News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest

&gt; It could end up akin to classical music, contemporary art, and literary fiction — important for a few in the upper crust, marginal to the lives of the majority of the public.<p>Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new.<p>You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed.<p>The main problem, as I see it, is that there&#x27;s just too much of it. There&#x27;s no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it&#x27;s the only way to produce so much content.

This is the natural result of cable news becoming increasingly biased and even outright and completely false and&#x2F;or misleading. There is almost no tolerance for asking even the most basic critical questions of the prevailing narrative or having an honest conversation with dissenters of mainstream views. Watching mainstream news feels increasingly like watching propaganda instead of &quot;news&quot;.<p>There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer&#x2F;reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.

I’ve been reading NPR along with some foreign sites like the guardian and Al Jazeera and it really feels like the US is drinking its own koolaid WRT what gets covered and what doesn’t.<p>Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives.<p>Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.

What I increasingly see is that mainstream news is in it&#x27;s own bubble, they report on things that they think are very relevant from their point of view, but the rest of the country really couldn&#x27;t give a damn about.<p>The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn&#x27;t matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy. Again if you are in DC then it&#x27;s an important issue but if you&#x27;re the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally.<p>And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren&#x27;t really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.

&gt; I cannot stress enough how clear the structural trends are, and how fundamentally they will change journalism from serving the broad public to serving, basically, people like me who are affluent, highly educated, privileged, and middle-aged or older.<p>Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.

This article seems as out of touch about the real problems with journalism. All he observes is &quot;much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer&quot;, yet all he talks about is election coverage.<p>News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2]<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnewsdeserts.com&#x2F;reports&#x2F;expanding-news-desert&#x2F;loss-of-local-news&#x2F;the-rise-of-the-ghost-newspaper&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnewsdeserts.com&#x2F;reports&#x2F;expanding-news-desert&#x2F;...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;california&#x2F;story&#x2F;2023-03-27&#x2F;as-the-salinas-californian-withers-a-city-yearns-to-know-its-stories" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;california&#x2F;story&#x2F;2023-03-27&#x2F;as-the-s...</a>

&gt;However gratifying, no amount of speechifying about how journalism serves the public interest will save the profession and the business if the public isn’t interested.<p>A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that&#x27;s not a functioning democracy.<p>In public, I&#x27;ve had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don&#x27;t care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.<p>But it&#x27;s problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.<p>&gt;So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge.<p>We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don&#x27;t see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.

i was thinking about something similar last night: that what we call &quot;news&quot; is obsolete. this narration of human-social-events. we have the tech to observe the world as it is, and if something interesting happens, save that. like, the only important news is scientific discovery. read about an experiment that someone did and what was proved or disproved or gained by that experiment. watch a video of the experiment, look at the data, whatever. idk, there is an ideal state of affairs that i&#x27;m thinking of where &quot;geopolitics&quot; isn&#x27;t really a thing, because we no longer find the concept of a &quot;country&quot; useful, because we&#x27;ve established an optimal method of resource allocation and distribution. but that would only really happen once everyone becomes enlightened i guess.

I don&#x27;t know the condition in worldwide, but in my hometown newspaper companies spend more resources collecting news from everywhere. TV news rely on newspapers, YouTube &quot;news channels&quot; rely on TV. I don&#x27;t what will happen when everything fail apart.

&gt; But people in the U.S. can still access online news from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, and many others for free.<p>These are all TV&#x2F;radio channels. Somehow newspaper brands work better on the web then TV brands.

My generation seems to read headlines on social media and nothing else. I wonder if it was the same back in the newspaper days. Would your average person see the headlines in the paper and stop there?

The first job AI will replace (this has already partly happened) is the &quot;journalist&quot;.<p>Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around.<p>They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of &quot;journalism&quot; is easy to replace with AI.<p>Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don&#x27;t see it disappearing, because the consumers of the &quot;news&quot; provide value to those who have an agenda to push.

Am I the only one that read the name of the author at the top of the page, &quot;Rasmus Kleis Nielsen&quot;, and thought it was a joke on Rasmussen, Nielsen etc, the usual poll companies? It&#x27;s even more on the nose, since trust on opinion polls maybe the only thing lower than trust on mainstream news.

I&#x27;m curious how this is different than the past? World news, in particular, has always been of very marginal value to most folks.<p>Indeed, with the level of understanding and agency that most of us have, I&#x27;m struggling to see what an alternative would be.

The current title (&quot;News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest&quot;) is difficult to parse. An improvement would be &quot;News could end up like Art, important to few elites, marginal to the rest&quot;.

It depends on what we mean by “news”.<p>I think there are three levels for looking after prod<p>- monitoring - modelling - machining<p>This applies here I think<p>Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model<p>What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it?<p>Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red?<p>Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs.<p>This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week.<p>News as Edward R Murrow knew it was <i>all three parts</i> at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring &#x2F; reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator)<p>But Murrows news has been disaggregated.<p>The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well)<p>The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model<p>We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models.<p>We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work<p>Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions<p>What we need are great journalists.

News is already of marginal utility to most people, except as entertainment.<p>The top headlines on my version of Google News are:<p>* an update on Trump&#x27;s trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses<p>* a story about France&#x27;s new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France<p>* more trump trial<p>* more trump trial<p>* a piece on Age of Emprires<p>* whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer<p>* an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info<p>* news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I&#x27;m an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available<p>* crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess<p>Minimally important.<p>The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting.<p>Everything else is just information&#x2F;misery&#x2F;voyeurism pornography.<p>It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news.<p>That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.

Most news isn&#x27;t worth paying for. I subscribe to the Economist, and read Politico.<p>That&#x27;s it - I could care less about anything else. Sometimes I read The Hill.

Its 100% due to ad tech.<p>When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters.<p>The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures.<p>Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it&#x27;s profitable, all boundaries are lost.<p>The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It&#x27;s all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.

Except for every single person I encounter parroting back whatever happens to be in the news like automatons?

I don’t know who the author considers “elite”, but I do consider News very marginal to me already (for several years actually). To keep the analogy, Art is much more important to me than News.<p>But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?

News has always been, and always will be, only important to the elites. They feed it to us to make us feel like we have agency.