Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: The Washington Post Says It Publishes Something Every Minute -- How Much Is Too Much? (washingtonian.com)
Media outlets are increasingly vying for your attention. But they are also feeding Google's algorithm. Some of them churn hundreds of news articles every day, hoping to offer a diverse range of articles to their readers, and also increase their "search space." The Washington Post is currently running a promotional offer -- letting people get a six-month digital subscription for $10 (pretty good if you ask me). But the Washington Post also mentions that is now publishes a new piece of content every minute. That's like 1,440 articles, videos and other forms of content in one single day. This raises a question: how much content is too much content? How many stories can a person possibly find time to read in a day? Do you feel that perhaps outlets should cut down on the number of things they publish? Or are you happy with the way things are?
From the synopsis: "The Washington Post is currently running a promotional offer -- letting people get a six-month digital subscription for $10 (pretty good if you ask me)."
Browsing the Washington Post in your browser's "privacy" mode is free.
Don't read the drivel that passes for news these days and you'll only have a couple of articles to read a day at most.
Anything that traditional media corporations publish is "too much" as far as I'm concerned: they are money-making enterprises that will say whatever it takes to maximize their profit and power, and that usually involves a combination of: (1) trolling the public and causing discord, (2) spreading FUD, (3) kowtowing to politicians and the government. What these media corporations don't do is care about your well being or give your reliable and unbiased information.
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...just to republish the talking points directly from the Clinton campaign, without all that wasteful middleman editing and rewriting. Saves everyone time and money...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Agreed!! We can hardly keep up with this site.
Everything is BREAKING NEWS even if it happened yesterday or the day before. Reporting on incidents before there are any real known facts, having EXPERTS come on and speculate on what MIGHT have happened or not without anything to really base an opinion on yet.
Not really news... entertainment for many, boring and shut off for me.
Except that people have different interests. If you have 30 categories of news then 1440 / 30 = a news story every half hour if you are only interested in say "Sports" or "Business". If you're interested in Linux and Programming I bet that only represents probably a story every couple hours at best.
Saying a story every 10 minutes is too much is like saying Netflix has too much content because nobody could ever watch 100,000 hours of television. It's true, but it ignores the fact that there isn't a perfect venn diagram of interest.
The WaPost has 740 staff writers. So that's only a story every 4 hours/writer. If they gave each writer 5 minutes to write a story I would worry about quality but 4 hours is plenty to make some calls and interview people.
So, basically, the Washington Post is proudly declaring that it's just a click farm. Churning out nonsense to get page impressions.
1 per minute = 1,440 per day.
Pre internet, how many individual articles, editorials, comics, ads were in a typical daily print edition of the New York Times? I would venture that 1,000+ would not be out of the question.
The bad thing with that is even if you try to do the "right thing" by reading an internet newspaper, you end up in a filtering bubble by only looking up a couple categories you're interested in.
This makes an actual newspaper vastly superior. Even if you skim over or ignore swathes of it, all of the content is there and instantly available. Once in a while you might read something in the "useless" culural sections or among some content you usually don't give a damn about.
A newspaper is a collection of a few dozen reflective, zero power 4K displays that you can bend and fold at will, and where you don't even have to scroll. Scrolling is so 500 B.C.!
The shame is newspapers have shrunk and lowered in quality and merely echo propaganda like TV, radio and internet news sites do. Corporate power and advertisement make them trivially susceptible to pressure. I'm not sure that in my country there is any good daily newspaper left. E.g. war stories are the cartoon-like version where our authorities call for us to be outraged about the bombings of civilians by Russia and Syria, but starving people hit by artillery don't officially exist if they're not in the right areas. It's only a war crime when Syrians defend themselves, not when the West or Israel or Al Qaida does it.
Also, everyone is unemployed, underemployed or underpaid, and tobacco increased 2x in price, food increases despite the zero inflation. So they arbitrate between a newspaper and bread or a newspaper and smokes, and decline to buy the newspaper.
Internet news sites are the shit end of the stick, like video games replaced going outside and free or pirated movies replaced the theater.