Going further, even the business model of chumboxes wouldn't exist - back in the days of print, ads were mostly used to sell a product; where as the point of chumboxes is to drive more eyeballs to other sites where they can look at other ads; the content itself is worthless.
Nowadays, ads are delivered programmatically from a third-party, which means the newspaper has no way to even know what garbage is going to be displayed to their readers. This is the real problem.
Pre-internet days, Thursday was always a day you had to buy early if you were in the market for a new job - after 3pm it would be hard to find anywhere with a copy left to buy.
When I was in grad school a few years ago the college had a program to encourage newspaper readership that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. I can't imagine ever subscribing to a newspaper now.
There was so much in a newspaper that I have zero interest in or even if I did I would look somewhere else than dead trees (sports, stocks, fashion, travel, horoscopes, advice columns).
I grew up in a rural area and even in the local paper most of what was original, non-syndicated content was simply stating facts: the high school basketball team won/lost, there was a wreck, obituaries, births, weddings.
No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.
News is great as a social object - you and me both read some reporting about an event at the same time, so when we meet at a bar, we have something to talk about. It's really bad if you're trying to learn accurate information about the world.
Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication.
But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.
As someone with repeated direct experience with the elite corps that staffs their bureaus in Japan, I cannot provide evidence in favor of your hypothesis that they keep a special breed of Pulitzerschreck around for that purpose. They still call me for Japanese domestic political analysis on the basis of a) in Japan b) speaks English c) was in the NYT in 2011.
In any field there's going to be variability in quality and it's not fair or wise to tar the whole field with the same brush but I think journalism sometimes attracts people who have a different relationship with facts and ideas than I do.
I read a piece by a moderately famous journalist a while ago (and I've been trying to figure out who even since with no luck) who when talking about his practice said that sometimes there _are_ no experts in a particular subject and the journalist has to do a 'deep dive' and become the expert. Now he didn't say exactly what constitutes a 'deep dive' but it struck me as profoundly arrogant and symptomatic of this problem.
But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe stay away from the opinion section.
What's annoying is how hard these dumb barbs are to rebut, even when they're plainly fatuous. Like, I had to go navigate through the Pulitzer categories and relay back to the thread how to do it, and all the original commenter had to do was write "the NYT and USA Today are the same thing and both are just superficial made-up trash".
† though I'm sort of waiting to spring a little quiz on the next person who takes a shot at Gladwell for "Igon Values".
I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.
I don't see how that's a silly thing to argue. Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different. You don't just call "Gell-Mann Amnesia" upon spotting a simple jargon mistake and call all news bullshit. But people have different expertise. You, me and others here know our CS; many of us also know our maths & physics, and derived specializations ranging from batteries to rocketry. We can routinely spot nonsense in news stories within those domains. Then, we all have friends who are knowledgeable in other areas. Myself, I have a historian in my circle, whose pastime is debunking nonsense written within his field of expertise. If you ask around, between yourself and your friends, you can spot the same reporting problems emerging across many domains. A pattern emerges.
That's not to say that good journalism doesn't exist. I maintain that good stories, and good journalists, are few and far between. You may read a solid, trustworthy[0] report on an important topic every year. Or every month, if you're good at curating your news experience. But these good stories are not what majority of people read most of the time; using them as defense of modern journalism is just plain motte-and-bailey. Regular people read regular news, with clickbait headlines, bad reporting, lowest-effort articles and no attempt at being accurate.
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[0] - But then, if it's not in your field, is it trustworthy or just good sounding? How can you tell?
Hah, you can't try to sneak out of this using the tangential Gell-Mann lifeline. You said something along the lines of 'Hard to call it idle cynicism and incuriosity because [overt expression of idle cynicism and incuriosity]'. That's plainly silly.
As to this 'effect' itself, I've always found it strange it's given the weight and consideration that it sometimes is. I'm no Crichtonoscopist and I've never seen the full text of his remarks but given it was a bit in a speech delivered at the "International Leadership Forum" and arrives at the conclusion media is useless, I'm guessing it wasn't meant entirely seriously. It's a little amusing anecdote and morsel for thought in a talk - not some expression of deep insight and hard-hitting media criticism. If someone had come up with it on HN, there'd be legions of black-belt logicians leaping in to check off the fallacies (appeal to authority? confirmation bias? the dreaded 'anecdata'? plain old vanity? it's got it all).
One thing I suspect has been a blow to the news is that they used to be able to pretend people would look at all those ads. How many people were genuinely looking at all that? Now it's extremely easy to learn that its just not happening.
If you can expect reporting to be wrong on one topic, why do you trust them to be right on other topics?
It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime.
(There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).
What if someone did that for you, as a full-time professional job, and did it both online and offline? What if they actually spoke directly to the participants, from senators to the bus driver in the crash to the head of safety at the regulatory agency; and what if they interviewed leading experts and engineers; and read the court filings, etc. What if they made it their life's work to become expert in that kind of research?
That might be worth a few bucks a day. And it would be far more valuable than idle commentary from bloggers and commenters.
Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds.
> bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts
And orders of magnitude more who claim to be.
I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of misrepresentation, and quite frequently are the source of it.
Or: I'm not saying that if you pop on to a random subreddit you'll immediately find gold-standard, unbiased people. But I am saying that for any given domain, if you find a niche community and browse it for a bit, you'll get, on average, much better information than you'll get from reading news articles on the same topics.
Another extra feature of niche communities like various specialized subreddits, or HN, is that the experts, the pretend-experts and the wannabe-experts will engage in a discussion. This does not only help filter out obvious bullshit, but also provides extra information and can tell you when a problem is so complex it can't be accurately summarized in a headline or a short article.
However, I still think it greatly underestimates the prevalence of misinformation in specialized communities (e.g., I have never found a valuable subreddit), and greatly overestimates human ability to know when they are being mislead. And the latter is far more difficult when trying to understand, as a non-expert outsider, experts in conversation about their domain. I fear what someone outside IT would walk away from HN thinking about some things. Even I have a hard time identifying the BS sometimes.
Subreddits are the answer to the philosophical question: 'Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what they're talking about?'
[1] Not sure about that — those "better sources online" tend to be the very journalists whom we're discussing, working for local media outlets.
[2] Assumes facts not in evidence — vetting of someone else's expertise is a non-trivial challenge, one that most of us neither want to do nor have the time to spend doing it.
[2] - well, a lot of people don't want to spend time vetting their sources, but this should prompt them to assign very low confidence to the things they read; of course, they frequently don't, which is why they need to be reminded that when they repeat what they read, they're most likely repeating bullshit.
My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember what I'd read, and years later it didn't matter. I've never gained any lasting knowledge from the news.
Very little has changed. News has been, and is, nearly worthless.