USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data | Hacker News Reader

USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

niemanlab.org

195 pointscdrnsf80 comments

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper.

I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.

Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.

USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.)

It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.

I decided to spot check a few, including places like Portland and Seattle, and it seems like private ownership by a family for the last century is pretty common. And isn't the main paper in Austin the Austin American-Statesman? That's the Hearst family. Though looking a little deeper, they were owned by Gannett until last year.

Yes for big cities, but there are very very few independent local papers in less populated areas, for example: https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/with-a-new-media-conglo...

Also the Oregonian (big Portland paper) and the Seattle Times (big Seattle paper) are not locally owned anymore.

The Seattle Times is still owned by the Blethen family (who have owned it since 1896).

Ah confused it with the Tacoma News Tribune

It’s interesting. Growing up, my small town of ~4000 had a local newspaper. It doesn’t exist anymore, as of 5-10 years ago. I think many less populated areas did have some independent journalism until very recently.

But at the same time there is also an online newsletter/blog/sort of newspaper that started maybe 15-20 years ago. It has maybe one or two employees but it’s mostly about high school sports and local events.

My local USA Today-owned paper moved from a giant historic building (800 people when I worked there), to a new much smaller office (about 150 people at that point), to announcing they're moving to a coworking space.

They're dying, it's just a slow bleed-out.

Jokes aside, I do honestly wonder what they expect to learn from this kind of analysis.

For the newspaper: elderly people staying in 2 and 3 star hotels eating their free continental breakfast.

For their website: slightly younger elderly people on their ipada eating breakfast at home.

USA Today, feel free to contact me for payment details

Hey now, maybe they can finally figure out how many people get pissed off when they click on the left side of a page when they pull it up to get window focus to scroll and have the entire page navigate off back to the main USA Today homepage instead of whatever puff piece story they got linked to.

> Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.

And USA Today will be billed $50M for the privilege.

Stories/comments like these make me want to dedollarise.

With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had to be really angry to follow through on writing a physical letter, getting a stamp and walk to the post box just to complain.

I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.

What happened is there used to be local newspapers with local reporters who at least knew something about the local community. Even if you hated the bias you could at least learn something useful about your community.

USA Today as a "my country Today" edition - but they don't have local reporters who understand my community and uncover the important stories. 3/4s of the "local" paper is fluff pieces that go into every local paper". If something nationally important to me happens I'll find out about it, but nobody is telling me what my town council is doing (the published minutes are "debated a proposal for X and voted on it, it passed" - I have an opinion on this and want to inform my next vote based on this issue, but I don't know who did what (importantly there might be a consideration I'm not aware of that would make me change my mind - which is why I don't want to lookup their vote even if I could)

They bought the newspaper I worked at in/after college. They downsized significantly, but many folks I worked with over a decade ago now are still there.

Even with moral issues aside, Palantir is absurdly expensive and seems to be focused on selling buzzwords over actual value and tech. It’s like crack for non-technical big wigs.

They'll get a discount for publishing good things and suppressing bad things about Palantir.

edit: prepare for a lot of interesting op-eds from the nation's first newspaper printed in full color and targeted exclusively at morons. The most well-printed comics section in the industry.

My question is this: why is Palantir required for this kind of fairly basic data analysis? Couldn't they use much cheaper, probably open platforms for data science & analytics?

I don't see where it says who's paying whom. Maybe the deal is that Palantir gets more personal data to throw in a national profile database.

I dislike USA Today. It feels like lowest common denominator fluffy news.

Also, I remember staying at a hotel once where they delivered one to every guest room.

https://www.amazon.com/Were-Eating-More-Beets-Trudeau/dp/080...

I didn't see you capitalized the T at first. The sentence was still somehow making sense.

Im pretty sure I've only ever seen people read usa today when hotels give it away for free with the continental breakfast.

I stayed at that hotel! I think it was the Peachtree something-or-other in downtown Atlanta, around 1980-85.

They always have been. A few times I've read it and I was always disappointed. They are about all that is left though. I keep looking for someone with real reporters who cover my local area and I can't find it. Just big city papers that have an edition for my area but no reporters to dig into local stories.

Does your local NPR station (or even PBS) have local journalists? Obviously their primary formats aren’t written, but my local NPR has a fantastic website also.

USA Today is news written for 5th graders. It has always been a waste of time and paper for anyone who really wants to know what's going on.

The people who can only read at a 5th grade level are precisely the people who need to be more informed about what's going on

Why? They mostly don't do anything very impactful. Voting and other civic engagement is very low amongst the illiterate.

not talking about illiteracy, ~50% of americans read at a 6th grade level or below... that's certainly enough to make an impact, the 2024 election was decided by ~250k votes across 3 states... Michigan specifically has a reading level below national average

And the percent of eligible citizens who vote is often not much more than 50% in presidential election years (higher recently but not for good reasons). It's even lower in mid-term years. If you're not an engaged, informed person and your worldview is based on USA Today headlines I'd rather you didn't vote.

well you can enjoy your imaginary world where you get to decide who votes and who doesn't, but I'd rather the people who do exist and vote in the real world read USA Today than nothing at all...

we're talking in the area of 100M+ people, remove accessible reading from them and you're left with what? cable news and tiktok?

There's enough high quality video and audio news that it's fully possible to be an engaged and informed person even if you can't read for shit. Plus, text-to-speech is very good now. You can listen to written articles as well, even if you can't read them. You still need to evaluate sources and fact check, but that's a separate skill (albeit one most literate people also fail at).

I don't believe the literacy rate is a measure of intelligence, when the "three cueing" educational calamity is right there as an obvious explanation. That and Americans just being overworked and exhausted and sick all the time.

In Soviet Union, newspaper read you

My, how times have changed.

Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?

some of their value comes in as they're an outside party with carte-blanche to organize your data....do you have 10 internal teams that can't agree on a schema or organize themselves well due to political reasons? hire palantir

Their contracts give them a preposterous amount of control over their customers. All of the "Sovereignty" messaging is kind of ironic because it basically boils down to "don't trust them, trust us"

Besides that they're basically the most expensive, white-glove, enterprise-y version of what they do

At least in the military aspect, I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family.

I personally find the panic over Palantir, Data Centers, etc to be largely mass hysteria vs anything else. It has become an omni-cause like Israel (I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish, just read any internet comment thread on the topic.)

>I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish

Dont be disingenuous, you know damn well the backlash isn't because he is jewish. Its because of the business relationship with the Israeli government and how Palintirs tech has been used as a tool in Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people.

>just read any internet comment thread on the topic

You're the first comment in this thread or any ive seen, mentioning the CEOs religion.

>I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family

Really? And what is it that these friends and family members are saying great things about Palintir?

This reads like some grade A marketing bot bullshit

Another part is that Palantir is helping Ukraine defend against russia

I think one thing to keep in mind is that the bar had been subterranean. I've had to work on a few platforms that were either the incumbent Palantir was trying to displace or a competitor trying to beat Palantir. All were not great, but the non-Palantir products would be embarrassing to release to a general enterprise or consumer market.

My observation from the peanut gallery, is that Palantir has been successful because they created a tech-culture incentive system for engineers, whereas legacy contractors (Booz, Deloitte, Accenture, CACI, Boeing, etc.) treated engineers as cost center plus. I think it was literally as simple as: pay engineers Big Tech competitive salary, allow them to collaborate directly with clients to develop solutions, and actively remove Product Managers/Contract Managers from interfering -> megabucks.

To your point, I don't think this is an intrinsic or structural moat. To the extent someone can do these things better or faster than Palantir, I could easily see them beating Palantir in the future.

I think I missed a connecting piece here, since this is a non-government contract for Palantir.

Since they've been able to do the above, I think they've developed a pretty good skillset at merging disparate data and surfacing it for analytics. Combine that with the fact that their government business is a money-printing machine, you basically end up with an analytics shop that has significant experience at scale and is extremely well capitalized. For a relatively non-tech savvy or uninformed customer, Palantir could look like a pretty attractive option.

Search traffic is failing for everyone because of AI, you don't need a billion dollars to figure that out.

Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now?

There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and poison the bot to remind everyone that not only are we at war with Iran, but Coca-Cola is still America's favorite soft drink.

I believe we saw that this week - https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-diff...

This will be fun. Currently dealing with Palantir trying to work their away into where I work. All I can say is I’m glad it’s going the way it is and thankful the CEO has gone public that he is “leading all AI” decisions

Yeah it’s a complete disaster. They are trying to usurp all data; even employee personal data off devices via MDM that has no relevance to the project. They also asked for api keys to everything (in a regulated environment). And if you thought their forward deployed team knew anything about GRC, think again

Let's also remember: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/can-ai-judge-journalism-a-...

Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.

How is this relevant?

It's a Thiel product, and the subject here is Palantir and media. Ideological adjacencies in media affairs seems relevant to me at such high levels of influence and power integrations.

But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question?

If that is not a fair question, maybe show me evidence supporting a falsifiable general rule showing that all, or the majority of comments in HN threads contain strictly directly related comments -- or at least something showing most HN threads show non-directly related comments being challenged consistently, perhaps by yourself. This would help.

On a deeper level...

As a rogue journalist, I research many things. In this case, I have been researching both Palantir and Thiel, particularly products and things funded by Theil, particularly certain YouTube influencer channels.

My research shows certain contradictions of proclaimed values that very much interest me, such as Thiel Capital support of American Alchemy, which heavily promotes "neuro divergence" and an entire category of ideas that his partner, Alex Karp severely criticizes. Karp has made openly contemptuous claims on "neuro divergence" and drugs, while Thiel Capital is affiliated with American Alchemy, which is not modestly adamant on the subject, but hyper adamant, and promotes what some might call "conspiracy" related material.

However, when you have such individuals deeply connected with the Pentagon, and Law Enforcement, with verifiable influence, profiling abilities, and much more, this is something I take very seriously. As a 'journalist', I tend to see connections. I am sure you resent this, but despite an often rough approach, they have yet to fail in final synthesis. So that is what I am actually thinking, when I leave such posts.

> But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question?

I don't see why you "must" ask such a question?

You're being way too defensive for such a simple question.

I'm accused of being "way too defensive". For those who would consider this, tick "show dead" and review my comment history. Yes, you will find some slop, often a result of that implied above, but you will find quite a few that should not have been flagged, but were. There is a precedent here. I also get at least one downvote for every comment, however neutral, even on obscure posts with few views. That is close enough to a pattern to wonder. So I do.

Asking why a Thiel related media organization is relevant to a Thiel related media organization is odd, to me. It's not as if Thiel or Palantir aren't involved in many things. Am I supposed to voluntarily compartmentalize them?

This "simple" question has an easy answer. Sometimes questions with exceedingly simple answers do seem awkward.

Title could be closer to: USA Today Co. partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

I'm curious to see what the crossing of a newspaper network and a mercenary kill optimizer will produce. Is Palantir getting a propaganda arm extension?

That's like eating dinner with a chainsaw

Is Palantir getting access to any data it didn't already have about the newspaper chain's readers?

Imagine paying a billion dollars for some contract software devs to add tracking cookies to your websites.

What does a newspaper need "actionable intelligence" for?

To quote the CEO, "that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value."

So they view their readers as something to be monetized. Not to be educated, not to be intellectually stimulated, not to have their questions answered, not to have their curiosity satisfied, not to provide them with anything a newspaper traditionally did. Nope, they are just a source of money. Get them to click, serve them an ad, sell their tracking data.

I immediately thought they might be trying to de-anonymize article Commenters. Maybe I'm being too paranoid.

Oh, I'm sure they are doing that too. Something else they think they can monetize (never mind that most of them are probably bots).

There are a bunch of "emperor's new clothes" companies in the economy today. Palantir certainly seems like one of them.

Being awful is easy when you start, but think about how much they have worked, how hard they have worked, how much an anti-anti-christ they must have proved themselves to be, what Indiana Jones traps they must have escaped to reach Palantir's CEO from the lobby, how many kids they probably have sacrificed to Satan, to get a contract from one of the most prominent and established war crime houses in history, to do what Google Analytics could do with copy-pasting three lines of code and signing in with your own Google account — just so they could burn their already-gone reputation and keep being one of the worst ways to waste human labor, office space, servers, and dead trees. This takes work, and I must admit I'm in total awe. This is going way beyond the competition to prove something, even if that something is the stupidest thing the laws of physics can handle.

Wow. Bad move.

"After 12 months of data analysis, we have arrived at the conclusion that our average customer was born before 1957 and thinks the country to going to hell in a hand basket."

This is the continuation of Operation Mockingbird. After it was exposed in the 70's by the Pike and Church Committee's, they reorganized privately using Allen & Co's Billaionaire's SummerCamp to consolidate the media (and now Social Media) industries for maximum control of the narrative. Each year they meet to further consolidate the media industry.

https://webdoodle.substack.com

I've been protesting there for 7 years now, and this was the first year the Democratic Socialists of America showed up. It was a major improvement. Next year the rest of you need to show up.

Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies. The propaganda was much too obvious. I don't think a Palantir partnership is going to change my mind.

Hacker News occasionally indexed Palestinian voices but this was a breath of fresh air compared to outlets like USA Today. I'm actually constantly conflicted about the sources I consume and still seek alternatives. If they want me to view more of their content, including more authoritarian surveillance technology is not the right move.

> Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies.

That is not helpful, and a very good way of falling down rabbit holes just because you find a source that agrees with you on one subject. That’s how you get manipulated and radicalised.

It’s much better to have a variety of sources, even if you occasionally disagree. It keeps you grounded and reminds you that other people have other opinions.

I cannot stress this enough: do not get polarised because of a single issue. That is how rational discourse dies.

As I said elsewhere, I can't even find a single source....

For important world news there are a lot of options. However the most important news is my local community. Who covers my local school district - nobody. (This isn't true, they do send a sports reporter to the school games - but not to the school board meetings even though they matter more)

When that single issue is a genocide, the calculus changes. Would you feel the same about a news source that argues the Hutus were acting in self defense?

Part of the issue is the label genocide is applied so liberally as to lose meaning. We're seeing similar devaluation of previously potent labels like "fashist"

It then becomes easy to say "I don't engage with fashists / genocide supporters / whatever" as an obvious justification for staying in ones bubble when in reality that label is so overused for people/events that say 10 years ago would have obviously not been labeled this way.

That is to say: when everyone is fascist/ genocider you have an excuse to not debate with anyone but that's not good for you.

I did not choose this world, it’s just the one I live in. If enough people believe something, it’s not really surprising to see it written, even if it is wrong. According to many comments I have read here and articles on even respectable American websites, I live in a communist shithole on the verge of collapse, we’re drowning in bureaucracy and we’re all just waiting for the good Americans to show us how everything is done. Meh. I can open the window and see how wrong they are, but I am not going to refrain from reading anything written by an American just because their nationality makes them likely to be very wrong about a lot of things in Europe.

In reality yes, Israel is a nationalist theocracy and obviously guilty of genocide in Gaza and in Lebanon. Your opinion on this or mine has no bearing on our credibility when discussing things like rocket mechanics or economics. I am not using the Armenian genocide as a purity test, either. Or the Holodomor.

You seem to be clueless about Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon (and probably about Gaza too).

Or you have redefined “genocide” to mean any war Israel is involved in.

The irony of leftists trying to kick people out for having opinions they don't like always makes me sad.

And before someone mentions the paradox of tolerance: The paradox clears itself up if you look at what tolerance actually is. It's simply not interfering with people's agency over themselves. Given that your right to self-agency doesn't entitle you to restrict others' self-agency, behavior that does try restricting others' agency is automatically not included in "tolerance."

It's one thing if both sides believe they are attempting to restrict each others' self-agency. It's also possible that both of you are wrong. Whose place is it to say what is right OR wrong? Is there even always a right or wrong? I don't think so.

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