Google cuts dozens of jobs in news division
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
When was the last time you read a news article in any "major" news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, "This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story"?
I don't remember having had this experience since I was a child, decades ago. I was a teenager when I first extrapolated that if they couldn't report with even big picture accuracy on the things I did know something about, odds were that they were similarly wrong about all the things I didn't know about too.
With that perspective in mind, it's come down to a question for me of whether it is good or bad for my life to be immersed, near-constantly, in stories about (usually awful) things happening in parts of the world that I can't do a thing about. I don't think it is.
I think that's what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this "victimer than thou" culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help. Nobody feels like an agent anymore because they're constantly immersed in stories of awful things in which they don't have any agency.
There's this broad cultural assumption that "one must be informed about world affairs," but it's at the expense of local affairs, the affairs we could affect. If you know about violence on the other side of the planet, but don't know that your neighbor three doors down is having trouble getting to work and at risk of losing their job because their car broke down, I'd strongly argue that your priorities are out of whack. People's lives everywhere are getting worse because we're all worrying about things far away that we can't affect rather than local problems we could actually solve.
I'd just as soon see Google News shutter. I think we would all be better off without the 24-hour global news cycle.
I follow current events by reading the wikipedia current events portal [1] so I can stay informed without all the manipulation. It’s a completely different experience from the newsmedia: biases are still aplenty but they’re downright quaint when stacked against commercial incentives.
That's because of decades of "small/lean state" preachers. Be it the UK's NHS, Germany's unemployment/social security scheme, or the US healthcare/social security/pension systems, it's the same: people don't have a safety net to fallback on, other than (for some) family. They're fighting for financial or literal survival every day - just look how many people are living paycheck to paycheck, and our collective governments are doing nothing to help the 99%. No wonder the populist far-right is in an upswing.
The overwhelming majority of things that actually happen in your life could be solved by a close network of 100 or fewer family members and neighbors who helped each other out.
Someone gets sick or becomes disabled, someone loses a job, a car breaks down, a house burns down, the road cracks, a store has trouble making ends meet--these things do not need national governments taxing every single resident of the country to solve them.
It's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. There certainly are exceptions. When a dictator sends an army to bomb your whole town, your neighborhood isn't going to be able to fix that.
But the overwhelming majority of things people consider "problems" could be solved by a community of 100 or fewer people who actually know each other, care about each other's lives, and are willing to work together.
Housing and healthcare should be human rights, available to everyone, backed by the government, without being dependent on their family or their "near community".
Imagine you're gay or trans, you live in a rural area and your family is Evangelical Christian. In a country with a strong government, you can be assured that you'll be taken care of with your basic needs. In a country that follows your ideals, you better do your best to conform to societal pressure, get a trophy wife and hide who you truly are all your life.
Which environment sounds better to you? To me the answer is clear: the one with a strong government that guarantees everyone's right to live like they wish.
You can have a meaningful impact on a community. It'll take time and effort, but you can actually have an impact. You can be the one who welcomes the rejected, who opens your house to the down and out, who shows people that love isn't something to fear.
You can't affect your national government. If you get exceptionally lucky, you might be able to get sucked up by some political party as their knighted figurehead, but that only happens because you happen to agree with their agenda, not because you're the individual agent of change.
I will gladly take the community of people who actually know each other and solve their problems together over the "strong government" every single day of the week and twice on Sundays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
I agree entirely, I used to pay attention to the news, in part because I wanted to be knowledgable, and I guess the premise was growing up I'd eventually be part of a leadership class that would need to make big decisions based on that knowledge...but I'm frankly just a laborer, and being ignorant of the larger world is a totally reasonable and healthy position to take.
The alternative seems to be to become an absolute news junkie which means a politics junkie which means a useful idiot arguing online with other useful idiots for some political movement I have no control or power over.
Reasonable yes, healthy I'd debate. More importantly, if you prefer to have something of focus it would local politics, your mayor and representatives. It is often said that what happens here is more impactful on your life than what happens in national or international news. You can participate whether a new library or infrastructure is built, zoning laws, etc.
You won't see this anyway on your newsfeed so it might suit you.
I think of my mom and brother for instance, versus my dad and other brother - my dad and other brother are blissfully ignorant.
My mom and younger brother get worked up over things they see in the news daily that don't affect them at all.
I'd wager that stress, depression, and anxiety levels are all higher for people like my mom and younger brother than for the former.
In my observation in NYC being surrounded by some of these people, it attracts A LOT of nepobabies. Even some of the famous newscasters you watched as a kid fall into this category. They, as a group, have largely chosen power over money.. but only partially because they do come from enough money to make that choice. Tons of overlap between the industry & working on political campaigns / in government admins.
Who else can afford to go to Harvard, work summers for free, then move to Manhattan for a $40k salary in a flat to declining industry? Who else has the parental backstop to choose to make 1/3rd their potential income given the school they got a degree from? It's kind of a fun game looking up random people in the industry on wikipedia and observing how many have 1 or 2 parents who have their own wikipedia pages (A LOT).
Even guys I deeply respected at some point like Michael Lewis, who started in the industry and knew it well.. eventually get so out of touch that their writing starts to exhibit the Gell-Mann effect.
Most of the time? Maybe I don't know what you mean.
Most of the news that appears via AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, etc. is largely factually accurate. Especially when you're looking at their core competencies of covering domestic US politics, basic foreign affairs, and domestic economics/business. E.g. they've been doing accurate jobs on factual reporting about the recent battles for house majority leader, events unfolding in Israel, and events unfolding in Ukraine. Sometimes you might be bothered with their "present both sides and don't take a stance" but it's still largely factual, accurate reporting about what is happening and what public figures are saying.
If by "big picture" you mean analysis, however, that's not exactly news. Analysis is necessarily opinionated -- declaring that a public figure is lying, that another public figure ought to do X. That's not what Google News is for -- that's what publications like the Economist, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vox, or New York Magazine are for. (Or pick your own preferred set.)
But you need both. 24 hour political and international news is very necessary for a lot of people in decision-making positions, and for people affected by a lot of these events. If it's unhealthy for you personally, then you shouldn't consume it however. For example, I read tons about politics and economics, but I don't look at crime reports stuff at all. (And Google News doesn't show it to me either, since the "For You" tab is really good at learning your preferences.)
I’m not saying they (Reuters, NYT, WaPo) don’t do much better fact checking than most outlets but there’s still a wide gulf between “no outright falsehoods” and “truly unbiased coverage”.
I’m not entirely sure the latter even exists.
And that just doesn't seem to be correct, by and large. But you're absolutely right that choosing what to cover and what to emphasize is a conscious choice, and that there is no such thing as neutrality there.
Regardless of how “factually accurate”, selective reporting is no different than selective omission. The very nature of a finite space to print (or display on the front page in the digital age) means that there is always an angle.
Google News is an interesting one because they add a level of indirection. They pick the sources they’re willing to aggregate. It’ll never be all news everywhere. It can’t be anyway. There’s always going to be some editorialization, even in the selection of “factually accurate” information.
But I do have deep familiarity with other topics that are of similar impact and complexity, and the gaping holes in the writers' understanding of the topics in the articles on these topics are so gigantic you could drive trucks through them. I'm not talking about nuanced issues. These are big-picture mistakes.
It's certainly possible that they're only wrong about the topics I understand. Maybe they really are right about everything else.
It just seems extremely unlikely.
It would make make sense that reporters get political news right more than more niche topics - that’s most of what they report on, it’s most of what they read, and something politically adjacent is probably the most common major for a journalist besides journalism itself.
Anything else and the reporter is likely straying a bit out of their wheelhouse. Eg if they’re reporting on a scientific discovery they go to one of a handful of their reporters with scientific backgrounds, who may not have studied the specific field in question, and gets reviewed by even more removed editors. Compare that to political news where everyone in the chain is very much family with the broad subject matter.
Except for specifically political reporters, no, its mostly not. OTOH, for TV, network anchors seem to generally have spent some time on a political beat.
> it’s most of what they read,
Where do you get this?
> and something politically adjacent is probably the most common major for a journalist besides journalism itself.
In the US, ISTR that the top 3 majors for journalists, and the only ones above a 10% share, are, in order, Journalism, Communication, and English. Even if Poli Sci is next after that (and I think it is), its a really small share of reporters.
Years of experience crafting he-said/she-said dueling press statements from politicians and other government officials and interested lobbying groups into narratives doesn't equate to understanding of politics or government.
However, the bulk of the parents argument wasn't about the veracity of the news, albeit your quote did show a strong dig from the parent. The parent was chiefly arguing that being aware of the world seems to be a bad thing, and that globally we would be better people by not being aware at all of the world. No matter what the news looked like, the parent argued, we shouldn't read it.
It feels like some crazy dark world shit to me. I can't imagine a return to the darkness, to being unaware of each other & the happenings of this planet. It's a burden, yes, and I think there's a ton to recommend about finding balance where local matters and our own lives aren't so entirely outshadowed or even sandblasted away by the enormity of the acts unfolding upon the global stage. But I just think of ignorant easy to manipulate peasants & awful fuedal systems, when we can't or won't consider the setting & events of this planet.
We are a better species for this noospheric connection we have, and rather than fret about whether we should go back, I'd like to figure out how to progress forwards, like to figure out how we can do it better.
If you know ten of your neighbors by name, you're in a vanishingly small minority in much of the Western world today. I would happily take a bet saying no one in this thread can name ten of their neighbors, what they do for work, and two things those people care about, without counting more than two from the same household.
That is "some crazy dark world shit" to me. People don't know the people who spend half their lives within a mile of them, and yet they can spout of random information about dozens celebrities or conflicts or politicians thousands of miles away.
Humanity is weaker because of this. Only when we can do this better can we afford to try to extend our awareness.
Well no. Just a few days ago most of them ran a story as front-page news that turned out not to have happened. Hell, a lot of them even seem to have Google image-searched for "bombed-out hospital" to get an accompanying photo, again of something they can't possibly have verified first-hand because 16 hours later the evidence came out that the hospital hadn't been bombed at all.
They reported that a Palestinian official claimed that Israel bombed a hospital. This report was factually correct, but the claim was a lie.
It was bad journalism for other reasons - the headline didn’t emphasise the uncertainty, and it wasn’t wise to publish the official’s claim when they knew so little about the facts on the ground. But they said nothing factually incorrect.
They made no claim themselves about what Israel did, and the official said what they said he said.
This makes google news itself pretty hard to use. I think complaining about "paywalls" in general is stupid, but it's really hard for the news reader this way.
Part of the problem for me, is it seems like it's still very hard to get away from the web 2.0 part of news anyway. Is subscribing going to reduce the clickbait journalism? Nope.
I have apple news, and the quality of what I see isn't exactly encouraging me to go out and buy more subs. I will probably still get shotty, rage inducing content, just like I get on reddit.
By the way this same pattern seems to hold with local stations. In fact local publishers more pay walled, for important local stories. I think you could argue these are the subs I should pay for the most.
Because everything in my Google News is about my interests:
- article about cmake from kitware
- article about AI alignment from lesswrong
- article physicists creating a new form of antenna from phys.org
- article about benchmarking rpi5 from rpi.org
- travel ad to Casa Batlo as I've just been to Spain
...
I can keep scrolling and it's all articles from quality orgs on content related to my interests, without having subscribed to anything, and I get zero flame or bait content.
You need to tell the recommender system you're not interested in bait content by "showing less" instead of clicking on them.
I think Wikipedia is about the most objective source out there. Before you jump on selective examples of bias: no, it's not perfect and IS full of BS and errors. But I would believe something they said long before believing anything in NYT or WaPo.
They make a much stronger effort to be fair and complete than any major news outlet does. I think their reviled editing process at least serves the function of asking writers, "Is this a fair summary?" most of the time. It's easy to see that the mainstream media gave up on that a long time ago.
(and yes, some of the bio pages are written by the subjects.)
There is a lot going on right now, with Google + Meta at the centre of possible regulation over news links; with the wars in Israel and Ukraine causing spikes in misinformation; with American trust in news at historic lows, and with X's disbanding of its Trust&Safety team leading to a rise in misinformation on the platform; any withdrawal from a service as prominent as Google's News is going to be noteworthy.
They operate on the principle that without revenue the people doing the actual work of journalism will go out of business.
Do you think the regulators are wrong on that point?
Seems completely different to me.
We already know the answer from other countries where Google was forced to share ad revenue or not index the papers.
Also, news sites have control over how their site shows up on Google. If they want to continue being indexed and show up in the search result with just a title and no snippet of the page, that's something they could make happen immediately just by themselves. That none of them are choosing to do so makes it pretty clear that the "people just read the summaries and don't click through to the article" thing isn't a problem in reality.
> we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies
Sure. Why do you think that it's search engines and social networks that should be doing the paying?
To be clear, I have no opinion or information either way. I'm just providing some conditions under which it could be considered newsworthy.
Not just this, but for example, the discourse around big tech companies introducing bias into "news" is increasing. So reductions in those teams is itself newsworthy.
So the overall SWE hiring landscape is still pretty rough.
e.g. Waymo two days ago https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alphabets-waymo-makes-more...
Australia was successful, Canada is in the middle of the implementation of legislation (goes into effect in December) and Google is likely going to remove news and all news links in response, and it sounds like the US is in the process of drafting similar legislation.
How exactly did they do that? You mean by being better distributors of advertisements?
The other common trend here was offering competitive pricing until they had enough market share to force less generous terms. We joke about even prestige journalism writing like Buzzfeed but that was responding to the incentives set by ad-tech companies.
Again, I’m not saying Google or Facebook should get nothing - only that we should recognize that paying journalists is expensive and they were successful for several decades at getting a great deal of profit from that work without compensation. If you don’t want to live in a world awash with quasi-spam, clickbait, and propaganda we need to figure out a better balance where people can make a decent income doing quality journalism.
Here are two good breakdowns of the problems/limits of modern mainstream news.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalism-needs-more-taylor-sw...
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265
Americans wisely agree, trust in media is very low https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re....
It's worth pointing out that mass media has had a brief lifespan, about from the 1920s. And the "golden age" when everyone was following it was really only 1950 to 2000.
It's fine if it declines, and even if it disappears.
Canada's accidental banning of links to news is a good model, we should do it in the US. Let's tax any links to news sites from major web platforms.
I agree, but those in power don’t. Maybe we should rather tax hyperboles and keywords like “Alert!” at the beginning of tweets. “Breaking news!”. It’s so stressing I auto-ban authors who use them.
Any usage of the red color on television. Usage of flashes and running messages. We should come up with a way to measure the equivalent of loudness (TV, radio and ads are all standardized in average authorized loudness) but for alertness.
We should smoothe out the level of alertness, across all digital screens.
I think the first amendment might have a few words on that
That is so hypocritical coming from the news industry that this past week had massive headlines saying Israel bombed a hospital prompting massive riots across the Middle East, when the truth was that an Islamic Jihad missile misfired and blew up in the parking lot of the hospital. The misinformation spread by the news media probably did as much harm as any spread on tech company platforms.
They seem to want censorship for everyone else, while wanting “freedom of the press” for themselves.
Personally, it's hard for me to cast too much judgement on this particular kind of reporting, given there's quite a lot of indiscriminate bombing in densely populated areas. And a huge incentive to use anything you can to help promote a cease fire.
[1] One example: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/17/photos-an-israe...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/what-have-open-sou...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-presents-evidence-misfired...
This article exposes a recorded telephone conversation (which could easily be faked) that this was "friendly fire." The lack of a crater at the impact site, and minimal damage to surrounding buildings, rules out the standard ordinance used by the IDF (although something custom could have been used in this case in an elaborate attempt to shift/inflict blame, but unlikely by reason of Occam's Razor).
This article on Al Jazeera reports the assessment of French intelligence that the IDF was not responsible:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/21/french-intel-says-...
The above article casts some doubt on the Israeli assertions (and French assessment) and reports on calls by the U.N. for a full investigation.
The well-known video of the explosion has a high-pitched whine which would not be heard in the standard munitions used by the IDF, which do not have propulsion as I understand.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/18/gaza-h...
This is either an accidental weapons malfunction, or a false-flag attempt, but the later seems unlikely as the Israeli government response seemed somewhat muted if it were planned by them.
The question would be who, how, and why.
That's how breaking news works. First stories report what people on the scene are claiming (Gaza officials in this case), which is often incomplete, and then update as more information comes in.
For people who regularly read a given set of news sites that works well. Pick a few that have different political leanings and read them fairly consistently and you'll get a decent picture of what's going on.
For people who just get their news by whatever tweets (or whatever they are called now on X) they see in the feed (in many cases just going by the content of the tweet itself instead of clicking the link to read the article at the source) it is not going to work so well.
There's a similar problem with the snippet headlines showing in televised news bottom screen tickers. Those "...as claimed by (the IDF|Gaza Officials)" parts get clipped off.
Even the paid experience of news sites is horrible. FT is the only one I feel positively about.