsing, period of low interest rates ending, advertising budgets shrinking, subscription charges rising, new regulations that are upending how things used to work etc etc.
The Attention Economy is under assault and things are going to change. Content creators (be it news orgs or influencers) are functioning under the belief that if they create the "right" content they will get the views.
But the platforms (just like HN) dont inform them as more and more content creators enter the chat, and more and more content is Produced, the amount of content being Consumed doesn't increase cause total collective Attention is a constant. It has become easy to produce content, copy it, broadcast it. So supply goes on rising. But demand cant match it. And then spending time analyzing what "works" for the content creators is delusion.