Of News & Curation of Truth
Journalism and critical debate is under attack pretty much everywhere in the world. I've been thinking about authoritarian states' crackdown on the press--from high-profile cases like Jamal Khashoggi to recent ones like the organized attacks on Asma Shirazi for her BBC piece, or 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa: vilified and arrested by the Philippine government, or Rana Ayuub, forever a target of Indian authorities. Recently, add to the list of autocrats attacking the press Mark Zuckerberg, who, on Facebook's earnings call, cast himself as the victim of a conspiracy by the malicious media.
It seems like curation of high-quality, reliable content has never been more important--or harder. Our phones are our second homes, and the information ecosystems we live in form our entire lens on the world. The social and political impact of an increasingly-online world has been profound. In developing countries, the added vulnerability of weak institutions makes news and analysis essential tools for truth-telling and accountability. Our universal "truths" are increasingly divergent, co-relating to where we live, who our peer influencers are, and what we consume. Our bubbles may be big or small, fluid or rigid, but we all live in them. Even for those that stray far from broken products like Facebook, avoiding misinformation, distortion of truth, and echo chambers is tough.
What if there were a better way to consume, without the accompanying dread and hyperbole, without the clickbaity, inaccurate headlines that are designed to shock, without wanting to curl up in a ball and never read the news again?
As I thought more about this, a few things stood out to me this week:
Victor Pickard published a great essay about media capitalism and the impact of excessive reliance on advertisement dollars. We've known for a while now that financial incentives run counter to producing good journalism. "Is the journalism crisis just a capitalism crisis?", asks a roundtable discussion, linking to a column that argues that local journalism is infrastructure. Reading these made me reflect on how the most useful and uncorrupted news sources remain either open-source and free (like Wikipedia) or without shareholders or billionaire ownership (like Guardian). We need creative models that break journalism's over-reliance on advertising and political donors. We also need to go back to community-owned, localized models of news, and better incentives and support structures for independent news. The United States is an outlier among developed democracies, with its tiny, under-funded public media sector.
The birth of the newspaper itself is a fascinating study in the universality of censorship and manipulation of truth. The foundation of modern journalism, with its vision for a popular and politically independent press, was laid by European refugees that fled persecution to land as immigrants in New York City. Suppression of journalism in the service of opacity and corruption goes back to the earliest newspapers of the world. The first American multi-page newspaper was published in Boston in 1690--the 'Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick'. Its first story was disparaging of the British, causing the paper to be put out of business four days later. India's first newspaper, the four-page Hicky's Bengal Gazette was published in 1780, with accounts of the East India Company's corruption. It was immediately sued by Governor General Warren Hastings for libel, and prohibited from being carried by the post office. In Europe, censorship stifled newspaper development well into the 18th century.
Today, the definition of "news" seems to be shifting, for the worse. Adweek just named Tucker Carlson its 'Hottest News Host'. "He may be cable news' most controversial personality but he's also the most popular," says the announcement. That Carlson's commentary qualifies as news, and is being normalized and mainstreamed by news channels, is concerning.
On the flipside, I keep discovering new, independent sources of news and analysis that give me hope. There are more well-known ones like Jacobin and Project Syndicate, and more up-and-coming ones like Rest Of World, which reports on technology and society with a focus on outside the US, as well as niche, cultural publications like the South Asia-focused FiftyTwo, whose recent pieces on the history and politics of items like the sari, and the biryani, I've enjoyed immensely. The audience for niche and independent reporting and analysis seems to be growing, and I'm always on the lookout to discover more to add to my sources.
Given how impactful our daily intake of news and analysis is, I am amazed that I (and so many of us, it seems) still get the lion's share of valuable links from happenstance sources, like twitter, or friends sending me pieces, supplemented by some newsletters I subscribe to. From a tech perspective, I feel there is a lack of great news-focused products that can reliably curate and surface high-quality content, while giving users a fully customizable experience. This last bit is critical to me. I've tried Apple News (the paid version), Google News, several tools like Flipboard, Feebly, SmartNews etc. Google News is certainly better than others, but none give me access to news I actually look forward to reading, that demote high-on-shock, low-on-value content, that provide reliable coverage that is a mix of relevant and diverse, and that allow me to fully own and calibrate the experience.
Overall, I want a lot more control to create the news consumption experience I want -- high on quality, reliability, depth, novelty and nuance. I like Google News' feature that shows full coverage of a topic (news, analysis, videos, tweets) but it still allows very limited customization. I can only sort by relevance or date. I can't follow pieces by author or journalist, or by regions of the world. I can't follow content buckets outside of the usual, broad ones like business, tech, sports etc. I can't highlight, bookmark, save, and organize pieces directly from my feed. Teaching the feed what I like is a clunky, highly inconsistent experience (across mobile and web). I can't easily do things like add more analysis/opinion instead of news, or podcasts instead of tweets. I imagine so many plug-ins could be made available that let me do creative things with my experience. International news still pulls primarily from mainstream behemoth publications, overlooking a range of quality, smaller publications hosted in the countries they report on. I'd also love to see much better local news, with the ability to select neighborhoods. For a city like New York (my selected location), the quality and breadth of content feels disappointing.
Update, Nov 20: Discovered a few very interesting iOS and Android plug-ins that do things like:
rewrite headlines to make them less click-baity, and more representative of the body of the piece
provide short summaries of long pieces
score pieces on objectivity and accuracy
Now imagine a news curation and discovery tool that did all of this and more for you. There's so much value curation tools could add, to both the demand (readers) and the supply side (publications and writers), so much more control they could give us to influence the quality and diversity of the news we cross paths with daily.
