Conversation

Ever since I got annoyed enough by the NYT to unsubscribe and even stop visiting for the free articles, I’ve been mostly cobbling together a news feed from CNN, LA times (subscriber for local stuff but it’s very limited) and occasional free raids of FT and BBC.
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I check Fox News occasionally in an opposition research spirit. WSJ they say has good reporting, but the mix of economy focus and editorial bias makes it rare for me. Guardian occasionally but mainly because it’s free. It feels like a more inept version of the NYT.
Replying to
Hindustan Times for India news. Long tail of drive-by reads from topically relevant outlets. Not counting a few substacks, the LA times is the only thing I subscribe to. Nothing feels worthwhile. But for now you can still cobble together a sense of the news this way.
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I suspect most of you are in this boat. This us really begging to be an aggregator token-based subscription model. I’d gladly pay for say 100 reads a month across a sufficiently broad portfolio without major holes.
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No, this is far too simplistic. It’s not “just a database.” Reporting still takes effort, risk, and money. People who do it need to get paid. It needs to get by small local orgs not global behemoths. Even if you condone a bit of marginal pirate-aggregation, it’s not a solution.
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Replying to @vgr
We can just set one up. Really its a data base. The issue is folk keep trying to own parts of it. Aaron Swartz had the correct idea - knowledge turns nearly 9 billion humans into evolution machines. I think that's the problem leaders like us dumb ❤
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The fate of The Economist has been interesting. It used to be a way to get a more reliable version of the news about 6 months too late to be useful but that was fine for me. But since the Weirding it has basically seemed out of touch rather than merely late.
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The Atlantic and New Yorker side bands seem mostly editorially confused now. They seem unsure of whether to track the news or track substack extended opinionverse.
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Twitter utility for news endpoint has steadily decreased through all this. If Musk does some ideological vanity free speech thing, I suspect long-tail news-disinformation noise will get worse 🤔 Possibly the read-later apps are the best new endpoint.
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Software has been trying to eat journalism for the longest time but has basically failed. Compare to the much more successful eating of say banking, transportation, accommodation, etc which all started later. Chokes on the part of journalism that’s basically public service.
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There’s a part of me that suspects the very idea of journalism was a weird artifact of the Industrial Age, and we’re hoping back to a structurally pre-modern info environment, just with abundance instead of scarcity.
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Wild Desert —> Nice public lake with potable water —> network of poisoned wells, pick your poison —> desalinate-it-yourself wild ocean. Maybe not a bad thing. “News” is a weird construct anyway.
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