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.
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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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But I doubt the market favors it. It favors NYT style vertically integrated poisoned-well models.
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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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Why do people think this is a mechanical aggregation problem? If RSS were the solution it would have survived and thrived, acquired token paywall features, publisher tools, better advertising scaffolding etc. It’s like mistaking tire stores for the car industry.
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Replying to @vgr
RSS is right there fam
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Well I think it's RSS plus payment models on top of RSS. Journalists should go solo and distribute news directly, but much of the infra is centralized. Twitter is just glorified RSS. Also people are just lazy and don't want to run their own servers so you get aggregation. Web3?
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Nope. Solo journalists are weak. Good reporting takes teams. You’re vastly underestimating what it takes.
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Market isn't paying for that though.
Sinofuturism. We're moving to a more data dominant world, we don't really need independent journalists.
Dictators tweet. Sell phones record video. AI is already writing a ton of stories. Most journals are glorified feed syndicates anyways.
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From a pure information theory standpoint, pre-internet you needed journalists to compress data into newspapers because the medium had an information bottleneck.
Today I can just download the 4K video directly from 15 people at the location who recorded via cell phone.
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You’re mistaking aggregation as an activity that adds no information and you’re using the wrong information theoretic measure. What you want is mutual information, not absolute. What is new in relation to what you know. Which changes everything.
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Possible, but no one is willing to pay for that as evidenced by the hemmoraghing of the practice of journalism. There's likely going to be more advancements in AI/ML and data mining to make that automated.
I think the future of news is AI mailing lists and prediction markets.


