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Comment by scrollop | Hacker News Reader

Well, perhaps there will be a small revival, just as there has been with vinyl and film cameras, however compared to the "mainstream" these will likely be very small.

If anything, I think it's more likely that people will invest their news via new means especially AI platforms.

I use chatgpt's voice to hear the latest news instead of staring at a screen but it's clunky -

1. Waiting for the new voice so that we can speed up cadence and interrupt 2. I would prefer to talk to a news service directly with voice rather than relying on an ai platform to give me the news as I can't beg due the platform won't give me less trustworthy sources etc news corp

Ideally, I could log into Reuters or whatever site I want and talk with it about the news, and the same for anything (recipe sites, Reddit, whatever)

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AI voice + video generation is a really cool (probably in a Marshall Mcluhan sense too) and natural extension of the 24/7 CNN type media/news distribution but amongst other things it lacks a major thing that the printed word has -- immutability.

A newspaper is distinct from the radio / nightly news / 24/7 news network type journalism and that key distinction is that once it's in your hands it's yours until you give it up. It's that piece of the past that you can hold in your hands to let you know that the things that you remember actually happened in the way they happened.

There's something magical about these artifacts, the ones you can hold in your hands, look at with your eyes, smell with your noses, and hear with your ears, it's a physical thing that exists irrespective of the whims of some tin-pot dictator. Possessing this kind of artifact gives the bearer some sort of power -- an ability to resist those tin-pot dictators -- and that's why certain kinds of people want to burn them or trick people into stuffing them into a memory hole.

I wonder what we lose forever if we don't have these sort of physical and immutable mediums for communicating ideas, and I hope we can find a way to maintain them. I acknowledge that it may not be feasible to do so on a large scale, but I hope that we can find a way to keep them alive in some local form.

It sounds like What you're after is good quality radio. radio 4's world at one is rather good, and have a nice mix.

The FT prototyped a way to make podcast/article reading interactive. The problem was that we didn't have an LLM to answer the question, so they were stuck on hacking alex's awful API.

The problem with wire services is that they tend to only have light detail. You need a different service for analysis/investigation. (this is different to opinion, which is really just cheap news replacement.)

If you are immersed in a culture outside of the UK, and check in on the current state of the BBC's reporting on it, you realise how poor it is. I am reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

BBC Radio 4 is also sadly now a shadow of what it used to be.

I'm not quite convinced of how bad it has got. If you listen to only one thing them yes, mistakes will happen.

However I'm fairly close to dutch culture, and the explaining of Gert Wilders wasn't that bad. The first hand reporting of "the youth" seemed to be reasonable from my point of view.

But perhaps thats because I don't use the BBC as my only source? I dunno.

That’s all true, but I do think there is a burgeoning “back to physical things” counterculture. It might take a decade or two to not be an obscure thing, but culture does work in cycles.

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