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- Hacker News
- People are always talking past each other in the comments here because when some people hear "journalism" they think "national coverage reporting like what you see on TV, NYT, or Twitter maximized for eyeballs and engagement".
They should be thinking "coverage about local elections and politicians, and investigative work".
More Block Club Chicago or Oklahoma Watch.
Less Buzzfeed or CNN.
by claudiulodro - Reinvention takes money.
A bunch of investors went on a buying spree of traditional news outlets about 25-30 years ago, hoping to make good money off of them. They also offered free access to the news online at the time.
Well, people stopped buying newspapers and fewer and fewer people watch the local news, so there was no money making happening.
They're still expecting to make the cash off the original investment. There will be no reinventing, civic consequences be damned.
by lenerdenator - I know there are 4th estate implications, but there's probably an argument made that news media should be a municipal endeavor supported through taxation. Yes there is public corruption all the time but usually it isn't a grand conspiracy sort of corruption, but on an isolated individual level, frequently exposed by staff themselves. In LA these days, the city controller is actually one of the best muckrakers right now. He is a sort of accountant/data scientist who doesn't care if the data he presents is embarrassing for the city leadership.by asdff
- It has been trying to do that for 25 years. It is hard when on one hand you have people seeking truth and not trying to fleece you, and on the other hand there is actual propaganda that is not caring about the truth and trying to fleece you with every trick out of modern psychological research available to them. Not to say all journalism is good, there have always been rags, but that is the general situation.
It is a completely unbalanced dynamic. And it takes massive financial support. These are professional salaries that need to be paid for in some way. You need a lot of staff to actually meaningfully cover various stories and regularly publish.
Now think of the potential readership. A small fraction compared to the old days when the paper of record was the only way to learn about anything at all. Orgs like NYT that have essentially a national customer base do alright. 5% of the entire united states (made up number) is a lot of damn people. 5% of a single metro region on the other hand just isn't enough to support the demands of the work. It never was enough.
Now you have newsrooms getting bought and commanded from upon high. LA times is a rag now thanks to a conservative billionaire putting his thumb on the editorial board and laying off staff. The newsroom isn't even in LA anymore, it has been reduced to an office in El Segundo. The old newsroom in downtown LA that they were kicked out of has been vacant for 8 years now, presumably the owner (onni group) is doing the commercial valuation shenanigan where they are concerned about the value of the asset to take loans out against vs the potential cash flow opportunities from rent paying tenants.
by asdff - This is about the journalism that is serious. That tells stories, reports, and goes deep into subjects.
My impression is that most media today is nowhere near this. They're just cheap dopamine source, containing only "news", not any serious discussion.
"This ____ grills ______ on his comments about __________." -- this is typical American title, but in other countries this sort of news is abundant, and differs only in wording, not the essence.
A local media news: Lebron James died in a crash. Which happened at the other side of the world in another country, nothing to do with the place itself. Because the media is owned by a holding company, and metrics are measured and aggressively optimized.
Trump became a source of cheap dopamine for every non-serious media in the world. "American president said that X. <insert your tongque in cheek/sarcastic/caustic comment>".
"Traffic jams in city X reached level 9!" (screenshot of a mobile map with traffic layer)
by culebron21 - Journalism has been talking about the future of journalism for fifty years or more. It is literally always the same answers, none of which are both feasible and realistic. All the problems boil down to this: journalism is a product, not a public utility. And the product isn't in the information category; it's in the entertainment category.by gumboshoes
- One of the things I've noticed here in Britain is that journalists don't even try to make sense of events, and instead the 'analysis' is just the opinions of uninformed bystanders.by cjs_ac
- > So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.
I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.
I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.
But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.
by efields - I've stopped paying attention to the news. Almost none of what is reported affects my life in any way.
I do read HN, more than I should actually, and a couple of local bloggers who report on local happenings. Our local paper used to do that but it's now just a USA Today reprint under a local masthead.
by SoftTalker - Meta: It would be really interesting to see comment sentiment vs time of day to get a read on perspective when different parts of the world wake up. For example, "independent journalism is the future" and "independent journalism is dangerous", which are the two extremes in in these discussions.
Has anyone made something like this for HN?
by nomel - That’s an interesting idea. I think that folks have already built something like this for internal use or as a service, but I’m not sure if it exists as a free service.
This might be enough to get you started if you wanted to roll your own (h/t @simonw):
> Summarizing Hacker News discussion themes with Claude and LLM
https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/claude-hacker-news-themes
For something similar at the story level, but without any kind of sentiment analysis, there’s this:
Edit:
Some (AI?) comment analysis summary per story on this site, but I don’t know how the site works or how often it might re-analyze the comment thread, if at all:
by aspenmayer - "NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention.
Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
by oldnetguy - Your post is a good description of how journalism has operated for hundreds of years. Maybe we're seeing that the twentieth century was just a (positive) blip and now we're regressing to the mean.by mrhottakes
- Journalism today is a joke. More like 'what journalism? that heavy manipulative gossip masquerading as journalism?'
Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.
by bsenftner - There is still good journalism going on but it is seldom read as it can't afford to promote itself like the propaganda empowered by capital. In LA, we have LA TACO for example. But they don't have much staff, so they don't even publish at a rate of a single article a day, it can be a few days between articles, and they are only able to cover a limited set of topics.
People also of course aren't reading in general, they are watching reels and ticktocks.
by asdff - Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.
- Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.
Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
I'm not sure what the solutions could be.
by jakeydus - Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
by jaredwiener - That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you.
Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get news and reporting from around the world, and now it's ubiquitous and nearly free to get news from everywhere.
The hard part about good journalism is critical thinking, and identifying fact, and untangling the thread of truth from the overwhelming flood of information available on nearly every topic. Throw in the motivated bias of modern "style" guides, the politically and ideologically biased influences that govern framing, pacing, which stories get covered and how, thematic and editorial impositions, and it's going to be more or less impossible to do anything resembling "good" journalism in any modern incarnation of the former journalistic institutions.
You can get live streams from nearly anywhere on the planet even during murderously hot conflict. During the middle of Iran's crackdown we were still getting videos from citizens daily, as well as seeing Iranian soldiers videos and the like.
Journalism is a product. It's not a business of itself. The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity. The writing will never be as tangibly valuable on a consistent basis to any of the advertisers.
The value of superb writing and journalism with integrity and a significant story is the perception of institutional integrity, and thereby becoming a better outlet for advertising (and/or manipulation.)
Throw in the fact that every strictly written word platform is in direct competition for time and eyeballs with the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Netflix, Prime, and all the other algorithm optimized timesinks, and the effective marginal value of even the absolute best of the best writing falls to nearly zero.
If all I'm going to get is biased, skewed, ideologically motivated, politically or commercially manipulative narratives, then I'm not only not going to pay, I won't even pirate. I'll find some talking head that does the tedious job of figuring out how things work, de-censors, untangles the manipulative elements, and presents a reasonable facsimile of facts on the ground.
All those talking heads do it for free, and with ad blockers, I'm consuming the video stream resources without contributing to any of the overt commercial mechanisms in play.
The advent of AI also means that I can synthesize, filter, model, and report on any given topic with validated sources and pull in all of the best the internet has to offer.
The era of high paid Pulitzer prize writers and journalists is effectively over, and the only way legacy institutions are going to get people to pay is by tricking them into thinking that value exists where there is, in fact, none.
- There's news for entertainment, and news for making informed decisions. I suppose in a healthy democracy, it would be in the people's best interest to have unbiased and thoroughly investigated the news available so voters can make the best decision for themselves and the country. It wouldn't be profitable so it would have to be publicly funded like PBS News, BBC, CBC. And, well, it was good while it lasted but politicians seem hell bent on demonizing anything for the public good.by morkalork
- Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.
- >But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
NYTimes Revenue - $2.9B Daily Mail Group - £1.1Bn
Getting them/advertisers to pay isn't a problem!
by khurs - I know some journalists say that we're living in the post-truth era and perhaps they're right in the sense that it's what the market needs?
We don't value right or wrong outside of the financial markets so much because there's not much profit to be made there. A politician doesn't need to know if their ally is ethical, only need to act according to the narratives. A piece about a company easily swayed by sponsorships and donations, or needless alarmism that keeps public mind away from real problems.
The current system we live in doesn't value the accuracy of the information and I think that's a tell on how badly the world is running.