"But the press of today is a for profit endeavour."

It is worth paying attention to the significant rise in prominence of non-profit newsrooms, particularly in the USA.

Some notable examples:

The Baltimore Banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Banner Founded: 2022

ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica Founded: 2007

The Texas Tribune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Tribune Founded: 2009

The Marshall Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Project Founded: 2014

I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).

Blaming society for the poor state of journalism is tempting but ignores that the root of the problem lies from within. Financial institutions and other journalists demand information dense journalism to do their jobs and have no problem paying for it, so this is what they receive. Most regular people view news as a form of entertainment and have no problem with sacrificing their attention, and this is what they receive.

Worth noting this is far from a modern problem. Google "yellow journalism".

> to grab and keep eyeballs

yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful

For-profit media is definitely a problem, but Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post and Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter because they thought they were more profitable than any other investments they could have made.

I believe they did it because they wanted the power that owning a media outlet can provide in order to help protect their actually profitable businesses.

It certainly helps that they have their own revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.

I was a news junkie for several years (now cured).

I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad.

My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.

[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.

That's why it's called Churnalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.

Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.

A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper.

[1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.

The average newspaper has grossly declined in quality IMO.

But there are some good investigative journalists out there.

Arguably, all the smart and careful journalists have moved to the weekly or monthly format. Economist, The Atlantic, and the like.

Average newspapers have average content.

But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.

Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.

Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.

The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.

Perhaps there's also less stringent editing on the "Showbiz & TV" or "Culture" sections of the paper than the "News" section. I mean, papers in general are working leaner than they should. Hopefully, they put the editing focus on what's most important, but still, being lazy even in a lighter section does reflect poorly on the entire publication.

Gell-Mann Amnesia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

For me, it seems like the solution is some sort of seamless micropayments solution for individual articles. I don't want to subscribe to 30 different outlets, but I'd pay $1-2 per article for a good piece of journalism from those outlets.

The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees.

I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base.

[1] https://readwithacta.com/

[2] https://www.supertab.co/

[3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

* I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW

People used to pay $2 a day for a newspaper, what's $2 a month gonna do?

On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap.

Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.

Most people don't, sure. But anyone who calls themselves a journalist or has gone to j-school sure as hell better. That's literally the point. That's what journalism school teaches, or at least should; Not how to repost crap from other crap. It's simply not an excuse for an organization like the bbc.

I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not.

I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.

The article is addressed to journalists, who have not only the necessary skills but also a professional obligation to provide truthful information

The checking doesn't require anything more than what the original writing required.

There is no reason to try to excuse it

The analogy is invalid and casts doubt on those self proclaimed incredibly rare critical reasoning skills.

You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".

OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.

However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.

Agreed. It seems like a supposed quote? If my elderly mom wrote that she went to a NY Mets baseball game in 1960, and Wikipedia says the Mets weren't formed until 1962, is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?

> In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.

Yes!

And two of the most common indicators of that are if you read something that either makes you thrilled or furious.

> The BBC pulled that article/episode

Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced.

It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".

The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents.

References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.

It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.

Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet

I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.

I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.

It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.

I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.

Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably.

The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.

But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?

Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.

What's even worse: Some of the responses to the authors AI generated responses read like prompts. Case in point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450

The last one hits hard:

  Can you provide the numbers for Manhattan, or SF centre?

I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.

The author of this post reponds like AI

Wow that is pretty bad. The comments in particular don't really make sense and are also dripping with AI mannerisms. Gross.

If I might be more optimistic, I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality, but people may not be likely to slow down and engage in suspicion of something they would not expect to be false. (Though the size of that window may be its own problem!) If I see someone claiming they have the cure for cancer, then I consider it a bit fantastical and want to investigate further. If a supposed quote from an older actress talks about her time doing Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really proc any doubt in me; I’m offering a baseline of trust to the publisher that forwarded that information along to me that this information is factual and not someone’s strange fanfiction about her life. I can appreciate that the author doubted it because a quick scroll of the blog shows that he’s got an interest in stagecraft and so it bumped up against his expertise, but I don’t think that I would have seen the quote myself and done the same… maybe I am one of those sub-median ignoramuses you mention. I agree that people uncritically eating up sensational news is a problem, but this is like, pretty straightforward in-memoriam news that I’d hope to not have to doubt.

Regurgitating slop is part of the problem, and as yet hasn't provided a solution...

This is downvoted but shouldn’t be; LLMs can help find sources they are better at searching than Google on many topics.