We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.
Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.
And how are you supposed to digest it ? Journalists are here to provide the context of the event, the background. They also so the job of checking the sources. We are not machine, from the log "2 planes crashed on the 9/11 of 2001", we would have to search ourselves all the things surrounding it, probably missing a lot on the way because we all have our day job and have other things to do.
Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.
News that was less entertaining and did less to appeal to its audience would reduce the number of stupid people who vote in elections which would increase the quality of our elected politicians.
Cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC as well as their online competitors serve as propaganda wings of the political parties in general and typically the most corrupt wing of that political party in particular. They misinform their audience on purpose to create hyper-partisan voters who hate the other party and reliably vote for the donkey or the elephant no matter how unqualified, corrupt or unhinged the candidate may be.
We would likely be much better off if the people who base their identity on hating the other political party or who worship specific politicians would find a different hobby because the news was "boring" to them. If having tons of poorly informed or outright misinformed "vote {party} no matter who" voters participating in the political process wasn't to the benefit of large corporate interests, there wouldn't be an enormous corporate media industry intent on making sure they vote and telling them who to vote for.
1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go
2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log
We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.
Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.
We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/
Heck, just digest it into a shittiness score and tell me once a year.
Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?
According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.
We need both. The deep analysis that news is supposed to provide is an important service. Some things are important for reasons the reader does not necessarily understand, and providing it only in bite-sized form is not good enough.
Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.
But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.
For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?
That 'log' is generated by journalists, and the only reason why I have a paid subscription to a newspaper. Imagine living in a world without journalists and politicians and enterprises can do whatever they like without anyone ever writing about it...
You'd need journalism to dig out the parts & trends that matter given historical and current context anyway. "Murders up 10% in [city]"—is that statistical noise? Was there a policy change that may be connected? Does it follow historical trends for current economic conditions, so is perhaps a "natural" variation? Is below or above statewide trends? National? International? If it's below or above any of those, what might be the cause? Which sorts of policies have a history of being effective under these particular circumstances, to reduce a murder rate? Do any of the policies being proposed by various political figures have a history of being effective, or a history of being ineffective, or any history at all? Do any of the political figures stand to profit from their own proposals, or otherwise personally or professionally benefit in some maybe-questionable way?
All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).
Comments
We don't need "news".
We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.
Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.
Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.
And how are you supposed to digest it ? Journalists are here to provide the context of the event, the background. They also so the job of checking the sources. We are not machine, from the log "2 planes crashed on the 9/11 of 2001", we would have to search ourselves all the things surrounding it, probably missing a lot on the way because we all have our day job and have other things to do.
Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.
This generation already see news boring, do you think an event log will appeal them even better?
A raw event log is definitely useful tool in the toolbox, allow people who interested to perform deep level analysis.
To engage with different generations, we need different tools that engage with them and yet provide verifiable information.
News that was less entertaining and did less to appeal to its audience would reduce the number of stupid people who vote in elections which would increase the quality of our elected politicians.
Cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC as well as their online competitors serve as propaganda wings of the political parties in general and typically the most corrupt wing of that political party in particular. They misinform their audience on purpose to create hyper-partisan voters who hate the other party and reliably vote for the donkey or the elephant no matter how unqualified, corrupt or unhinged the candidate may be.
We would likely be much better off if the people who base their identity on hating the other political party or who worship specific politicians would find a different hobby because the news was "boring" to them. If having tons of poorly informed or outright misinformed "vote {party} no matter who" voters participating in the political process wasn't to the benefit of large corporate interests, there wouldn't be an enormous corporate media industry intent on making sure they vote and telling them who to vote for.
There's a two-pronged problem.
1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go
2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log
We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.
Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.
We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/
Heck, just digest it into a shittiness score and tell me once a year.
Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?
According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.
We need both. The deep analysis that news is supposed to provide is an important service. Some things are important for reasons the reader does not necessarily understand, and providing it only in bite-sized form is not good enough.
Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.
But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.
For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?
That 'log' is generated by journalists, and the only reason why I have a paid subscription to a newspaper. Imagine living in a world without journalists and politicians and enterprises can do whatever they like without anyone ever writing about it...
You'd need journalism to dig out the parts & trends that matter given historical and current context anyway. "Murders up 10% in [city]"—is that statistical noise? Was there a policy change that may be connected? Does it follow historical trends for current economic conditions, so is perhaps a "natural" variation? Is below or above statewide trends? National? International? If it's below or above any of those, what might be the cause? Which sorts of policies have a history of being effective under these particular circumstances, to reduce a murder rate? Do any of the policies being proposed by various political figures have a history of being effective, or a history of being ineffective, or any history at all? Do any of the political figures stand to profit from their own proposals, or otherwise personally or professionally benefit in some maybe-questionable way?
All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).
as opposed to politicians doing whatever they want, and journalists providing cover and/or distractions for them?
Insisting the world is this simple and black and white and algorithmic won't make it so.
Who decides what passes as these cold hard events? How would anybody ever transmit unbiased truth?
We already have all of these. Hardly anyone cares.
Who gets write access?