Tag: news

Read news written by journalists

A recent article from the Blue Skunk blog (Doug Johnson is about my age and has been blogging about as long) laments the decline of newspapers and the willingness of everyone to read original journalism. He identifies the lack of willingness to pay for a paper or two as a significant issue. There are many great books on the decline of newspapers in the last few years (I happen to be reading Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson at this time) and all describe the struggles of news sources that employ journalists to collect the news from original sources in an era of declining revenue and free outlets that are mostly opinions and retelling of the content generated by others. There are compounding factors such as the lack of patience for investing time in long form reading and a focus on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed, etc. leading individuals to assume they are informed when they are not. Doug urges us to invest in actual news sources as a commitment to reading the news and keeping journalism alive.

Johnson’s post caused me to think about my own reading. I read a lot and a great deal of long form content (books, news articles), but I don’t subscribe to what might be described as a major national news outlet. I subscribe to the Minneapolis StarTribune which I read digitally and we pay for an Apple News+ subscription which offers to a wide selection of magazines, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, but not the New York Times or Washington Post. I read articles from the Post and Times when articles not part of the subscriptions are available or until I have exhausted my monthly allotment.

I encourage others to look at two news aggregation services which I use and describe below.

First, is the Apple news aggregator and Apple+ (Apple+ is $10 a month).

This site offers access to a wide variety of quality sources. Try the link even if you are not interested in the paid level. The site seems to work better using Safari and I would recommend this browser if you are interested in the paid level (it knows who you are across devices and this seems to make access easier).

I would also recommend Google’s aggregation site – news.google.com. This site is interesting in the way it organizes content by topic with multiple sources per topic and if you are willing as a way to explore the same story from multiple perspectives.

Google news also makes it clear whether a story is available with or without a subscription to a particular service saving the time and frustration of trying to read content you will not see in full.

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Evidently, a good idea is not good enough

I am a news junkie and I have been using a product called Circa when I read on my phone. I opened Circa this evening and the lead was that Circa is going on hiatus (shutting down).

I became interested in Circa when reading the Jeff Jarvis book “Geeks bearing gifts”. Jarvis writes about innovation in the news industry and used Circa as an example. Circa proposed that no one wants to read extended articles on a mobile device and came up with a way of “atomizing” content. The idea is to break a story down into the main idea and supporting pieces and allow readers to take in as much as they want. Circa also attempted to follow stories over time so if you wanted to follow a given story you would receive additional updates. I offer an extended description and thoughts on the potential of this approach as a general model for content presentation in a previous post.

I am not certain where Circa thought it was going with its cool idea. It did not contain ads and access is free. This has worked for other companies (e.g., Twitter), but sooner or later investors evidently want to see the money flow.

This analysis from The Verge describes various difficulties.

  • News is a difficult content area
  • There was no monetization plan
  • The atomized approach does not share easily.

One of the reasons given bothered me. The author suggested people no longer want information that is cold and rational, they want entertainment and emotion. The author described the summarization methods employed as “flavorless bullet points” (if I remember correctly). Yes, ed tech types, this does sound like death by PowerPoint.

I see this assumption that we need to entertain everywhere. Whatever happened to just learning because learning itself is interesting.

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