[openasocket]

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?

[randusername]

News is perpetually in decline just like the old perpetually fear the young will bring humanity to ruin.

Kierkegaard in the 1850s:

"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control."

[conductr]

While the history of news quality has been cyclical, I think there’s some objective truth if you’re starting reference points is 1970ish-1990ish and on. The internet broke their financial model. They had an integrity and editorial standard; long abandoned. And, the fairness doctrine was abandoned. Fast forward a bit and the industry has or is devolved closer to what it was in your quote.

I’m sure there was still some funny business going on. They didn’t report so heavily on tabloid stuff and probably protected people in power more. But there was absolutely some level of investigative journalism in every article.

[BeetleB]

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.

[josephg]

Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.

Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.

I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.

[coatmatter]

Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.

[NikolaNovak]

I think a mixture of BBC, cnn, al jazeera, economist, will get a casual reader to a decent spot, and they're all mainstream media. Possibly guardian but emlarhically not their opinion pages (I agree with them, but even so they're gratingly opinionated, hate to think what a die hard conservative will think of them :)

[idiotsecant]

CNN is increasingly sensationalist junk. I've started just reading AP for what I might read CNN for

[fsckboy]

BBC, CNN, and al jazeera are complete trash.

Economist always was good but I have not read it in a while so I can't speak to it. If it has not changed, that would be great.

[michaelmrose]

Let's pick one. Why is the BBC trash?

[tehjoker]

Dropsite news is good, but are you familiar with manufacturing consent’s propaganda model of the mass media? A simplified explanation:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M&ra=m

[fsckboy]

if mainstream media has gone downhill, why would somebody have a preferred outlet? What's your preferred outlet?

[hhh]

your preferred outlet would be something not mainstream then, it doesn't mean it has to be some mega conglomerate.

[Jensson]

> News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.

It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.

[gnz11]

> they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.

No, that’s not a new phenomenon. Tabloids and political rags filled that market well before the Internet. News organizations aren’t static entities, they come in a wide variety of flavors.

[abofh]

I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value.

The industry got it wrong when it digitized

[katzgrau]

Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k.

Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.

[inigyou]

99% of everything is crap, even the ones you pay for. Some are good and worth supporting, like 404 Media.

everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.

[slickdork]

I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

[zhivota]

There's not much money to be made by doing quality news, but plenty to be made in click bait crap news.

And if you're a billionaire there's a lot of intangible value in owning news outlets.

[lynx97]

I life in a country where we have a mandatory monthly fee for the state-run media outlet. Its roughly 2x a youtube premium. And quality of said outlet is still declining with everyone else. Pretty non-critical reporting, basically forwarding of what others have claimed. Typos, questionable headlines which get corrected half an hour later. I refute your claim. Its not about financing. Journalists have just become very lazy. Mainstream media deserves the same "I vote with my wallet" treatment as everyone else. And the state forcing me to pay for a specific outlet is just so broken, I am questioning the sanity of our politicians. But lobbying helps I guess. Instead of doing a good/great job, the new tactics is to insist that "you" are an indispensible part of democracy, even though you aren't doing any critical reporting anymore...

[wolvoleo]

We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop.

The real deep dives are hard to find.

And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort.

A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care.

And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.

[leonidasrup]

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades, but the relationship of news organizations with the current US goverment has been shaped by the current president.

"Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with...

[cyanydeez]

you dropped 3. its more valuable to pay for propaganda

[protocolture]

>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends.

Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions.

I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.

[bch]

I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream media" here, but I feel various public broadcasters have served me well over the years: CBC[0] in Canada, BBC[1] in United Kingdom, NPR[2] in America, ABC[3] in Australia, NHK[4] in Japan... switching around the world also gives reprieve from local politics letting you tune into someone else's local politics practically recreationally, which seems more and more necessary in the modern world of today. Streaming radio is one of the best things about the contemporary internet.

[0] https://cbc.ca/

[1] https://bbc.com/

[2] https://npr.org/

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/

[4] https://www.nhk.or.jp/

[daniel_iversen]

The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.

[SturgeonsLaw]

It's "just a blog", but if you're after positive and uplifting, that does exist

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/

I like to check this every so often as a palette cleanser for the endless bad news that is available elsewhere

[protocolture]

>The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.

I dont see any bias in their journalism, but they have a tendency to just accept everything at face value. They will also shop around for experts that support their opinions. One person will write an article about housing referring to housing experts, and get one view, and then a few years later another will instead quote a public housing expert getting another view. Theres never any "Lets test the quality of each expert and try and figure out whats true"

4 corners and foreign correspondant however are still absolute top tier journalism. Its a shame they dont apply those standards everywhere.

[apparent]

I used to listen to and read NPR. Since about 2015 they've been slipping, and at an increasing rate. After submitting several corrections, none of which were heeded, I have stopped taking them seriously. An outlet that does not correct clear-cut falsehoods is peddling a narrative, not reporting news.

[DrewADesign]

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.

[Gigachad]

This always felt like way to work around libel laws. Where they can claim "People on twitter are saying x", as an indirect way of making a claim without having to be liable for it.

[jchw]

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.

[ggregoryarms]

Yeah it really flips things upside down when a journalist has so much access to info that they can essentially pick their own story from the data.

Maybe they can't credibly fudge the numbers, but they can find enough data to agenda-set pretty much anything.

[DrewADesign]

Yeah it’s really just depressing. It’s like every news outlet wants to be just a ‘little bit’ “national enquirer” but still have everyone take them seriously. Our news industry is abjectly sensationalist.

[dmoy]

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...

[andy_ppp]

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.

[avaer]

Look at how many times the current government has tried to shut down reporting that didn't tow the current party line. Selective access, prosecutions, lawsuits, threats to block mergers, comedians being cancelled while the administration cheers, there's a (s)hitlist of journalists on the whitehouse site, etc.

It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.

[jaredwiener]

For what its worth, I'm a former journalist looking to automate this. Getting on those newsmaking lists, and automating the rest.

Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news

[rambambram]

Your 'personal' site in your bio is giving me a browser-warning not to visit. Maybe expired certificate?

Btw, nice initiative with Forth! That's why I clicked.

[jaredwiener]

Thank you!

Looks like I didn’t rotate my certificate. Eek

[grvdrm]

Neat. Bookmarking to revisit. Does your team do any headline writing and or manual section? Your site reminds me of Techmeme.

[jaredwiener]

Right now, no.

The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.

[partyficial]

> half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort

that is EXACTLY what i want in news.

i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.

just be a parrot.

[avaer]

Parroting seems like the same thing ("out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet"), except without any checks or oversight.

[sethammons]

No no no. Absolutely not. A parrot repeats, we need verification.

"We've always been at war with Eurasia." -Politimouth

The news should say this is not true when it is not true.

[fyltr]

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.

[TuringTest]

> 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.

[pzxc]

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.

[sixtyj]

> 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.

[ericjmorey]

"current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases"

The facts chosen to include in a report are chosen with bias. There's no neutral subset of facts about any event.

[goatlover]

That view tends toward sophistry and relativism. It can't be true that no event has a neutral subset of facts. If I'm reporting on some discovery in astronomy or math, what biased facts would I be choosing? There would need to be some sort of controversy about the discovery where choosing some subset of the facts supports one side over the other. But this assumes both sides have an equal claim on the facts, which is often not the case.

And while humans can't be without bias, there is a big difference between trying to be factual while leaving your biases aside, and having an agenda or outright reporting propaganda.

[dfxm12]

No. Knowingly reporting lies (including lies by omission) isn't "neutral".

[watwut]

> 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.

[lovich]

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...

[safety1st]

I think a lot of it has to do with the desire and pressure to publish as fast as possible. Online, EVERYTHING is rushed and even published before the facts are known. The story may or may not get updated as the situation develops.

Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.

Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.

[dfxm12]

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.

[Computer0]

I follow the New York Times, as well as being an avid news follower and have found them to be of poor reporting quality a handful of times over the past year.

[like_any_other]

> regurgitated without any additional effort.

Wrong. Great effort goes into ensuring only the desired statements are regurgitated, and the undesirable ones omitted: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ap-report-slain-north-dakota-t...

This is not a cherry-picked example, but the policy of most major media, explicitly outlined in their style guides: https://jfulford.substack.com/p/hiding-the-race-of-criminals...

[Funes-]

>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.

[nakedneuron]

Isn't it also true that a quick buck can be made on the stock market with these news?

Now Trump offers privileged access to his "tweets" for money.

Late stage capitalism indeed.