One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?
I was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.
I swear to God there are articles on news sites (glorified blogs, but you know) that are along the lines of "people on twitter are saying this" and then if you actually look there is literally one (or perhaps two if you're lucky) person saying it and their post isn't even that popular. It's not that I'm surprised it's just that I know 98-99% of people are just going to take that at face value, and either allow it to confirm their pre-existing notions, or perhaps they will see it and shake their heads disapprovingly. I think this over time leads to people having distorted views of sentiment on issues, sometimes leading to really weird situations where literally most people disagree but nobody wants to be the one to say it.
How can we measure if things are worse now? Potentially asking/training an LLM on news stories from different eras might be a fairer comparison than human intelligence at this point.
I hear people say they just want the facts. Providing context is also perceived as adding spin. On the other hand, I suspect this is more due to cost cutting and the fact that context would likely paint the people who own these media outlets in a bad light. Keeping their readers underinformed is win-win for them.
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases.
Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y.
Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.
Exactly. As the saying goes, if one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not, it's not the job of the journalist to report both. It's the job of the journalist to look out the fucking window to see if it's really raining or not.
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
> I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort.
The 2020 tune sang, worldwide, comes to mind: "Anyone believing SaRS-COV2 may have originated in a lab is a conspiracy cracknut, like those who believe we didn't land on the moon".
This was everywhere and very few, including here on HN, did dare to question the official version.
Now the official report mandated by US Congress says the virus has non-zootropic properties and the "expert" who explained it couldn't possibly be a lab-leak is prevented from ever getting funding from the US. And it's not just US congress: the CIA changed its stance too and publicly said it's leaning towards a lab-leak after all. The examples are countless.
And yet the bile spilled and the attacks on those disputing the mainstream media version were incessant.
I posted links, back then, to an article by an actual investigative journalist who explained how Peter Daszak was doing gain-of-function research on bat-modified viruses only to be met with derision.
It's sickening, really.
People would do well to assume that, by default, mainstream media "journalists" aren't journalists but pawns relaying state propaganda.
If it had been a lab leak, how would that change the behaviors that everyday people would have had to take? The social distancing, masking, handwashing, quarantining would have all been identical.
Maybe it wouldn't change general hygienic practices, but it might have a impact on voting preferences to find out who was funding the research that led to the creation of the virus and the leak.
That whole timespan… the absolute nonsense the “trusted media” and their “experts” were pushing with nary a single trace of critical thinking absolutely boggles the mind. How about PCR test results, “opening dates”, death counts, the almost intentional mixing of terms like IFR vs CFR, etc. the list goes on and on and on.
I mean, people did try to discuss it. YouTube and Facebook actually deleted content discussing it, in possibly the most blatant act of political censorship in recent memory in this country, and barely anyone knows that.
Not that the US government has any credibility left after current admin, but the statements in here are factual, they really did take down youtube videos that were speculating about lab leak. I saw it happen.
It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people.
We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.
15 years after making the decision, while working for a major news outlet, to no longer read “the news,” I can pretty confidently say: if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway.
Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
I have seen people who don't follow news confidently say fairly absurd things. They tend to assume things are kind of like they were those 15 years ago and don't want to believe a party of or a country or a situation could have change in the meantime.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
I wonder, do those people you talk about also happen to avoid the other forms of journalism, such as investigative reporting, analysis, essays, documentaries, books, and long-form features in general?
Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.
When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).
And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.
(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).
The other thing is that I find a fair number of "news" stories these days are basically one or two small details about the latest update on some ongoing situation, followed by a long summary of what happened before. So most of the news is already old.
I was subscribed to this. It's beautifully designed, well written, good paper stock, the works. If the idea appeals to you, it's worth trying.
Ultimately, it didn't work for me, but that's my fault. Despite my best intentions, it turned out I wasn't interested in reading about world affairs beyond the news cycle.
Did they show the same news as everyone, but later? That seems like it doesn't fully leverage the format. The format seems like it would be good for things that are subtle and got overlooked at the time. But I guess maybe the normal news cycle can surface those same things when they reach a breaking point.
It's been several years (and the issues are in my office so I could take a look later) but I recall it was a mix. They'd sometimes group big stories together thematically (like when all the billionaires were starting to get into space) but also do longer-term reflections on single, complex stories like the Salisbury Novichok incident.
I don't recall it really surfacing things that didn't make the news cycle, but one thing I failed to mention is they had (have?) really good infographics/visualizations! They have a lot of the more recent ones here https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/infographics
The target audience of this doesn't appear to be people who don't like reading the news. But rather people who like reading journalism that has perspective and nuance (which tend to improve when you take your time to let a story fully develop before writing about it).
the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.
i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"
I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.
The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.
that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.
our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.
People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".
“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”
There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.
A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.
The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.
In this spirit, I prefer to not read any online news, or daily newspaper, but the weekly Economist in print. It has higher quality writing than all the rest, has a built in capacitor buffer against high frequency low signal bullshit (noise) by virtue of being weekly, and contains all the information about the world that mattered in that time period. Zero engagement bait because it's an expensive subscription.
I have been a long time subscriber to the economist for the same reason. The print edition is great and keeps me feeling informed. If only it wouldn’t include the digital edition too… Invariably, the more stressed I get in my everyday life by work and small children and lack of sleep, the more I get dragged towards the online edition of the economist, and BAM I’m back in the constant instant news cycle again, even though the site doesn’t update that often.
My latest life hack which I can recommend to anyone, at least in Germany: as part of my local library membership I get access to the PressReader app, which gives me access to the print edition of the economist! At 10 EUR a year it’s so affordable it nearly feels like it’s unethically so for what I get. I guess I’ll close with: May we forever be blessed with libraries, and may they never be „optimised away“ as an unnecessary social good.
I haven't read or engaged in mainstream media in over 15 years now. I just pulled up the Economist website for fun to see what's on it. I see stories that have absolutely nothing to do with me or the country (e.g. an article gushing about how China managed to stop massively polluting one of their rivers. In what universe is that remotely relevant to me? Why is this the front page story?), I see the typical biased articles and bias in choosing what to report on, everything all biased politically the same way (of course, if you hold the same biases then you don't see the bias, it all just just looks normal/neutral/true to you), I see stories increasing the fear and hate in the world (China has a scary secretive shadowy maritime militia! Oil markets are scary right now! Be afraid!), there's absolutely nothing of interest to me. Guess I'll go another 15.
I found the Economist to be a liberal rag. I mean that respectfully, and it has been a number of years since I've bothered to pick one up so maybe it has changed. I know people who I respect that read every issue cover to cover.
A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.
I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.
I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's "Fetch News" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that at my leisure.
I ran a similar personal project where weekly I scraped a country's news stories across curated sources using Brave News API and used an LLM to dedupe and cluster stories. This got expensive fast, so I'm wondering what your approach is to keep costs down across what I imagine is a lot of volume, i.e., one months' worth of stories across several sources.
Nope! Every source I care about either has an RSS feed, or I've been able to make a custom recipe [1] to handle things like auth for paid sites and whatnot.
It's heartening to see that Delayed Gratification has successfully continued their work for so long.
I used to work at Tortoise (who now own/operate The Observer) and our motto was 'Slow News'. We operated on a pretty transparent membership model, but I got the impression that it was difficult to make pure membership work financially, leading to a reliance on other revenue streams like podcasting and business partnerships over time.
If you feel interested in following them but it feels too high traffic or chaotic you can follow specific categories with rss by just going to subcategories on the website and adding /feed to the end of the url. Even slower journalism!
You can do that trick with a lot of sites. One of your old faves started pumping out listicles but still puts out good stuff here and there? Might be worth seeing if those higher quality articles have their own categories with feeds.
I learned about Delayed Gratification when someone linked "The last of the Flying Wallendas" (https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...) in a chatroom. In the spirit of the magazine, I set a reminder to read it in a year. I decided to do it again when the reminder triggered. A total of three years later, it was a good article.
I cancelled the subscription because I just couldn't connect its stories ever. such was their choices. Not just the subjects and how the stories were from physically so far that I felt it was an exercise in compulsion on my part. I wasn't a fan of the writing style either. Besides, at some point it started to feel like news and journalism were not centre stage, being "delayed" and different were.
Sounds very appealing. Anyone here have experience with it? If I want to try it, should I go print or digital? How is the writing compared to say The Economist or other more mainstream options?
How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Has it improved?
I've lapsed my subscription because it has, in my opinion, gotten a bit too clickbait-y and many of the articles are sort of thin rehashes of already covered material. It is still better than most, but also fairly pricy.
> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news
I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push the Overton window.
I understand and appreciate your point, but takes like brexit are nuanced. They might be overall bad, but they will always have some benefits and in my opinion journalism (especially economic journalism) should explain those benefits even if the point is to show that they are more than cancelled out by the negatives. Without this kind of reporting this is exactly how the Overton window gets moved.
I think that when it comes to topics we can vote on, saying X is bad because media says it's totally bad is not really an informed opinion.
Having subscribeed for years, I find it very good on that front. I haven't detected any political bias, and I suspect they would say that fairness and honesty is what the "journalism" half of "slow journalism" means.
Similar to the longer cycle times, I'm curious if there is the equivalent for HN. I like this site, https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, but it's once-per-day. I'd at least like once-per-week.
Agreed, and chances are that due to the nature of the event bring reported, we as readers are unable to influence it in sny way. Therefore a couple of weeks delay will make mo difference.
The apparent need by the Media to keep issuing constant updates and then suddenly having to retract the story is very frustrating. Each "update" is usually slighly incremental and is invariably a short new paragraph tacked into the previous version. The final version of the story being covered is often a mea culpa retraction because earlier versions were rushed and inaccurate. I'm trying very hard to escape this destructive cycle but it's not easy.
This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.
I have often thought about with my friends who are "terminally online" that they would benefit from NOT being a town crier from times gone by.
Many of my friends hate Twitter, hate Elon and hate social media, but because they have to be first to all the latest news, they remain locked in to Twitter day in and day out. They cannot quit. They are socially bound to them because being the person to start a topic on whats happened in Ukraine, who was traded to the Dolphins, etc is part of their socialization.
It's been baffling to me, as I simply don't see the value in being the "first" to discuss some news, especially if its misinformation.
Anyway, all that to say that I think is a great idea and would really benefit society to return back to less "real time" news, which really tends to drown out the big topics in favor of buzz words and Twitter quips.
I think proximity is a good measure, what different types of news do you need to know and will impact your decision making on different time scales? There's probably a very small amount of things I really need to know (practically) instantly, regional/national/continental/global news might be interesting to be summarized daily/weekly/monthly, but even then it will be different subsets where it affects me or is little more than trivia and will be forgotten quickly as I have little connection to it.
> This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.
I agree. Aside from emergencies or other truly circumstance-changing news, I am not sure there's really any value in being immediately informed vs. days or perhaps even weeks later. I just hadn't thought in these terms before.
I can't help but imagine how much healthier our society would be...
We don't have a local newspaper anymore but there are a couple of bloggers who follow city council meetings and other local happenings. I read those fairly frequently. National/world news I have stopped following at all, as 99.5% of it doesn't affect me and I have no influence over any of it.
Most people clearly don't benefit from watching the news, tech news is a bit different but regular news are quite useless in general and plain toxic, I frankly advise everyone to take a break from reading the news altogether, maybe do it once a week, stay informed by other means, you won't miss anything, you'll improve your energy and mental health.
Delayed gratification in my case was going through three captchas before I could even read the advert for a magazine. I know it's common but that disrespect for the customer irks me. How do people here find the content, is it worth trying again?
Thank you. I'll give them a try, if recommended I can forgive captchas because most companies don't really think about the negative user experience and it's unfair to punish one
Interesting. I wonder where the "sweet spot" on the delay is. I've given up online news and twitter and all that entirely, and just read my print Economist, which comes weekly. That already has the news somewhat delayed and presumably with less of a rush to report has a little more fact checking.
This advertises up to a 3 month delay. I do like that with that much lead time you can see not just news but sometimes a bit of the fallout and consequences.
Not a fan of the name, though. It reads like those Claude comments that I absolutely despise, where it feels the need to comment in a reactionary way to the feedback it's getting and changes it's making, rather than a forward-looking way that's cohesive with the new state of the codebase.
Maybe I missed it, but is there a back issue available I could page through, or even just a full story somewhere, that I could read so I can evaluate what I think of it?
For a really long time, I've wanted a way to know just about products that have already actually released, rather than exciting innovations that'll be in the lab for years.
I wonder how much news related issues have to do with the way news is presented rather than the frequency at which you read the news. Daily news reading doesn't strike me as concerning given that getting a newspaper delivered in the mail in the morning was entirely normal practice and people didn't seem to experience the distress they do now. Between the 20s and up until the 70s almost every American household subscribed to a daily newspaper.
I figure the fact that news has turned into hedonic consumption is the much bigger deal. Neil Postman wrote a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death outlining how mass media turned all programming into entertainment programming. Everything is stimulating, emotionally charged etc. That to me seems to be the exhausting part.
So as for the title of this publication people really seem to be into the "delayed" part but I think the "gratification" part might be the problem
highlighting this as 'slow journalism' is a bit odd - it's a magazine, there are lots of them, quarterly etc. The slowness is a given, the delay is the feature.
One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?
How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)
2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online
Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.
I was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.
I swear to God there are articles on news sites (glorified blogs, but you know) that are along the lines of "people on twitter are saying this" and then if you actually look there is literally one (or perhaps two if you're lucky) person saying it and their post isn't even that popular. It's not that I'm surprised it's just that I know 98-99% of people are just going to take that at face value, and either allow it to confirm their pre-existing notions, or perhaps they will see it and shake their heads disapprovingly. I think this over time leads to people having distorted views of sentiment on issues, sometimes leading to really weird situations where literally most people disagree but nobody wants to be the one to say it.
This is not exactly a new criticism. See e.g. Fisk's complaint from decades ago r.e. "US Officials Say"
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
How can we measure if things are worse now? Potentially asking/training an LLM on news stories from different eras might be a fairer comparison than human intelligence at this point.
I hear people say they just want the facts. Providing context is also perceived as adding spin. On the other hand, I suspect this is more due to cost cutting and the fact that context would likely paint the people who own these media outlets in a bad light. Keeping their readers underinformed is win-win for them.
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.
> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?
Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them.
If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.
Exactly. As the saying goes, if one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not, it's not the job of the journalist to report both. It's the job of the journalist to look out the fucking window to see if it's really raining or not.
> a need for immediate reporting
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?
Yes.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...
>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
> I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort.
The 2020 tune sang, worldwide, comes to mind: "Anyone believing SaRS-COV2 may have originated in a lab is a conspiracy cracknut, like those who believe we didn't land on the moon".
This was everywhere and very few, including here on HN, did dare to question the official version.
Now the official report mandated by US Congress says the virus has non-zootropic properties and the "expert" who explained it couldn't possibly be a lab-leak is prevented from ever getting funding from the US. And it's not just US congress: the CIA changed its stance too and publicly said it's leaning towards a lab-leak after all. The examples are countless.
And yet the bile spilled and the attacks on those disputing the mainstream media version were incessant.
I posted links, back then, to an article by an actual investigative journalist who explained how Peter Daszak was doing gain-of-function research on bat-modified viruses only to be met with derision.
It's sickening, really.
People would do well to assume that, by default, mainstream media "journalists" aren't journalists but pawns relaying state propaganda.
If it had been a lab leak, how would that change the behaviors that everyday people would have had to take? The social distancing, masking, handwashing, quarantining would have all been identical.
Maybe it wouldn't change general hygienic practices, but it might have a impact on voting preferences to find out who was funding the research that led to the creation of the virus and the leak.
That whole timespan… the absolute nonsense the “trusted media” and their “experts” were pushing with nary a single trace of critical thinking absolutely boggles the mind. How about PCR test results, “opening dates”, death counts, the almost intentional mixing of terms like IFR vs CFR, etc. the list goes on and on and on.
The media is absolutely just state propaganda.
I mean, people did try to discuss it. YouTube and Facebook actually deleted content discussing it, in possibly the most blatant act of political censorship in recent memory in this country, and barely anyone knows that.
Not that the US government has any credibility left after current admin, but the statements in here are factual, they really did take down youtube videos that were speculating about lab leak. I saw it happen.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people.
We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.
15 years after making the decision, while working for a major news outlet, to no longer read “the news,” I can pretty confidently say: if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway.
Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
I have seen people who don't follow news confidently say fairly absurd things. They tend to assume things are kind of like they were those 15 years ago and don't want to believe a party of or a country or a situation could have change in the meantime.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
I wonder, do those people you talk about also happen to avoid the other forms of journalism, such as investigative reporting, analysis, essays, documentaries, books, and long-form features in general?
Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.
I used to be somewhat of a news junkie.
When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).
And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.
(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).
Nassim Taleb has a note about this idea in one of his books. Essentially just pointing out how unimportant most news headlines are a few years out.
If you are interested, Daniel Boorstin wrote about similar ideas much earlier in The Image.
The other thing is that I find a fair number of "news" stories these days are basically one or two small details about the latest update on some ongoing situation, followed by a long summary of what happened before. So most of the news is already old.
I was subscribed to this. It's beautifully designed, well written, good paper stock, the works. If the idea appeals to you, it's worth trying.
Ultimately, it didn't work for me, but that's my fault. Despite my best intentions, it turned out I wasn't interested in reading about world affairs beyond the news cycle.
Did they show the same news as everyone, but later? That seems like it doesn't fully leverage the format. The format seems like it would be good for things that are subtle and got overlooked at the time. But I guess maybe the normal news cycle can surface those same things when they reach a breaking point.
It's been several years (and the issues are in my office so I could take a look later) but I recall it was a mix. They'd sometimes group big stories together thematically (like when all the billionaires were starting to get into space) but also do longer-term reflections on single, complex stories like the Salisbury Novichok incident.
I don't recall it really surfacing things that didn't make the news cycle, but one thing I failed to mention is they had (have?) really good infographics/visualizations! They have a lot of the more recent ones here https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/infographics
The target audience of this doesn't appear to be people who don't like reading the news. But rather people who like reading journalism that has perspective and nuance (which tend to improve when you take your time to let a story fully develop before writing about it).
the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.
i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"
I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.
They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.
[0]: https://www.readtangle.com/
Agreed, they've been a boon for me.
The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.
that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.
What would you need to start such a project?
https://www.verity.news/ might be interesting for you; they try to show you both sides of the spin.
Agreed. The 24 hour news and social media with our brightest phds learning to drain all attention from you have broken and radicalized our society.
our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.
People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".
“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”
There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.
A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.
The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.
"hooked" is right.
I'm trying to tell people, you have to take initiative, you have to have agency and be responsible for your own attention.
If you are being "fed" from a "feed" you are being fattened for slaughter
In this spirit, I prefer to not read any online news, or daily newspaper, but the weekly Economist in print. It has higher quality writing than all the rest, has a built in capacitor buffer against high frequency low signal bullshit (noise) by virtue of being weekly, and contains all the information about the world that mattered in that time period. Zero engagement bait because it's an expensive subscription.
I have been a long time subscriber to the economist for the same reason. The print edition is great and keeps me feeling informed. If only it wouldn’t include the digital edition too… Invariably, the more stressed I get in my everyday life by work and small children and lack of sleep, the more I get dragged towards the online edition of the economist, and BAM I’m back in the constant instant news cycle again, even though the site doesn’t update that often.
My latest life hack which I can recommend to anyone, at least in Germany: as part of my local library membership I get access to the PressReader app, which gives me access to the print edition of the economist! At 10 EUR a year it’s so affordable it nearly feels like it’s unethically so for what I get. I guess I’ll close with: May we forever be blessed with libraries, and may they never be „optimised away“ as an unnecessary social good.
I haven't read or engaged in mainstream media in over 15 years now. I just pulled up the Economist website for fun to see what's on it. I see stories that have absolutely nothing to do with me or the country (e.g. an article gushing about how China managed to stop massively polluting one of their rivers. In what universe is that remotely relevant to me? Why is this the front page story?), I see the typical biased articles and bias in choosing what to report on, everything all biased politically the same way (of course, if you hold the same biases then you don't see the bias, it all just just looks normal/neutral/true to you), I see stories increasing the fear and hate in the world (China has a scary secretive shadowy maritime militia! Oil markets are scary right now! Be afraid!), there's absolutely nothing of interest to me. Guess I'll go another 15.
I found the Economist to be a liberal rag. I mean that respectfully, and it has been a number of years since I've bothered to pick one up so maybe it has changed. I know people who I respect that read every issue cover to cover.
A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.
I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.
I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's "Fetch News" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that at my leisure.
I ran a similar personal project where weekly I scraped a country's news stories across curated sources using Brave News API and used an LLM to dedupe and cluster stories. This got expensive fast, so I'm wondering what your approach is to keep costs down across what I imagine is a lot of volume, i.e., one months' worth of stories across several sources.
This sounds really interesting and something I'd love to try. Do you have more details on how someone else can utilise this?
Not yet, but I'll see if I can publish the basics for it this week.
The what now. But not all sources have epubs, right? Is there any one that you're missing now?
Calibre has a feature that will fetch a rss feed or (IIRC) scrape a site and make an epub from it.
Nope! Every source I care about either has an RSS feed, or I've been able to make a custom recipe [1] to handle things like auth for paid sites and whatnot.
[1] https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/glossary.html#term-recipe
epub is ZIP with HTML+CSS+images+some metadata.
It's heartening to see that Delayed Gratification has successfully continued their work for so long.
I used to work at Tortoise (who now own/operate The Observer) and our motto was 'Slow News'. We operated on a pretty transparent membership model, but I got the impression that it was difficult to make pure membership work financially, leading to a reliance on other revenue streams like podcasting and business partnerships over time.
Was a long term subscriber, now just a podcast listener: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/delayed-gratification-...
They had their 15th birthday late last year: https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...
If you feel interested in following them but it feels too high traffic or chaotic you can follow specific categories with rss by just going to subcategories on the website and adding /feed to the end of the url. Even slower journalism!
For example I follow the long reads one: https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/long-reads/feed
You can do that trick with a lot of sites. One of your old faves started pumping out listicles but still puts out good stuff here and there? Might be worth seeing if those higher quality articles have their own categories with feeds.
Previously:
Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32222831 - July 2022 (16 comments)
Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573 - Jan 2020 (23 comments)
I learned about Delayed Gratification when someone linked "The last of the Flying Wallendas" (https://www.slow-journalism.com/delayed-gratification-magazi...) in a chatroom. In the spirit of the magazine, I set a reminder to read it in a year. I decided to do it again when the reminder triggered. A total of three years later, it was a good article.
Legible News has a weekly edition for subscribers:
https://legiblenews.com/week
I cancelled the subscription because I just couldn't connect its stories ever. such was their choices. Not just the subjects and how the stories were from physically so far that I felt it was an exercise in compulsion on my part. I wasn't a fan of the writing style either. Besides, at some point it started to feel like news and journalism were not centre stage, being "delayed" and different were.
Sounds very appealing. Anyone here have experience with it? If I want to try it, should I go print or digital? How is the writing compared to say The Economist or other more mainstream options?
How is the economist these days? Around a decade ago I read it cover to cover every week for 18 months, but during the brexkt referendum they seemed to go into a tantrum and half of the magazine was always about how brexit was 100% a bad thing. Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news because at some point it's like propaganda. I understand they were started in support of trade deals but even so. Has it improved?
I've lapsed my subscription because it has, in my opinion, gotten a bit too clickbait-y and many of the articles are sort of thin rehashes of already covered material. It is still better than most, but also fairly pricy.
It seems fine now
> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news
I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push the Overton window.
I understand and appreciate your point, but takes like brexit are nuanced. They might be overall bad, but they will always have some benefits and in my opinion journalism (especially economic journalism) should explain those benefits even if the point is to show that they are more than cancelled out by the negatives. Without this kind of reporting this is exactly how the Overton window gets moved.
I think that when it comes to topics we can vote on, saying X is bad because media says it's totally bad is not really an informed opinion.
You mean "The E-Communist"?
Also interested in what their biases may be. Being "slow" isn't really enough, they also need to be fair and honest.
Having subscribeed for years, I find it very good on that front. I haven't detected any political bias, and I suspect they would say that fairness and honesty is what the "journalism" half of "slow journalism" means.
Similar to the longer cycle times, I'm curious if there is the equivalent for HN. I like this site, https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, but it's once-per-day. I'd at least like once-per-week.
You’re in luck!
https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/
I'd love a breaking news service that gives me the latest headlines -- but only if they are still true 2 weeks later.
Agreed, and chances are that due to the nature of the event bring reported, we as readers are unable to influence it in sny way. Therefore a couple of weeks delay will make mo difference.
The apparent need by the Media to keep issuing constant updates and then suddenly having to retract the story is very frustrating. Each "update" is usually slighly incremental and is invariably a short new paragraph tacked into the previous version. The final version of the story being covered is often a mea culpa retraction because earlier versions were rushed and inaccurate. I'm trying very hard to escape this destructive cycle but it's not easy.
This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.
I have often thought about with my friends who are "terminally online" that they would benefit from NOT being a town crier from times gone by.
Many of my friends hate Twitter, hate Elon and hate social media, but because they have to be first to all the latest news, they remain locked in to Twitter day in and day out. They cannot quit. They are socially bound to them because being the person to start a topic on whats happened in Ukraine, who was traded to the Dolphins, etc is part of their socialization.
It's been baffling to me, as I simply don't see the value in being the "first" to discuss some news, especially if its misinformation.
Anyway, all that to say that I think is a great idea and would really benefit society to return back to less "real time" news, which really tends to drown out the big topics in favor of buzz words and Twitter quips.
I think proximity is a good measure, what different types of news do you need to know and will impact your decision making on different time scales? There's probably a very small amount of things I really need to know (practically) instantly, regional/national/continental/global news might be interesting to be summarized daily/weekly/monthly, but even then it will be different subsets where it affects me or is little more than trivia and will be forgotten quickly as I have little connection to it.
> This is really what a lot of people need, a return to learning about something 2-3 weeks after it happens and more details are known.
I agree. Aside from emergencies or other truly circumstance-changing news, I am not sure there's really any value in being immediately informed vs. days or perhaps even weeks later. I just hadn't thought in these terms before.
I can't help but imagine how much healthier our society would be...
We don't have a local newspaper anymore but there are a couple of bloggers who follow city council meetings and other local happenings. I read those fairly frequently. National/world news I have stopped following at all, as 99.5% of it doesn't affect me and I have no influence over any of it.
Most people clearly don't benefit from watching the news, tech news is a bit different but regular news are quite useless in general and plain toxic, I frankly advise everyone to take a break from reading the news altogether, maybe do it once a week, stay informed by other means, you won't miss anything, you'll improve your energy and mental health.
one of the first commenters commenting about not being first - irony
https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/all_or_nothing_fallacy...
Delayed gratification in my case was going through three captchas before I could even read the advert for a magazine. I know it's common but that disrespect for the customer irks me. How do people here find the content, is it worth trying again?
if you like print journalism they're a good option with great print quality
Thank you. I'll give them a try, if recommended I can forgive captchas because most companies don't really think about the negative user experience and it's unfair to punish one
My problem is the opposite. When there are breaking news directly affecting me I have no way of getting them.
In between a myriad of notifications, fake social media posts, total collapse of local radio and tv, I have no idea of how to stay informed.
Does this publication assume prior basic knowledge of the past months’ events?
I generally wait for a story to get a full feature in The New Yorker or The Atlantic before I give it my attention. Similar concept
I enjoyed this magazine and subscribed to it for a while, but I wish there was a US-centered version of it for those of us on this side of the pond.
Interesting. I wonder where the "sweet spot" on the delay is. I've given up online news and twitter and all that entirely, and just read my print Economist, which comes weekly. That already has the news somewhat delayed and presumably with less of a rush to report has a little more fact checking.
This advertises up to a 3 month delay. I do like that with that much lead time you can see not just news but sometimes a bit of the fallout and consequences.
Not a fan of the name, though. It reads like those Claude comments that I absolutely despise, where it feels the need to comment in a reactionary way to the feedback it's getting and changes it's making, rather than a forward-looking way that's cohesive with the new state of the codebase.
Maybe I missed it, but is there a back issue available I could page through, or even just a full story somewhere, that I could read so I can evaluate what I think of it?
Luckily the magazine came long before Claude, but I suppose your comparison describes their mission pretty well. It's a haven of non-AI writing.
For a really long time, I've wanted a way to know just about products that have already actually released, rather than exciting innovations that'll be in the lab for years.
I haven't really had that problem with news.
This is a great idea (although it probably exists in other places) I'm reminded of Taleb's (2)
https://stevenbagley.net/blog/taleb-signal-to-noise.html
I wonder how much news related issues have to do with the way news is presented rather than the frequency at which you read the news. Daily news reading doesn't strike me as concerning given that getting a newspaper delivered in the mail in the morning was entirely normal practice and people didn't seem to experience the distress they do now. Between the 20s and up until the 70s almost every American household subscribed to a daily newspaper.
I figure the fact that news has turned into hedonic consumption is the much bigger deal. Neil Postman wrote a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death outlining how mass media turned all programming into entertainment programming. Everything is stimulating, emotionally charged etc. That to me seems to be the exhausting part.
So as for the title of this publication people really seem to be into the "delayed" part but I think the "gratification" part might be the problem
highlighting this as 'slow journalism' is a bit odd - it's a magazine, there are lots of them, quarterly etc. The slowness is a given, the delay is the feature.
This magazine only covers stories that are at least three months old.