Comment by beatpanda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beatpanda | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to the Internet, there is a huge glut of awful, cliched writing that leaves you no smarter than you were before you started reading. Journalism school calls this "pumping out copy", and it's something you used to be able to build a career on.

There is a frightening dearth of well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding as opposed to hit a word limit and generate pageviews.

People talk about this all the time — the first question people ask me when I tell them I have a journalism degree is "what news sources do you recommend?", because the vast majority of what's out there and popular is complete garbage, and everyone knows it, and there still, in 2013, isn't a good way to verify sources or tell good journalism from propaganda.

I believe people will pay for compelling content that leaves them better-informed, that they have a good reason to trust, and I believe we can use technology to go far beyond what's been possible up to this point with static, narrative storytelling. We're still terrible at providing context, perspective, and verifiability, all things the Internet has made possible, but nobody has done well yet.

Nobody should pay for what, for instance, the Associated Press produces. Robots will replace them one day and that day can't come soon enough. There is very little value in what they do.

But there is value in content that leaves you smarter than when you started. The methods of producing it haven't caught up with the baseline of knowledge the Internet makes possible for everyone, or the stunningly beautiful display of information that's possible on the modern Web.

It hurts to see the skills gap up close - journalists in the grad program at Stanford are still totally defeated by data mining, web design (a skill they all know well for print), data visualization, non-linear storytelling, multimedia production, and the kinds of things I believe will elevate journalism in the 21st century, and nobody's paying well enough to poach the people who do have those skills.

So what do we do?

>There is a frightening dearth of well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding as opposed to hit a word limit and generate pageviews.

I've left comments like this before, but I'll reiterate: go subscribe to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs. There are others in this general vein, too, but that I don't care for as much: Mother Jones, n+1, etc.

Sites like "The Feature" and "Longform.org" also help.

Look, I know that, and I will sit there and read thousands of words of well-written copy all f*ing day.

Meanwhile, Americans are terrifyingly ignorant of basic facts about the world around them and their own lives.

"Well, the elite media exists, and people with college-level reading skills know what's up, so I guess we don't have to do anything" isn't a real answer.

>Meanwhile, Americans are terrifyingly ignorant of basic facts about the world around them and their own lives.

That's a demand problem, not a supply problem; in the GP you wrote: "There is a frightening dearth of well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding as opposed to hit a word limit and generate pageviews." But there isn't "a frightening dearth of well-produced content." You can argue that too few people want to read it, but you can't legitimately argue that it doesn't exist.

>you can't legitimately argue that it doesn't exist

I can! I said:

>well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding

I would argue that lots of the quality stuff out there is designed for consumption by an audience that's already really smart and well-informed, and doesn't increase what we can call "net understanding" by the whole of society.

What about targeting people who aren't already well informed? Fox News is great at this, only their goal is to help the Republican Party. What if someone did the same thing with the goal of making people smarter?

I know this isn't a new idea and sounds incredibly naive. I don't care. There's a need for this whether the demand is there or not.

I think you should read more pre-Internet journalism. You'd be shocked (SHOCKED) at what a NYT really looked like from 1970, let alone the zillions of regional papers, weeklies, newsletters, etc.

We remember the good stuff.

> journalists in the grad program at Stanford are still totally defeated by data mining, web design (a skill they all know well for print), data visualization, non-linear storytelling, multimedia production,

> So what do we do?

You get journalists together with other people to do the other stuff.

Journalists shouldn't be noodling around choosing fonts and colors or drawing charts - they should be gathering information and talking to people and writing best quality articles.

>Noodling around choosing fonts and colors or drawing charts

Yeah, 'noodling around', like this guy: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/war.casualties/index.html

Design done well increases understanding. Data visualization done well increases understanding. They are integral to high-quality journalism, not a decoration to place around it.

Right but regardless how meaty your copy is, no matter how privileged your information is or how sensational your story is, people will only start reading it if you have a good headline. The medium ultimately is the message and the more journalists realise they're writing for a browser and not for paper the more they can contribute to reporting the news.

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