[nathan_long]

The biggest problem with news is that it's about newness and rarity. Whereas what we actually need to know is mostly not new. Eg, "man eaten by alligator" is a billion times less important than "decades of data say you will likely get heart disease."

Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.

My ideal internet news source would publish infrequently and be filtered to the specific reader. The second part is very hard. It would look something like this:

Not News - A car accident across town - A single crime in another state - Celebrities - Scandals - Daily stock market fluctuations

News - A trend of car accidents at an intersection near me - Crime in my neighborhood or a trend of crime in my city - Economic trends and their underlying causes

[DanBC]

News in the UK has several problems.

News papers are either horrible - I cannot describe just how vile much of the UK news press industry is. The decent newspapers have tiny distribution figures. The Guardian, for example, has a circulation of under 300,000 people. Obviously, more people read it, but still, that's a tiny figure.

UK news allows the agenda[1] to be set by spin doctors. We frequently has stories about how a politician "will announce" something - the speech has been released by publicists before it has been given, allowing the speaker to set the tone of the coverage.

I don't know why that's allowed or why they do it. It's incredibly frustrating.

And there's very narrow window of what is or isn't news. A blond white girl goes missing? We'll have wall to wall coverage of it for weeks. A non white person, or a boy, goes missing? Not so much. Compare, for example, the Soham coverage (two white girls killed by a caretaker at their school) with Adam Morrell, a boy who was brutally tortured and killed.

For years I read about agents that would go out and find news items that would be interesting to me. It still hasn't happened. I would pay money for something that works for me:

1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm interested in news items about mental health, even if it's poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a stigmatising way.

2) Suggest items that I might be interested in based on my reading history, and what I am or am not interested in.

3) Provide suggested items to break me out of my bubble. This can be things about what I'm interested in with an opposing viewpoint to my regular sources; or it can be things that I haven't previously shown interest in.

[1] I don't know if "news agenda" is a peculiarly UK term.

[Theodores]

I agree, wholeheartedly. I would also like to add this about what is going on in the UK:

There is no local news. Remember in the olden days when there were local papers that people did actually pay for? I delivered them as a child and I did find them rather dull at the time. However, looking back, you could have small ads and sports news that would reach a target audience of locals. There were also syndicated articles, e.g. new car reviews, that were okay to read. If something actually happened in town, e.g. a book signing, a gig or even a jumble sale then it would be in there. Things the council wanted to tell you were in there. Then there were letters, probably one of the more interesting pages.

The problem nowadays in the UK is not just national/global news it is also with the local news. We have the Internet and those local papers have moved online, however, it is not working.

As for the relationship the press have with the politicians, the press need access or else they cannot write anything. So they have to do as they are told to get that access.

Most of what passes for news in UK papers is stuff cribbed from the news wires. This means that it is a very easy system to game - get your story on the news wire and it will make it to print. Meanwhile, you try and get some investigative journalism of your own creation into the papers - impossible!

[snorkel]

Not to dump on UK, but I also find the UK newspapers to be very mean spirited. US tabloids gawk at celebrities, but UK tabloids are out to get them. I would not want to be famous in the UK.

[chestnut-tree]

I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press).

The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority.

TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4#t=38

[DanBC]

That's not dumping on the UK, it's a very true point. Many UK HN readers will agree with you that a lot of the UK press is just toxic.

[gabemart]

    > 1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm
    > interested in news items about mental health, even if it's
    > poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a
    > stigmatising way.

I have set this up for myself for other topics with a wide range of rss feeds plus some filtering through yahoo pipes. It's pretty simple to do. IIRC there are also some commercial services that offer rss feed filtering.

[mattfenwick]

Your post reminds me of "The Truth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_(novel)) by Terry Pratchett, in which the characters invent newspapers and deal with these issues. Hilarity ensues.

[timje1]

Another comment mentioned the economist's weekly digest - this gives a good summary of the important world news, but won't help with your local news.

As an example, it covers the riots breaking out in Ukraine but completely skipped that Paul Walker died..

[jakub_g]

> Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.

Totally agree. OTOH many e-newspapers have unlimited capacity of producing news like "man eaten by alligator", "bus crash in Bolivia" etc., every hour, updating their homepage and moving all the articles down the list (including the important ones). Here the newness is taken to its extremes. Some solution is the "most read" list, however it also often consists of the sensationalist stories.

A good e-newspaper which updates just once a day would be a great thing.

[dublinben]

I recommend reading weekly magazines for exactly this reason. The longer time to publish also affords better perspective than the 24 second, Twitter-fueled, cable/internet news cycle.