"We have all become gnostics, immersed in our own special knowledge, accepting only those reports that comport with and support our own views, and rejecting both the reports and the reporters motives of things we don’t like. The brats who cancel reporters and editors over old tweets, pronouncing a Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur are steeped in this new news gnosticism to a degree not seen before, due to the velocity and volume of bad journalism."
Bad journalism has been with us for as long as we've had news and reporters. (Read up on the history of the fights between Pulitzer and Hearst, as well as "yellow journalism" to get started.) The antidote to this isn't to expect that the news you're listening to will magically get better and abandon the creed "if it bleeds, it leads", but instead to diversify your intake from a variety of sources and see where reporting starts to overlap and where one outfit or another is out over their skis alone.
On the technology front, I still use an RSS feed reader (feedly.com - how I arrived here this morning), which allows me to pull in traditional cable news, newspapers, longer form magazines, the business press, the technology reporting, as well as outfits like this one. Each of these has their own biases and audiences to cater to, and what will fly on CNN will be a lead balloon with CNBC's business audience.
This is pretty much a solved problem on the technology side of things. Trying to change the individual media outfits to conform to what you think news should be is a fool's errand (FOX and CNN are not going to stop reporting on what their audiences crave), so diversifying your own personal attention is about the best you can do. And in the process of doing so, you're giving some smaller outlets that may be overlooked in the cable news and newspaper wars some additional attention (and maybe cash in this new Substack world) so that they can continue to excel at what they're good at and maybe expand beyond the prior titans peddling modern yellow journalism.
It’s not the existence of bad journalism. It’s the velocity and sheer volume of it that has increased. Also, the cost of subscribing to all the Substack and Patreon and Podcasts of everyone I would need to hear, plus the time investment of reading and hearing diverse sources, is beyond my capacity or financial ability and I presume beyond most people’s. There needs to be a better way at some point.
I guess you need to find a curator you trust then. in the RSS world, this was easy, because one could export the RSS feeds they followed as an OPML file that you could import into your own environment to import your curator's sources.
That said, there's still some space for innovation in assisting the process of curation. In addition to using RSS to aggregate sources, combining some form of personal rating (not combining with others ratings as in a recommendation engine) as well as mathematical models of similarity (such as the cosine distance between articles available to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity) might be able to do a couple of things:
1. Float to the top articles (and sources) that may be of genuine interest to you (from your ratings).
2. Prevent your personal recommendations from being too alike and introducing some serendipity into your news feed (cosine similarity could keep you from reading two similar articles from two different news sources).
3. Measure the value that a source is bringing you and regularly culling the bottom performers. If I stop reading CNN because it's gone All-Trump, All-the-Time, then it would be good to know so I can boot it from the pool of stories. (I recently reached this point with Rod Dreher and am trying to pull out other folks who only want to talk about the culture war.)
The technology to do all of this is readily available - the trick is finding a proper monetization model to keep the enterprise afloat. Unfortunately, our ad-supported media ecosystem is the complete opposite of this. :-(
There may also be an opportunity to use the bagging approach from the machine learning community to continually rank sources and use those ranks as elements in choosing to float something up to the reader's attention:
The way I envision this is your reader keeping track of what you read over time and asking for a random review every week or so, with the question of whether you remember reading something and - a week later - would you have recommended to your past self to read it again? The sources that are publishing the journalism equivalent of empty calories are penalized and given less access to your attention and the sources that are doing worthwhile memorable work get more access to your attention.
Additionally, I think it's important to both choose your news sources on your own, independent of any algorithms as much as possible. News algorithms these days are tuned not to maximize reader informed-ness, but to maximize "engagement", which keeps you on a particular site longer than you would otherwise. Try to avoid the algorithms and make your own choices on what you should read and what you should skip.
"We have all become gnostics, immersed in our own special knowledge, accepting only those reports that comport with and support our own views, and rejecting both the reports and the reporters motives of things we don’t like. The brats who cancel reporters and editors over old tweets, pronouncing a Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur are steeped in this new news gnosticism to a degree not seen before, due to the velocity and volume of bad journalism."
Bad journalism has been with us for as long as we've had news and reporters. (Read up on the history of the fights between Pulitzer and Hearst, as well as "yellow journalism" to get started.) The antidote to this isn't to expect that the news you're listening to will magically get better and abandon the creed "if it bleeds, it leads", but instead to diversify your intake from a variety of sources and see where reporting starts to overlap and where one outfit or another is out over their skis alone.
On the technology front, I still use an RSS feed reader (feedly.com - how I arrived here this morning), which allows me to pull in traditional cable news, newspapers, longer form magazines, the business press, the technology reporting, as well as outfits like this one. Each of these has their own biases and audiences to cater to, and what will fly on CNN will be a lead balloon with CNBC's business audience.
This is pretty much a solved problem on the technology side of things. Trying to change the individual media outfits to conform to what you think news should be is a fool's errand (FOX and CNN are not going to stop reporting on what their audiences crave), so diversifying your own personal attention is about the best you can do. And in the process of doing so, you're giving some smaller outlets that may be overlooked in the cable news and newspaper wars some additional attention (and maybe cash in this new Substack world) so that they can continue to excel at what they're good at and maybe expand beyond the prior titans peddling modern yellow journalism.
It’s not the existence of bad journalism. It’s the velocity and sheer volume of it that has increased. Also, the cost of subscribing to all the Substack and Patreon and Podcasts of everyone I would need to hear, plus the time investment of reading and hearing diverse sources, is beyond my capacity or financial ability and I presume beyond most people’s. There needs to be a better way at some point.
I guess you need to find a curator you trust then. in the RSS world, this was easy, because one could export the RSS feeds they followed as an OPML file that you could import into your own environment to import your curator's sources.
That said, there's still some space for innovation in assisting the process of curation. In addition to using RSS to aggregate sources, combining some form of personal rating (not combining with others ratings as in a recommendation engine) as well as mathematical models of similarity (such as the cosine distance between articles available to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity) might be able to do a couple of things:
1. Float to the top articles (and sources) that may be of genuine interest to you (from your ratings).
2. Prevent your personal recommendations from being too alike and introducing some serendipity into your news feed (cosine similarity could keep you from reading two similar articles from two different news sources).
3. Measure the value that a source is bringing you and regularly culling the bottom performers. If I stop reading CNN because it's gone All-Trump, All-the-Time, then it would be good to know so I can boot it from the pool of stories. (I recently reached this point with Rod Dreher and am trying to pull out other folks who only want to talk about the culture war.)
The technology to do all of this is readily available - the trick is finding a proper monetization model to keep the enterprise afloat. Unfortunately, our ad-supported media ecosystem is the complete opposite of this. :-(
There may also be an opportunity to use the bagging approach from the machine learning community to continually rank sources and use those ranks as elements in choosing to float something up to the reader's attention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_aggregating
The way I envision this is your reader keeping track of what you read over time and asking for a random review every week or so, with the question of whether you remember reading something and - a week later - would you have recommended to your past self to read it again? The sources that are publishing the journalism equivalent of empty calories are penalized and given less access to your attention and the sources that are doing worthwhile memorable work get more access to your attention.
Additionally, I think it's important to both choose your news sources on your own, independent of any algorithms as much as possible. News algorithms these days are tuned not to maximize reader informed-ness, but to maximize "engagement", which keeps you on a particular site longer than you would otherwise. Try to avoid the algorithms and make your own choices on what you should read and what you should skip.
Algorithms, no. Editors and curators, yes!