Taking a step back, do we really _need_ to check news every day? I read The Economist which is weekly, and I haven't felt like I'm uninformed much.

I didn't need to before Covid, but our government decided that it was okay to change rules (drastically), on a day-to-day basis, then when they got called out for changing them with less than 24 hour warning, decided that 48 hours was fine. If you didn't follow the news, you could get caught up and have to pay a not insubstantial fine, or more realistically you were planning to do something that was deemed safe enough some days earlier.

An older example: if you didn't pay attention to the news on 9/11 you risked being stuck in the airport for a very long time.

So yeah, there are situations where you do need to follow the news. Not often, but two global events have happened in my lifetime (3 if you count the fall of the Berlin wall) where you really did need to pay attention to the news.

Maybe some sort of exponential back-of is warrented? Say you check the news and if nothing relevant happend you check in again the next day, then you skip a day, then two, etc. When an event happens where you need to follow the news (say a local flood), you go back to an hourly checkup.

The final thing I have noticed is that the news you need to follow are mostly very local. What happens in other countries is, relatively speaking, of no importance to you.

I stopped reading the news since a few years, mainly because of the low signal/noise ratio and because it's time-consuming.

I assure you, you still hear about the big events without issue. Just your usual day-to-day is more than enough to hear about the important news very quickly. There's no way you could have missed 9/11 or the Covid lockdowns. I mean, I don't care a bit about soccer and I still heard within hours when my country was eliminated from the Euro.

And whenever something particular sounds like it deserves your attention you can go read about it on whatever news website. But that's fairly rare.

I'm not being glib here, how do you link 9/11 and Covid regulations and Berlin wall to really needing to pay attention to the news?

Check your government website if you want to know what the regulations are today, or check your airport and airline sites before you leave for the airport if you're worried about delays. You don't need "news" for this.

I don't think you need to over complicate it. There's nothing wrong with checking the news daily if that's what you like, or following some particular stories or events important to you even more regularly. A compulsion to keep checking, spending hours a day on it, or some fear that you need to check or you'll miss out is where it could negatively affect your life.

I don't need to read the news to discover covid, it was on hacker news long before it hit the media and I don't need them or the government to read/understand an exponential graph.

I needed them to keep taps on the government and explain the ever changing rules in a better, more clear way. It is not important for the government to make the rules simple, understandable or appreciable so they didn't.

That is not overclomplicating it, btw. That is responding to reality.

If you were that concerned exactly following the rules that change on a daily basis and are so difficult to decipher, why would you trust a journalist to get it right for you? What country, by the way, I'd like to see these crazy rules for myself.

And by over complicating it, I'm talking about this exponential backoff algorithm. You can read the news if you want, don't feel bad about it. Nothing bad is going to happen and you won't miss out on much if you don't though. And I promise you you would spend more time scouring the news for 9/11 type events than you would spend stuck in airports due to said events because you didn't read the news.

This is me too. And the me of 2 years ago would have been aghast about that. But I now finding myself missing pretty major news cycles regularly because eventually you learn to trust the fact that you can "catch up" at any point in time. I've really enjoyed letting news happen and not getting caught up in the immediacy of it.

I've stopped. I check my local news, I still read HN daily, but I don't watch or read any TV or national news. 99.9% of it has zero impact on my day-to-day life.

Replying to throwawayboise:

I've done the same exact thing.

I find very little usefulness in the national and international posturing, blaming, and virtue signaling that makes up most broadcast, cable, and print news.

The problem is only the more informed and better educated people take news slowly and form opinions slowly. But the masses are on these social platforms getting influenced by hot takes, and then they go vote with their poorly informed but strongly held opinions. This ends up affecting the rest of us who prefer taking in non-extremist long form information, since our society is effectively controlled by those engaging in social media. So it feels like we too are forced to engage in these terribly designed social media platforms in order to not lose our [political voice / country / whatever]. In a way, the existence of these social platforms with huge user bases and network effects drastically reduces the value of traditional media. What’s the point of keeping myself informed if only what happens in social media changes my world?

We don't have to check news everyday, but on that day when the BIG news hit, you want to be there and soon enough.

If it's that important, either I'll get an emergency broadcast text or it won't be televised. Otherwise, a family member will call me or I'll hear about it from other people.

What would you say were the big news hits of the last year? Also why do you need to be there soon enough?

Reflecting for myself, I used to feel the same way, but quit news about 6 months ago and have never felt happier. No longer am I sinking valuable hours into something that didn't bring me happiness or help me better myself.

Outside those who perform certain uncommon jobs, paying attention to non-local news more frequent than quarterly, at most, isn't of much more value than keeping up with a soap opera, or a reality singing competition, or reading tabloids. It's a low-value entertainment pastime. Fine in the same way those other things are, but not more laudable. People trick themselves, or get tricked, into thinking keeping up day-to-day or week-to-week matters and that doing so is somehow improving, but it doesn't and it's not. The time would almost always be better spent—if being better-informed or a better citizen or whatever is the intended outcome—reading a book.

That's even more true when the news takes the form of something like Twitter.

If you enjoy it, keep it up, but don't think it somehow capital-M Matters.

I don't know; I had concrete plans to quickly leave the US if Trump had actually retained the presidency after losing the election. I think it would have been a smart move, and wouldn't have been possible without close attention to the news.

One of the nice things about Biden's presidency is how much less attention the news seems to merit, these days.

The thing about "there's been an actual, successful coup in the world's (for now) only superpower" or anything similarly unusual is that it tends to break through simple disregard for the news in a hurry. Something like that seems to happen once a decade, or maybe once every five years at most, and are of the "say granddad, where were you when..." variety. Even the studious news-avoiders might wish to watch history unfold, and even they will rarely miss it unless they actively try to, given how everywhere information is now.

Meanwhile, did you find any of the Trump-related news for those four years (hell, over five, really, counting the election) particularly actionable, in an "I really needed to know that right this minute" sort of way? I kept up with all of it (it was entertaining, for sure) but never did, personally. Even CDC guidance and such during the pandemic filtered down to state and local ordinances by the time they mattered much. Mask mandates quickly resulted in posters at store entrances, and most provided free or cheap masks, especially at first, so there was little likelihood of being caught out there. I anticipated panic-shortages before the news caught on when I saw a way-above-normal number of household paper products in shopping carts at the local bulk store-by the time it was in the news or became a meme a few days later, the shortages were already a problem. Some help that would have been—and realistically, we'd have probably been OK if we'd been affected by them, we'd have figured something out with only very little inconvenience. Regardless, even a news-avoider would have realized that they should maybe pop in slightly more often than usual to see what's up, specifically, with the whole pandemic thing, well before it had much effect in the US.

Most big stories still don't actually matter. Pulse nightclub shooting, or the one in Vegas, or the Boston Marathon bombers? Quick news mattered—locally. Living several states away, I could have found out a month later and it'd have made no difference. Assange extradited, US pulling out of Afghanistan—US invading Afghanistan, for that matter? Russia invades Ukraine? Brexit? Libyan revolution? "Immigrant caravans"? I care because I'm a bit of a politics and news junkie, but if I'd ignored those the harm to my life would have been zero. They're not local events, for me, and they're just not that important to my day-to-day life. I could have found out about Brexit a year after the vote, would have made no difference (there's a joke in there about how long that process has taken).

9/11 disrupted air travel and phone service nationwide, but was of the rare "you could hardly miss it" variety so one was unlikely to encounter those problems before becoming aware of it.

I'm actually having trouble thinking of another event in the last 30+ years, in the US, that wasn't local and that had a "light cone", if you will, of actual effects on my life that hit in less than a week, and for which foreknowledge was in any way actionable. Typically, they never "hit". If they do, then finding out when that happens is just as good.

Public radio. For example, here is Chicago's local version: https://www.wbez.org/

Anything curated and not subject to engagement algorithms. Every publication has a newsletter, or you can just check their websites directly once per day.

News.Google.com for a max of 30 minutes per day.

Add RSS feeds for news sites to inoreader.

I subscribe to RSS feeds. I use the AP's feed for example for general news.

wsws.org

Hckrnews.com