Ask HN: Where do you turn for high quality journalism?
Upon hearing on HN today that Nautilus, a beloved science magazine, is struggling financially, I thought I'd ask the community about places online or in print to find excellent journalism. Any field or topic is fine--it doesn't have to be constrained to science or politics. I'm just hoping others can find journalistic gems, as rare as they may be today.
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Interesting thing I read in a book called "The Information Diet" was that many things that happen and that the news also covers are much more boring and mundane than the news portrayal of the event.
A conclusion I came to, after reading that book and some related stuff... news media / journalists... it's one big spin machine. They get attention by keeping you emotionally engaged, usually geared to the respective liberal/conservative agenda, and then get your eyes on ads.
I know it sounds cynical, but that's my take. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which is impossible (takes too much time). And kinda lame, because its the professionals job to provide results.
Obviously needs some kind of machine learning algorithm that just takes in all the news and spits out the average.
"Independent media" does not work.
Modern journalists dont make enough money, need to cater to external constraints like pageviews, need to put out way too many stories and are generally inept. Just looking at journalism on physics, you get major idiocies like "the LHC will create a black hole and not only will it create a black hole, the black hole will eat the world and everyone dies". Physics is generally not a hot button topic that people outrage about. Yet they screw even that up. Something really simple where you just have to listen to your interviewee and not apply hyperbole.
Its ok for random folks to not understand what a black hole is. Its generally not ok for a tech reporter to not know his subject matter at all.
The New Yorker writes some interesting stuff. But thats more like reading novels than reading "news".
People claim that pre internet, media was less biased. But I doubt that thats true. It was just way easier for them to be biased because nobody could even potentially fact-check them.
All these times I pray that these accounts are opposite. The rare times when they match, it's a signal that someone very powerful wants something done. E.g. Iraq war. NYT and WaPo and everybody had proofs that they had WMDs
Once a week they have someone successful in the respective field talk about whatever they're passionate about in a philosophical manner. Usually, they happen to be prominent researchers. It's not journalism, but I guess it fulfills a similar need.
Honestly, it's a lot more fun and makes me feel better.