Former reporter here: One of the things many people don't understand is that news organizations exist for themselves as much as they do for their readers. They are drama queens crying out for attention. Now imagine putting 10 drama queens in a room together with 100 innocent bystanders. That is the media industry. They will tire you out. Media organizations have several proven strategies to push our buttons: voyeurism, outrage, greed, fear, prurience and envious aspiration are at the top.
This is compounded by the fact that the world is full of people acting crazy and doing awful things to each other. News organizations are actually pretty careful to not bombard us with constant photos of dead children, even though Syria alone could fill the pages of the NYT everyday with images of their mangled bodies. (I have sat on the photo desk, and seen the photos stream by on the AP feed -- they rarely make the paper. )
So news organizations are aware of the fatigue that certain sensations cause, and they seek to mitigate them. They need their readers to feel just enough emotion, but not too much. A perpetual state of excitement and irritation. This is one reason why climate change doesn't get the coverage it deserves. It's just too depressing, and people stop reading.
Other comments indicate you wrote for the New York Times. I'd sure buy your book, or contribute to a Kickstarter for it. The Times stories and themes are copied slavishly by virtually all American news outlets.
To vamp a little on vonnik's thread. Try this thought experiment. What would the Times say about you and your job if they wanted to dig up a scandal? Your taxes? Could a reporter truly understand the technical aspects of your job with a 15 minute interview where they are as interested in getting viewers as they are in understanding what you do? Then why do you think the Times can cover equally complex entities properly, like the military or largish businesses? How can they understand what a cop does on a day to day basis without long-term embedded coverage?
When's the last time you heard political reportage not about the actual issues, but about what that media organization's polls say what people think about the actual issues?
Or: visit a country or state or city you know nothing about. Hang around with the locals and listen to what's important to them. Now imagine how the Times would cover it. I know the media seem to have absolutely zero knowledge about the daily life of Chinese citizens, even when reporting from China. I only know because I have family there, and they're cogent, smart people. But it took me 15 years before I felt I could discuss China fairly.
How would the Times cover the local mining community? How many kids are in 4H in the USA? A lot more than the Times thinks, I bet. How much coverage do they get? How many Girl Scouts are there in the country? How many people donate massive amounts of time to their favorite causes and get a ton out of it? Why don't we hear when local church groups scrape together 5 semis worth of food for people in Haiti? Why don't we hear how effectively Joplin rebuilt itself after the hurricane with very, very little Federal help?
Turn the tables. What if you had to report on the job of a reporter for an hour. Could you report about that competently by midnight deadline? What if you were given a story about the last fight your best friend had with his or her spouse/life partner. Could you cover it fairly in 250 words with a linkbait title?
The answer is probably close to why people view banks as some sort of public service organization rather than a business. I used to work at a bank, and it was amazing to hear comments from people.
> News organizations are actually pretty careful to not bombard us with constant photos of dead children
They probably should. They censor all the hard foreign political stuff to not effect public sentiment. They give you just enough to keep you on their program.
"Media organizations have several proven strategies to push our buttons: voyeurism, outrage, greed, fear, prurience and envious aspiration are at the top."
Goes way beyond that...
First, our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought.
I travel to places many people think of as traditionally dangerous - I drove Alaska->Argentina[1] and I'm setting out to drive around Africa for 2 years.
People often feel the need to contact me and tell me about the latest bombing or kidnapping in a country on my route. I always ask how many people got married in that country yesterday, or how many people had the happiest day of their life with a child born, or other celebration.
Of course, nobody has any idea, because the media doesn't tell us things like that.
very nice! I like your perspective.. so true also.. if you live your life in fear of what could happen, you'll miss out on some great experiences.. nice
Instead of using going to Facebook first when I'm bored these days I'll check out the top stories from r/all on reddit, check out Google News, or Hacker News top stories. I used to take a lot of pride in being current with world news or my industry news. This all started about 5-6 years ago when news aggregators started getting better. The first one for me was http://newsmap.jp/.
In reality I think it made me feel worse and sadly I'm just within the past few months realizing this. I feel like there's so much content masquerading as "news" and it's hard for me to tell what is legitimately good content until I'm a little bit through it. I am leaning to really cutting back but I need to rely on a few news sources from now on.
Over saturation of news can be depressing for me. I've had to take a couple of deliberate breaks and shield myself from it (mostly due to politics). I consider it a very real threat to my mental health and I now limit the sources of information I let in early on when I see warning signs that it's happening again. One thing that works for me is to focus primarily on issues were I believe I can make a difference by staying informed and not those where I genuinely feel powerless to affect change. It's imperfect, but I'm a lot more capable of dealing with it this way.
I tried to found a subreddit with the idea that if some article is still interesting 6 moths after it's written, then it's actually interesting stuff. Most things in the world don't happen in a day. And even those that happen, are often understood only with time.
But I can't keep a reddit account. The amount of misinformation in reddit and my tendency to correct people just gets too consuming.
A 'Slow News' service sounds intriguing. Especially if it was covertly collecting 'data' points for each story on a day-to-day basis and presented these on a timeline when the story was surfaced. A kind of ultra-modern-history.
The airliner crash in Sinai is a current example; there's really no pointin speculating or acting until the investigation team presents their findings, but every day people and states are taking actions that don't make sense from the immediate perspective. Looking back six months from now with a timeline view we might be able to understand.
But books are written by dictator. I'd want something that's ranked like HN or reddit, without the newness bias. With wide range of topics and varying depth and length of article.
This only works if the community is cool. But I' have a hunch it would attract mostly cool people.
I've had similar thoughts, though my time limit was 5 or 10 years, rather than months.
My other thought was to tie it to current events, so if Iraq was in the news then dig out something from the archive that takes a long view, you'd probably learn more than you would from a list of who died yesterday.
Part of the idea was that we have "event bias". Lots of meaningful things happen in the world without any significant event. Look at gap minder or green revolution.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt
Personally I don't like the idea of ranking people. There is nothing wrong discussing people or events. But I'm natural idea person and most websites have very poor signal to noise ratio in that respect.
So much on r/all these days is fluff, breaking stories don't appear as quickly as they used to - in spite of admins repeatedly stating that they're "looking into it".
I am reminded of H.D. Thoreau's essay "Life Without Principle"[1] where he has plenty to say about the ill effects, to the mind and soul, of filling one's head with ordinary news and other trivia.
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were- its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long.
The entire essay is a wonderful read about, among other things, life and living it well.
The last few years I was in Italy I stopped reading the news: the bullshit around Berlusconi and his entourage, the sad state of the politics there, the obsession with kidnapping or raping or murder or disasters. I was happy being ignorant, I stopped caring about things one should but can't really do anything about it. I felt a little out of the loop when somebody asked me "hey did you hear about the disaster in XXX?" and I had to play catch up.
Unfortunately now my morning routine consists in reading HN and The Guardian, I spend a lot of time reading about stuff that just feels like wasted time. In one hour of news reading there's probably a minute or two of stuff that interests me. I really want to stop that.
Aside: sometimes I catch up on news from Italian newspapers and it's incredible how depressing the tone of the articles are compared to e.g. The Guardian. The topic may be the same, but the British site has a much rosier approach to events. I'm positive that the modern news has the same effect of living with a slightly depressed housemate: he seems OK at first glance but slowly brings you down with his unhappiness and gray view of the world.
A girl from China joined my class in England, when we were 16¹. She mentioned that she didn't like British newspapers, since they were always so negative (we had to read and analyse them in class sometimes). Chinese news was much more positive.
It took a while for her to realise why this might be the case. I think it helped that the physics teacher regularly said things like "That bloody Tony Blair…".
¹ It was a private school, so her parents were paying the full cost.
Worked in news media for 9 months and can unequivocally say it made me pessimistic and completely depressed. Staring at 6 newschannels for 8 hours a day can be tough.
I don't read news but I trust I'll hear about it if something truly remarkable does happen. You might call that social filtering.
The reason I stopped reading news is that it's mostly noise: nothing in my life changed whether I knew this or that or not. After reading the paper, I had absolutely no idea of what I had just read. I can read a book at once and digest 90% of it on the first time: the news never stuck. I first dropped reading foreign affairs, then country-wide news, and finally local news, too.
It's not that I'm not interested at all but I prefer a) choose what is worth being interested in and 2) to digest the information in the form of an in-depth analysis later in time when I accidentally bump into (or search for) an article that summarizes something that has been flooding the news for years. Often even the summary doesn't really affect my life in any practical terms, so I skim it quickly to the extent of any academic curiosity I might have for the subject.
Reading news is addictive so you keep coming back for more.
Reading Hacker News and using Facebook is also addictive.
It's like mental sugar for you brain you keep coming back for more. I keep saying reading HN its to gather industry news but how much of it is relevant?
It's our duty as citizens of democracies to stay informed. If we don't stay informed then it is only the special interests that stand to make money that influence policies. Also it is important to stay on top of your industry trends to make sure you don't miss some opportunity. I agree that most crime and tragedy stories are useless information.
I disagree. I tend to think that brain has limit to the amount of information that can be perceived thoroughly. After going past this limit you are basically overloading your brain with information, which leads to decreased performance and such.
I'm not sure if there are any studies in this area (although I won't be surprised if there are) so I can only tell that from my personal experience (so this might be very subjective obviously).
This article is unsubstantiated claim after unsubstantiated claim leading to an overconfident fear that encapsulates everything I hate about modern news including things inside the article. I'd hope the author was self aware enough to see the irony in writing this article but I feel to stick after reading half of it to find out.
This is compounded by the fact that the world is full of people acting crazy and doing awful things to each other. News organizations are actually pretty careful to not bombard us with constant photos of dead children, even though Syria alone could fill the pages of the NYT everyday with images of their mangled bodies. (I have sat on the photo desk, and seen the photos stream by on the AP feed -- they rarely make the paper. )
So news organizations are aware of the fatigue that certain sensations cause, and they seek to mitigate them. They need their readers to feel just enough emotion, but not too much. A perpetual state of excitement and irritation. This is one reason why climate change doesn't get the coverage it deserves. It's just too depressing, and people stop reading.