Debugging Tech Journalism

Towards the end the author talks about how Google News doesn't do a good job of actively promoting good, well researched content. I wonder why YouTube doesn't face this same problem. I know it's very subjective, but I've managed to find a plethora of incredibly well made videos on YouTube. It used to have a much worse clickbait problem in the past but at least in the last few years I've usually been able to .

I suppose it comes down to 2 main differences.

1. It's much easier to post a good looking but badly researched piece of writing than it is to make a good video. So it's hard to tell before clicking or investing time in reading something that it's good.

2. Google knows everything about a YouTube video's metrics so can base recommendations off of much more information than it can over just the click through rate that it knows about articles on Google News. So articles with high click through rate will be recommended regardless of whether they're actually high quality which incentivizes clickbait. Meanwhile a YouTube video with high click through rate but terrible audience retention won't be recommended.

In my opinion there are lots of good looking but badly researched videos on YouTube.

Yep. Making a video requires different skills from writing an article sure, but those skills don't necessarily equate to knowing anything about the topic in question. Plenty of slick YouTube videos are full of lies and misinformation, or outright plagiarised from other sources.

YouTube has plenty of crap, especially autogenerated crap, but it's still much more difficult to produce a video that's going to hit all the right SEO buttons than to do the same with text on the web.

> I wonder why YouTube doesn't face this same problem.

Could be personalisation. It could be that you habitually reach out to same high quality sources(channels) and hence YT promotes those to your profile more aka the bubble.

Contrast to my uncle, always getting right wing garbage, plenty of conspiracy and “what-if-ism” and promotion of private insurance/hearing aids etc.

People watch what they perceive as quality content. While it is all probably paid for trash... Be it on any side.

youtube is full of crap news and crap tech stuff. At least in my feed it's atrocious. Tons of videos of techi video spam made as filler so userX has something to post.

I sympathize but it's hard for me to avoid the conclusion that this has already been decided.

Real journalism will be paid for and appreciated by the elite, and the public, the masses, will have to live with bad clickbait.

Not necessarily. My experience is that most tech journalism is pretty bad regardless of how much you're paying for it.

Of course, this might be because for many topics, actual authoritative research and meaningful discussion happens among enthusiasts and industry figures rather than media outlets. So anything you hear about in a tech related publication is probably second hand info quickly written up by someone who isn't necessarily an expect in the subject matter...

There is no law which says that it has to be this way

except nobody is willing to pay subscription fees for newspapers like we used to.

including myself, which im kind of ashamed of

I had the same comment in a previous HN thread and somebody responded noting something along the lines of, "I remember seeing free newspapers and magazines everywhere, especially in coffee shops." There are a few nits to pick about that but it stands that it was possible to get free news back in the day. If we did put subscriptions on most news then would places like coffee shops be able to offer those sources for free, maybe tied in with their wifi?

Also, and I hate to say this because nobody likes this model, but what if news took on a cable TV model where you pay $20/month and subscribe to a few different pubs, maybe even allowing you to make your own bundles? What if it was a box we could tick on our internet bill?

btw I subscribe to a few local news sites and the horrible thing is that it's becoming a slippery slope. Now even though I only hit science.org once in awhile for instance it's like, guhhhh I feel guilty for blocking all their trackers and ads, and I should pay something.

All the subscriptions I've seen deeply outweigh the cost of delivering the content to me. The Guardian had an interesting CTA where they asked me to subscribe for $13/month because I've read 20 articles this year. That worked out to about $1 per minute of reading time, which doesn't reflect the value of their work (and I think their work is pretty good!). If they had more subscribers would they charge less? And why does serving electronic content now cost so much more than a paper version?

> Also, and I hate to say this because nobody likes this model, but what if news took on a cable TV model where you pay $20/month and subscribe to a few different pubs, maybe even allowing you to make your own bundles?

You're describing the New York Times subscription model, fwiw.

As in: when I subscribe to the NYTimes Games app I also get a newspaper? (kidding!) When I look at their subscription page it just shows the paper and a few other bespoke properties like Wirecutter. (https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/all-access)

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/cooking.html

You'll have to scroll down (and visit each individual page) to get to the separate subscription plans, because dark patterns, but it is still available as an option.

Money comes from advertisement. Distribution/exposure is the problem.

Asterisk is one of the current great magazines to follow. Their articles have been great, even in domains I'm knowledgeable of.

Haven't checked out Asterisk yet. 404 media is another highlight of tech journalism.

https://www.404media.co/

Ex Vice Motherboard.

Eh? I’ve never heard of them until this article and my first impression of it was worse than bad.

The author seems full of hubris and the subject matter is a reformulated “tech journalism is broken” is comically late by, oh, about a decade. The author seems to be unaware that this isn’t a new thing.

Then there’s some cringeworthy stuff like unironically using the word normie before conjuring an irrelevant excuse to proudly remind everyone how easy political writing was in his corner of the society where there is only one correct candidate to support.

Author is also selling a paid subscription to an AI magazine. In one of the free articles he coins the phrase “singularism” (and used it in multiple articles) being oblivious to the fact that singularitarianism has existed for 30 years and means the same thing as his “catchphrase”. As the saying goes, “if you can’t pronounce singularitarian, you can’t be one”. https://www.understandingai.org/p/why-im-not-worried-about-a...

It’s alright folks, AGI is not a risk because the world isn’t a chessboard.

It just seems like a grift festival in there.

Timothy B. Lee has been doing great tech reporting for 15+ years.

Getting good tech writing, and even good tech policy writing, done is harder every year.

There's fewer ad dollars and lots more low-quality writing and outlets. So there's no a lot of money out there to pay reporters who know tech, have a good nose for news, and who can file decent copy.

Techcrunch recently shutdown its paid product because it couldn't afford the writers who could do the in depth work:https://www.luxcapital.com/securities/techcrunch-plus-termin...

The industry has lost so many good ones due to layoffs or just people deciding there are easier ways to make money.

There are still some great tech reporters employed in the industry or running their own publications. The NYT snapped up some great ones, like Cade Metz and Mike Isaac.

Kim Zetter is an outstanding computer security reporter still making it as a freelancer.

Ars Technica had a stable of great policy reporters, who understood the nuances of patents, copyright, etc.

Even Ars is barebones now. Jon Brodkin does great work.

The 404 Media folks, Vice Motherboard ex-pats, are pioneering a worker-owned subscription-centered site and are breaking all kinds of news. But the economics are still hard.

If you want good tech reporting, there are two things you can do personally: one, subscribe to good sites, and two, learn to be a good source, whether by leaking news, just sharing what's new and cool, or teaching a reporter.

It's not all bleak, but times is tough and if you want good journalism, you got to support it.

Serves you guys right for undermining the political fairness in the country imo.

I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean by that?

Look at the NYT for example:

https://www.nytco.com/press/a-statement-from-the-new-york-ti...

Their response for being too lax on Trump and overly focusing on irrelevant issues on Biden (eg. age) is to get angrier that Biden isn't giving them enough interviews.

Very nice! We know that all they stand for is a good horserace so their articles get clicks. Not information, democracy, or anything else.

I've been reading his Understanding AI publication for a while. In my experience he's a good journalist in general, but has a massive blind spot when it comes to advanced AI, and frequently makes elementary errors in service of his already-decided conclusion to downplay them. I still think it's worth reading for the other stuff; his reporting on the state of self-driving cars has been quite good, for example.

This article tries to describe the past, present & potential future of the relationships between the Media, Tech, and their Audiences. However, I felt the stream-of-conscious style was disorganized, and its ideas were undeveloped.

If the writer had instead developed a logical mental model of those relationships and presented them in stages, I could follow along easier and appreciate their points better. Even better, a few diagrams to demonstrate how they see the territory shifting over time. Wrap it up with citations on prior art, and then it may yet be a proper tech spec :^)

I think a lack of illustrations is the least of the writer’s faults.

My take is that journalism provides the pre-vetted training data for the slow AI that is society. (And consequently the fast AI that is LLM which read all the journalism ever recorded)

It’s why it’s important that journalists focus on “this is true”. It’s why science papers are journalism. It’s why it’s important that science papers are published solely on the basis of “is it true” not “does it follow a narrative (#).

This is the huge test for AI/LLM; If you state a thing, can you provide a link for why you know that. At the moment we just have “based on things I have read the thing is statistically most likely to be said (hence true).”

We really need “the truth”

(#) I am thinking here of things like archeology in Nazi Germany which switched heavily to publishing nonsense about Aryan people in different parts of world earlier than anyone else. Not some comment on diversity and inclusion.

My old journalism professor, Bob Woodword ("Not that one," he'd chuckle) would constantly chant "Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy" as he taught. I think he chose those words carefully because he recognized that while all news is going to have a slant, at least you can be accurate in presenting it. I don't know if LLMs will ever be able to see the facts through the slant.

It's important to note that journalism tends not to operate on a truth standard, but on an attribution standard, and holds itself to a "balance" which requires finding one liar to match every true statement, like a shitty logic puzzle.

And of course stuff on newspaper websites that's labelled "opinion" is under no standards at all.

> Not some comment on diversity and inclusion.

"Archaeology should not be Nazi" is very much a DEI statement! If a very basic one.