Hackers wanted: Scholarships available to coders to save journalism and democracy | Hacker News Reader

Hackers wanted: Scholarships available to coders to save journalism and democracy

radar.oreilly.com

34 pointspeter12310 comments

My local paper sucks. It's a corporate revenue generator. They give us as little real content as possible. Just enough to maintain the illusion that they are a News Paper rather than an Advertising Sales and Delivery System. The editor wails about how important he is to the community but he is merely an impotent tool for Gannett, just as his predecessor was for Knight-Ridder.

You must understand though, that your paper is doing what makes money -- it's providing what most people want: stories about cats rescued from trees, this years fashions, and possibly commentary on local taxes going up or down. Ads about what sale is going on this weekend, etc.

The real shocker, IMO, is that most people don't want to know what's really going on. They actively resist getting roused from their peaceful slumber.

I do understand that they are doing what made (past tense) money. Write to the lowest common denominator. Don't make waves, please the national advertisers. I think people do want to know what's going on. That why the newspaper is tanking. Circulation is in the toilet along with national ad sales. People actively seek content and commentary and they find it on the internet. Look at all the websites about cats(LOL) and fashion doing just fine.

>The real shocker, IMO, is that most people don't want to know what's really going on. They actively resist getting roused from their peaceful slumber.

I would say the opposite is true. Chomsky touches on this subject here (and on other articles on this website) and can explain it a lot better than I can.

http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm

The exclamation mark that disappeared from the headline really borks its parsability. Suggest someone fixes that.

The article does make an okay case for journalism being interesting, but it fails to convince me that "old news" is something that can or should be saved.

Maybe that is why they want hackers, to help create the "new news".

It's funny because the media industry blames the internet, and therefore, coders and hackers, for their downfall with not very nice language all the time...

and now they are begging us to save them from their death...

Life is funny.

Great to see Brian worked in a shout-out for http://repsheet.com an open source, dead-simple local political lookup tool.

The title is hilarious. I read it initially as

"[Some] Hackers wanted [the] Scholarships available to coders to save journalism and democracy"

I always like to see people blending various disciplines to make a better product. I think that's how business should be done.

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