This might just be a contrarian take on my part, but maybe we'd be better off without Google News--and most of the publishers it features.
When was the last time you read a news article in any "major" news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, "This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story"?
I don't remember having had this experience since I was a child, decades ago. I was a teenager when I first extrapolated that if they couldn't report with even big picture accuracy on the things I did know something about, odds were that they were similarly wrong about all the things I didn't know about too.
With that perspective in mind, it's come down to a question for me of whether it is good or bad for my life to be immersed, near-constantly, in stories about (usually awful) things happening in parts of the world that I can't do a thing about. I don't think it is.
I think that's what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this "victimer than thou" culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help. Nobody feels like an agent anymore because they're constantly immersed in stories of awful things in which they don't have any agency.
There's this broad cultural assumption that "one must be informed about world affairs," but it's at the expense of local affairs, the affairs we could affect. If you know about violence on the other side of the planet, but don't know that your neighbor three doors down is having trouble getting to work and at risk of losing their job because their car broke down, I'd strongly argue that your priorities are out of whack. People's lives everywhere are getting worse because we're all worrying about things far away that we can't affect rather than local problems we could actually solve.
I'd just as soon see Google News shutter. I think we would all be better off without the 24-hour global news cycle.
> When was the last time you read a news article in any "major" news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, "This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story"?
Most of the time? Maybe I don't know what you mean.
Most of the news that appears via AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, etc. is largely factually accurate. Especially when you're looking at their core competencies of covering domestic US politics, basic foreign affairs, and domestic economics/business. E.g. they've been doing accurate jobs on factual reporting about the recent battles for house majority leader, events unfolding in Israel, and events unfolding in Ukraine. Sometimes you might be bothered with their "present both sides and don't take a stance" but it's still largely factual, accurate reporting about what is happening and what public figures are saying.
If by "big picture" you mean analysis, however, that's not exactly news. Analysis is necessarily opinionated -- declaring that a public figure is lying, that another public figure ought to do X. That's not what Google News is for -- that's what publications like the Economist, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vox, or New York Magazine are for. (Or pick your own preferred set.)
But you need both. 24 hour political and international news is very necessary for a lot of people in decision-making positions, and for people affected by a lot of these events. If it's unhealthy for you personally, then you shouldn't consume it however. For example, I read tons about politics and economics, but I don't look at crime reports stuff at all. (And Google News doesn't show it to me either, since the "For You" tab is really good at learning your preferences.)
Absolutely agree. One thing that has only recently occurred to me is also this stuff showing up by default in new browser windows/tabs. I’ve used about:blank as my default page for probably 25 years or more, and that is probably my first configuration change on any new profile, so I don’t normally think about it, but the normies who don’t configure anything are exposed to this crap every day on their work computers. And of course the “top story” is always political clickbait for engagement and eyeballs. This cannot possibly be good or healthy.
> I think that's what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this "victimer than thou" culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help.
That's because of decades of "small/lean state" preachers. Be it the UK's NHS, Germany's unemployment/social security scheme, or the US healthcare/social security/pension systems, it's the same: people don't have a safety net to fallback on, other than (for some) family. They're fighting for financial or literal survival every day - just look how many people are living paycheck to paycheck, and our collective governments are doing nothing to help the 99%. No wonder the populist far-right is in an upswing.
It’s not the news itself at fault, it’s how sensationalized and emotionally triggering everything is designed to be from the story selection to the editorial control over titles. Everything is framed to generate either outrage or my-team-won fuzzies.
I follow current events by reading the wikipedia current events portal [1] so I can stay informed without all the manipulation. It’s a completely different experience from the newsmedia: biases are still aplenty but they’re downright quaint when stacked against commercial incentives.
I agree entirely, I used to pay attention to the news, in part because I wanted to be knowledgable, and I guess the premise was growing up I'd eventually be part of a leadership class that would need to make big decisions based on that knowledge...but I'm frankly just a laborer, and being ignorant of the larger world is a totally reasonable and healthy position to take.
The alternative seems to be to become an absolute news junkie which means a politics junkie which means a useful idiot arguing online with other useful idiots for some political movement I have no control or power over.
Google news is a mess and doesn't work. Perhaps if you had all the requisite subscriptions. As of right now, it seems to direct you to a family of many publishers with separate plans.
This makes google news itself pretty hard to use. I think complaining about "paywalls" in general is stupid, but it's really hard for the news reader this way.
Part of the problem for me, is it seems like it's still very hard to get away from the web 2.0 part of news anyway. Is subscribing going to reduce the clickbait journalism? Nope.
I have apple news, and the quality of what I see isn't exactly encouraging me to go out and buy more subs. I will probably still get shotty, rage inducing content, just like I get on reddit.
By the way this same pattern seems to hold with local stations. In fact local publishers more pay walled, for important local stories. I think you could argue these are the subs I should pay for the most.
I will be a contrarian here, since it's been in plain sight for 20+ years and everyone loves to hate it:
I think Wikipedia is about the most objective source out there. Before you jump on selective examples of bias: no, it's not perfect and IS full of BS and errors. But I would believe something they said long before believing anything in NYT or WaPo.
They make a much stronger effort to be fair and complete than any major news outlet does. I think their reviled editing process at least serves the function of asking writers, "Is this a fair summary?" most of the time. It's easy to see that the mainstream media gave up on that a long time ago.
(and yes, some of the bio pages are written by the subjects.)
The "Current events" portal is my main source of international news. I love the density of information, link to varied sources, and direct links to Wikipedia articles for background information.
I suppose it can be newsworthy to the extent that Google's news division has any editorial control over its content and influence on global discourse, and to what extent are those ~40 people a significant proportion of Google News itself—are they 5000 staff total, or are they just 200? What department took the brunt of the layoffs: admin, engineering, content...?
To be clear, I have no opinion or information either way. I'm just providing some conditions under which it could be considered newsworthy.
There’s a lot of interest in Google News right now by G7 countries that want to shake it down for cash.
Australia was successful, Canada is in the middle of the implementation of legislation (goes into effect in December) and Google is likely going to remove news and all news links in response, and it sounds like the US is in the process of drafting similar legislation.
What it might mean that they are specifically reducing headcount in their news division is the interest point. Not the impact to the company as a whole.
Not just this, but for example, the discourse around big tech companies introducing bias into "news" is increasing. So reductions in those teams is itself newsworthy.
News that affects the news industry always has a priority for news outlets, obviously. The fact that it's a tiny percentage of the staff is neither here nor there: if Apple laid off a few dozens from its core hardware design team, that'd be newsworthy too.
There is a lot going on right now, with Google + Meta at the centre of possible regulation over news links; with the wars in Israel and Ukraine causing spikes in misinformation; with American trust in news at historic lows, and with X's disbanding of its Trust&Safety team leading to a rise in misinformation on the platform; any withdrawal from a service as prominent as Google's News is going to be noteworthy.
It’s important because the news industry is important, and companies like Google siphoned off billions of dollars from the media. Democracies require well informed citizens and we know there are well-funded operations producing fake news-like stories trying to sway public opinion, which raises the concern that performative layoffs will leave Google less prepared to stop misinformation efforts.
10 years ago, I thought it was important have newsrooms reporting on current events. But now it's so schlocky, even on things I agree with them on, that I think they do more harm than good. Really anyone who has to come up with something shocking to report everyday is going to put out garbage. I include in this major city newspapers, news only websites (like tech press), network and cable news, and weekly magazines.
Here are two good breakdowns of the problems/limits of modern mainstream news.
It's worth pointing out that mass media has had a brief lifespan, about from the 1920s. And the "golden age" when everyone was following it was really only 1950 to 2000.
It's fine if it declines, and even if it disappears.
Canada's accidental banning of links to news is a good model, we should do it in the US. Let's tax any links to news sites from major web platforms.
Do you mean, news have a cost to society? We should tax the presence of news on Bing’s homepage, in your iPhone notifications, on television?
I agree, but those in power don’t. Maybe we should rather tax hyperboles and keywords like “Alert!” at the beginning of tweets. “Breaking news!”. It’s so stressing I auto-ban authors who use them.
Any usage of the red color on television. Usage of flashes and running messages. We should come up with a way to measure the equivalent of loudness (TV, radio and ads are all standardized in average authorized loudness) but for alertness.
We should smoothe out the level of alertness, across all digital screens.
To this day, I don't understand why the Discover section on new tabs in mobile Chrome is disconnected from Google News. It makes no sense to be managing interests and news sources in both places, but here we are and here we've been for years.
> Both wars have spawned a surge in the spread of misinformation across the web, heightening the importance of Google and other sites that users count on to find up-to-date news
That is so hypocritical coming from the news industry that this past week had massive headlines saying Israel bombed a hospital prompting massive riots across the Middle East, when the truth was that an Islamic Jihad missile misfired and blew up in the parking lot of the hospital. The misinformation spread by the news media probably did as much harm as any spread on tech company platforms.
They seem to want censorship for everyone else, while wanting “freedom of the press” for themselves.
I’ve been reading about the counterclaims about the origin of that missile all week in the news media, along with quotes from experts about the difficulties of investigating in a war zone. The absolute certainty is mostly social media and the highly partisan tabloids.
Compare to Twitter which has reduced the differentiation between a long form article and an unsourced image and you’ll find that Google News is nevertheless much superior to any other way to get information (though twitter was superior last year!)
Tell me about spreading propaganda while spreading propaganda. You know what is causing the world to riot against Israel? Israel bombing Gaza and human beings (kids among them). The hospital was just one of the targets, by mistake or not.
Many news writers can easily be freed up and replaced by procedural text generators such as llms. Both generate equally misleading and inaccurate “news”, but at least procedural generators are more humane.
Hah, I actually finally started using Google News after 10 years because it looks like Twitter 2023 is effectively completely broken for news. I was grateful that at least we could revert to 10 years ago, now our current best mechanism of finding truth
[+] [-] smeej|2 years ago|reply
When was the last time you read a news article in any "major" news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, "This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story"?
I don't remember having had this experience since I was a child, decades ago. I was a teenager when I first extrapolated that if they couldn't report with even big picture accuracy on the things I did know something about, odds were that they were similarly wrong about all the things I didn't know about too.
With that perspective in mind, it's come down to a question for me of whether it is good or bad for my life to be immersed, near-constantly, in stories about (usually awful) things happening in parts of the world that I can't do a thing about. I don't think it is.
I think that's what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this "victimer than thou" culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help. Nobody feels like an agent anymore because they're constantly immersed in stories of awful things in which they don't have any agency.
There's this broad cultural assumption that "one must be informed about world affairs," but it's at the expense of local affairs, the affairs we could affect. If you know about violence on the other side of the planet, but don't know that your neighbor three doors down is having trouble getting to work and at risk of losing their job because their car broke down, I'd strongly argue that your priorities are out of whack. People's lives everywhere are getting worse because we're all worrying about things far away that we can't affect rather than local problems we could actually solve.
I'd just as soon see Google News shutter. I think we would all be better off without the 24-hour global news cycle.
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 years ago|reply
Most of the time? Maybe I don't know what you mean.
Most of the news that appears via AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, etc. is largely factually accurate. Especially when you're looking at their core competencies of covering domestic US politics, basic foreign affairs, and domestic economics/business. E.g. they've been doing accurate jobs on factual reporting about the recent battles for house majority leader, events unfolding in Israel, and events unfolding in Ukraine. Sometimes you might be bothered with their "present both sides and don't take a stance" but it's still largely factual, accurate reporting about what is happening and what public figures are saying.
If by "big picture" you mean analysis, however, that's not exactly news. Analysis is necessarily opinionated -- declaring that a public figure is lying, that another public figure ought to do X. That's not what Google News is for -- that's what publications like the Economist, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vox, or New York Magazine are for. (Or pick your own preferred set.)
But you need both. 24 hour political and international news is very necessary for a lot of people in decision-making positions, and for people affected by a lot of these events. If it's unhealthy for you personally, then you shouldn't consume it however. For example, I read tons about politics and economics, but I don't look at crime reports stuff at all. (And Google News doesn't show it to me either, since the "For You" tab is really good at learning your preferences.)
[+] [-] acheron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
That's because of decades of "small/lean state" preachers. Be it the UK's NHS, Germany's unemployment/social security scheme, or the US healthcare/social security/pension systems, it's the same: people don't have a safety net to fallback on, other than (for some) family. They're fighting for financial or literal survival every day - just look how many people are living paycheck to paycheck, and our collective governments are doing nothing to help the 99%. No wonder the populist far-right is in an upswing.
[+] [-] civilitty|2 years ago|reply
I follow current events by reading the wikipedia current events portal [1] so I can stay informed without all the manipulation. It’s a completely different experience from the newsmedia: biases are still aplenty but they’re downright quaint when stacked against commercial incentives.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
[+] [-] fullshark|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
I agree entirely, I used to pay attention to the news, in part because I wanted to be knowledgable, and I guess the premise was growing up I'd eventually be part of a leadership class that would need to make big decisions based on that knowledge...but I'm frankly just a laborer, and being ignorant of the larger world is a totally reasonable and healthy position to take.
The alternative seems to be to become an absolute news junkie which means a politics junkie which means a useful idiot arguing online with other useful idiots for some political movement I have no control or power over.
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|2 years ago|reply
This makes google news itself pretty hard to use. I think complaining about "paywalls" in general is stupid, but it's really hard for the news reader this way.
Part of the problem for me, is it seems like it's still very hard to get away from the web 2.0 part of news anyway. Is subscribing going to reduce the clickbait journalism? Nope.
I have apple news, and the quality of what I see isn't exactly encouraging me to go out and buy more subs. I will probably still get shotty, rage inducing content, just like I get on reddit.
By the way this same pattern seems to hold with local stations. In fact local publishers more pay walled, for important local stories. I think you could argue these are the subs I should pay for the most.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
I think Wikipedia is about the most objective source out there. Before you jump on selective examples of bias: no, it's not perfect and IS full of BS and errors. But I would believe something they said long before believing anything in NYT or WaPo.
They make a much stronger effort to be fair and complete than any major news outlet does. I think their reviled editing process at least serves the function of asking writers, "Is this a fair summary?" most of the time. It's easy to see that the mainstream media gave up on that a long time ago.
(and yes, some of the bio pages are written by the subjects.)
[+] [-] momothereal|2 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
[+] [-] aldarisbm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mordisquitos|2 years ago|reply
To be clear, I have no opinion or information either way. I'm just providing some conditions under which it could be considered newsworthy.
[+] [-] speak_plainly|2 years ago|reply
Australia was successful, Canada is in the middle of the implementation of legislation (goes into effect in December) and Google is likely going to remove news and all news links in response, and it sounds like the US is in the process of drafting similar legislation.
[+] [-] tyingq|2 years ago|reply
Not just this, but for example, the discourse around big tech companies introducing bias into "news" is increasing. So reductions in those teams is itself newsworthy.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|2 years ago|reply
So the overall SWE hiring landscape is still pretty rough.
[+] [-] imgabe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonaldi|2 years ago|reply
There is a lot going on right now, with Google + Meta at the centre of possible regulation over news links; with the wars in Israel and Ukraine causing spikes in misinformation; with American trust in news at historic lows, and with X's disbanding of its Trust&Safety team leading to a rise in misinformation on the platform; any withdrawal from a service as prominent as Google's News is going to be noteworthy.
[+] [-] b112|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acdha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngetchell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshe|2 years ago|reply
Here are two good breakdowns of the problems/limits of modern mainstream news.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalism-needs-more-taylor-sw...
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265
Americans wisely agree, trust in media is very low https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re....
It's worth pointing out that mass media has had a brief lifespan, about from the 1920s. And the "golden age" when everyone was following it was really only 1950 to 2000.
It's fine if it declines, and even if it disappears.
Canada's accidental banning of links to news is a good model, we should do it in the US. Let's tax any links to news sites from major web platforms.
[+] [-] zzzeek|2 years ago|reply
I think the first amendment might have a few words on that
[+] [-] eastbound|2 years ago|reply
I agree, but those in power don’t. Maybe we should rather tax hyperboles and keywords like “Alert!” at the beginning of tweets. “Breaking news!”. It’s so stressing I auto-ban authors who use them.
Any usage of the red color on television. Usage of flashes and running messages. We should come up with a way to measure the equivalent of loudness (TV, radio and ads are all standardized in average authorized loudness) but for alertness.
We should smoothe out the level of alertness, across all digital screens.
[+] [-] Jellyfish19|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|2 years ago|reply
That is so hypocritical coming from the news industry that this past week had massive headlines saying Israel bombed a hospital prompting massive riots across the Middle East, when the truth was that an Islamic Jihad missile misfired and blew up in the parking lot of the hospital. The misinformation spread by the news media probably did as much harm as any spread on tech company platforms.
They seem to want censorship for everyone else, while wanting “freedom of the press” for themselves.
[+] [-] acdha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kunalgupta|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenebego|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meiraleal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majikaja|2 years ago|reply
Even the paid experience of news sites is horrible. FT is the only one I feel positively about.
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] megous|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eumenes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kunalgupta|2 years ago|reply