The problem today is all the rehashing of events. Professional journalists honestly do a better job than all the rest of us.

Internet information is mostly garbage (where social media is concerned). Don’t get me wrong the quick access to information is nice—but ”quick” means “less thought out” for the majority of readers and writers.

Are people willing to read a full page analysis, and are they willing to wait while someone dredges up the tidbits to make that page? Or, are they at least willing to do their own research? Not really, and I think that's the real point of the article. It's not that sources are necessarily bad, but that it takes time to know which are good. Ironically, the impatience that gave us instant access to information has now created so much information that it takes more time to process it all.

Twitter is just the latest example of being able to instantly talk to the world, and it feeds on everyone's impatience. News organizations know this too, that's why we have a culture of "breaking news" where all that's needed for relevance is to be the channel that brought you the story: even if there is no story yet, and you're seeing 4 hours of pontificating over a recycled video clip.

My ideal news source would: 1. Not be speculative. I want to know what happened and what it meant/means, not what it might mean, or what might happen next. 2. Not involve PR people. I already know exactly what they're going to say, and why they're going to say it, they've brought me no value. Bring me either the newsmaker themselves, or someone who has at least the _possibility_ of being neutral-ish. 3. Never auto-play anything or force me to dismiss an add. Yay print on that front. :-)

The internet makes it that they don't need to fill pages and pages every day just to be tossed into the trash bin. A year old article can still be valuable, and it can be augmented with additional sides and updates. It just takes diligence and work, not to mention setting up publishing and formatting abilities way beyond the average cookie cutter CMS. Investing in their own production processes and technology, in other words.

But nobody's doing that. They're just making the churn more efficient. At most they'll link to some previous articles, forcing you to do the sifting yourself, and only linking one way.

By the time a newsworthy event reaches mainstream level, it's already been going for a while. That's the point at which I'd want to read a brief one pager of backstory, before diving into current events, surrounded by more context. Take the conflict in Syria: it might just be me not paying attention and being too busy with other stuff, but I genuinely missed when that started. When it did enter my radar, everyone was talking about it like we all knew how it happened. Well, if you take a random person on the street, someone who was upset at the (staged?) pictures of a dead kid... How many can tell you what that conflict is about and get close to the truth? I bet it's incredibly low, the only difference is I'm being honest about my ignorance instead of doing the stupid primate thing of pretending to be in the know in fear of looking foolish (and, I guess, western propaganda being just that when it comes to these subjects).

There's your hole in the market. That's what people want to pay for: not being the person who can't join in on interesting conversations. Well, are our current journalists up to that task? I very much doubt it, cos most have no ability beyond being a newsperson, jacks of no trade at all. Instead of letting experts do the talking, we're letting self important pretenders do it, and then, mostly to push an agenda.

The Quillette expose linked here about the geneticist bullied into suicide should lead us all to ask: why are we letting these morons tell us anything? They just want to enter industries and scenes they don't know, mine them for brief moments of relevance, and leave behind a wreck of human dignity. All over a ten minute talk they couldn't be bothered to understand, because bullying a sperg was more useful to them.

I was the TL for Google News many years ago, and I had to read/deal with a lot of news sources. There is a lot of poorly researched noise out there, and my advice is to avoid the noise as much as possible, especially if you are already getting the socially relevant bits via HN/Twitter.

We did some studies. Slower periodicals (e.g. Economist) provide a lot more value per unit time than the breaking news types (e.g. CNN). The "more news faster" types generally don't make you actually more informed (surveys), and generally more depressed (since they filter for attention grabbing).

This could be a multi-hour conversation, but hopefully that helps.

IMO the best source for news is when you pay for it and read it yourself. also multiple sources.

But I think in part it's just because things don't stay 'in focus' for very long any more. In the news world, one or two days is now all it takes for stuff to be seen as 'old hat', with the timing going down to maybe about two or three hours in the gaming world.

So for journalists, it's more profitable/attention grabbing to get anything out 'right now' that it is to do the research and delay the piece.

It might also be because the first news site to post about something interesting can often claim to be the 'source', even if they're really just writing about something that's already been posted elsewhere. Most journalists don't actually check for the original page or paper, they just reference the site they heard it discussed on.

So being quick can also get a bunch of equally rushed sites linking back to your work as if it was the original source. That can be awfully good for your page rank or whatever...

Either way, it's almost always better (for the journalist/news site/media source) to be the first to print something than to cover it most accurately. That's just how the increasingly quick news cycle works online.