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New York Times CEO Mark Thompson says he expects the end of the physical newspaper in 20 years:
The New York Times was founded in 1851, but it would surprise outgoing CEO Mark Thompson if the physical paper made it to 2040.
"I believe the Times will definitely be printed for another 10 years and quite possibly another 15 years — maybe even slightly more than that," Thompson told CNBC's A View from the Top. "I would be very surprised if it's printed in 20 years' time."
More than 900,000 people subscribe to the print version of the newspaper, said Thompson. At its current subscriber levels, the paper could be printed seven days a week at a profit without a single advertisement, he said.
But as readers become more accustomed to reading the Times on smartphones, tablets and computers each year, a printed paper is clearly a dying form. The New York Times Company reported last quarter that total digital revenue exceeded print revenue for the first time ever. Print advertising fell more than 50% year over year from last quarter, driven by both secular declines and the pandemic. Thompson told CNBC he doubts that advertising will ever come back.
"I'm skeptical about whether it will recover to where it was during 2019 levels," Thompson said. "It was already in year-over-year decline for many years. I think that decline is probably inexorable."
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:01PM (2 children)
Goddamn booty kissin' bastards!
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:00AM (1 child)
Former newspaper of record, The New Woke Times won't last the decade.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:19AM
You should get a private room, masturbating in public like this is unseemly.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:13PM (12 children)
The print newspaper is done for.
https://wccftech.com/foldable-ipad-specs-3nm-chip-microled-2023-release/ [wccftech.com]
20 years could be considered optimistic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by ledow on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:56PM (1 child)
You could have a foldable iPad today. Just get two iPads and one of those magentic connectors down the middle to detach (like the keyboards attach to iPads already.
From there's it's just a second monitor and software support.
I bet if you got the right Android tablet you could do this now... with MHL or whatever it's called, and a USB-C -> USB-C magnetic connector interface. One driving the display of the other, but both work independently. Hell, they would even share charge.
The question is: Why would you want to? It's just more to break, and your eyes can only really look at one at a time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:19PM
A giant flexible/foldable display might be nice, and potentially perfect for replacing a newspaper.
If $device sucks, reviews or hands-on trial will let you know.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:16PM (2 children)
In 5 years time, iPads will be used to wrap the fish-and-chips takeaway and as toilet paper for that shit** (large grin)
--
** of course there'll be a brief period of "you are folding it wrong", but Apple will work to... ummm... straighten those creases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:23PM (1 child)
https://www.eater.com/2016/12/28/14101172/ipad-plates-restaurant-quince [eater.com]
I believe it. Most establishments will probably use ChiPads to save money, though.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:38AM
Now that the input port is covered, the output port is next.
For an... ummm... immersive experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:43PM (1 child)
Netcraft confirms it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:39AM
Why am I the first to mod this up for the nostalgia? Are all us old fogies getting forgetful, or is just young kids here now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:15AM (2 children)
Not so fast, how will I do my crossword puzzle, in pen, on a tablet?
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:28AM
Write on the screen, then hit it with the sandpaper.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:33PM
Wonderful appy apps will app your ability to app that appword or sudappu with the appiest appness so you can app onto other apps.
Apps!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:27PM
It's odd that the medium it is delivered on is still considered relevant. Information is cross-platform.
I would go further, however, and question if the "news" itself is still relevant, no matter what medium delivers it. Journalism has been so debased that it has very little currency anymore. There is still some value left in scholarship and research, but the rot is setting in there, too. "Do your homework" has never been more apt than now.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:16PM
Fixed the flamebait mod . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:18PM (1 child)
One of my favorite words. I want to mod Thompson up for using it! I'm headed out to the bar now, to find a nice exorable woman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:32PM
Wear a mask made of newspaper.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:35PM (2 children)
And what we will be left with is.... cell phones or similar proprietary locked down DRMed devices. Too many are already giving the web the finger. Of course they will have eye and ear raping advertisements that can't be removed or avoided. Content will change from minute to minute so you will never know if you are mis-remembering something or not. Information that disappears when a service is no longer supported.
None of those problems with physical paper.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Rupert Pupnick on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:39PM
Similar to the distinction between electronic voting machines and paper ballots...
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:39PM
Worry more about people disappearing, because they are deemed "politically incorrect". The headlines in Hong Kong are applicable.
https://apnews.com/2ce4e0aac2bbb360f06e481dffaf5149 [apnews.com]
Better read the story quick, before it disappears!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:52PM (16 children)
I'm in my 40's.
I've never bought a newspaper in my life.
I'm honestly surprised we still bother to print them, even if they are free, full of ads, and given away at commuter stations (like the London Metro paper).
Honestly - what a waste of paper and energy. Print a thing on paper in full colour, distribute tons of them around the country, they last precisely 24 hours, then they're "recycled" at huge expense of more energy and a small percentage of that put back into the production of more newspaper (because it's such low quality paper to begin with anyway).
The only one I see are the local-council papers which are put through my door against my will. They've been steadily shrinking and shrinking over the years and the last one I got was barely more than a leaflet. Nobody uses the personal ads, the classified section, nobody cares about the old granny down the road who had her garden gnome stolen, etc.
If every newspaper on the planet disappeared tomorrow, we'd have a more informed populous, and a lot more paper and a lot less waste.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:00PM (3 children)
Gnome lives matter, you RACIST!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:22AM (2 children)
You should stop being a despicable bastard then maybe your kids would call more.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:37AM
I wish they would all move out, so they have a reason to call. Better they call, than stand in front of my refrigerator with the door hanging open. 'Course, that's probably politically incorrect, seeing as they are millenials . . .
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:28PM
You should stop being a despicable bastard or you will never have kids.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:01PM (7 children)
If you hadn't bought a newspaper 20 years ago, I would place you as ignorant and self-centered. Lots of people like you in your age group. Not taking an interest in the politics that go on around you. And now you reap the fruits of your ignorance. Hope you enjoy your lockdowns.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:17PM (2 children)
20 years ago. For the math-challenged among us, that was the year 2000. 20 years ago, I didn't buy very many newspapers, either. I mean, it was very rare for me to pick one up - maybe a headline caught my eye. There was news on the radio, news on television, and, we were experiencing that relatively new internet thing. True, the internet has evolved quite a lot in twenty years, but the major news sources were on the web back then. You overstate your case, as if 20 years ago was 1970, or even 1940. Remember the advent of CNN? I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper published by CNN. Not even a magazine! They've always been television and internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:41PM (1 child)
Back when CNN was still a news organization, they never covered state and local news, for example. For that, and learning about local events (remember those?), you would pick up a copy of the paper. In those days, Craigslist didn't exist yet, so that's how you found jobs and junk for sale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:06AM
Horseshit. Twenty years ago we all used the Tradin' Post to find junk for sale. Classifieds have been dead since the 80s.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Wednesday August 12 2020, @07:48AM (2 children)
Because someone reading a trash tabloid opinion piece in The Sun or The Daily Mail is going to be better informed than someone who actually sat, looked up people's history, politician's declarations of interest, used resources from all over the world from their university Internet account and broadband connection (we were WAY ahead of most families), contacted and discussed politics in open forums back when IRC was mature and not filled with bots, spam and porn, followed international news from first-party accounts and foreign news agencies, etc.?
Yeah, okay. What an idiot I must be.
I graduated in 2000, by the way, which is why I chose that date. On a CS course from the leading London university, that I mostly got content and submitted coursework to via my home Internet connection, which was fast enough to run 4 PCs and had evolved since my schools days from modem to broadband. I literally RAN sites of my own where such things were discussed, not to mention having the antiquated-by-then Usenet and IRC forums. You know 9/11 happened in 2001, right? I don't know about you but I caught wind of it on a TV that happened to be interrupted with live footage, then caught up very quickly with online video, and spent three days doing nothing but talking to Americans about it, researching who the attackers were, etc. to the point that I had news-fatigue where every website I went on (including the predecessor of this site) was running better and more accurate and up-to-date and in-depth analysis of it than the news channels were, who were just repeating the same soundbites and reshowing the same footage.
I watched all the American channels, from the other side of the Atlantic, as well as local coverage, and even that of the Middle Eastern states. I read articles from countries all over the world, I read people talk of their own experience and dedicate articles to their family's memories after becoming victim to the attacks. I read the concerns of those in the Middle East of massive over-retaliation against a splinter terrorist group, which is exactly what happened. I read up on the history of the Taliban, of Bin Laden, of weapons deals with the Middle East, religious differences, guerrilla funding by first-world nations, etc.
You seem to think it was the dark ages. I'd actually argue that if you're getting your news from papers (even the BBC News website is often DAYS behind on stories) that you're out-of-touch, deliberately picking a biased-towards-your-view cut-out of the world, and are relying on other people to cherry-pick your stories for you with little to no regard to what's actually happening in the world, getting a rounded view, or putting in any effort at all, whatsoever. And not in a "MSM sucks!?!?!" Trump-ish kind of way, but just in a "Are you deliberately seeking the full picture, or did you just believe the editor who is as far right/left as you want them to be?"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:31PM
In the long ago before time when Google was a bouncing baby search engine, they had a section called "News." They discontinued it, though, probably because as you scanned down the headlines from New York to South Carolina to LA to Seattle they were all the same, and obviously copied & pasted from the same AP Wire feed.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:55AM
In the early 2000s I too mostly got my national news through the internet but I will say that one thing I miss is buying a local paper from the machine outside my favorite restaurant, ordering my usual, and spending a nice quiet lunch reading the newspaper and then leaving it for anyone else who wanted it. At my favorite coffee shop, the paper was put out and customers would share it -- some small talk like would ensue -- "are you finished with that section" and stuff like that.
Over time the local paper got thinner and then even the pages got physically smaller -- it got to the point where there wasn't enough in it to last a whole lunch time and what was there, was just AP reprints of headlines I'd already seen on my computer. Local news became close to nothing so eventually I just went to squinting at a phone.
There were some nice things about a real newspaper though and it is sad in a way that those days are gone. The writing was less ideological too. That's also gone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:02AM
20 years ago we had this new fangled Internet. I remember using things like Yahoo! News - cutting edge. I wanted to buy subscription to local newspaper. They were ahead of times and they actually provided subscription with a caveat - you also HAD TO get the print. And subscription from local news was like $30/mo, like regular. But if you were out of local delivery area, it became $5/mo... Needless to say, they never got my business. Today they are in trouble, still trying to peddle printed subscription though for last few months they have "digital only" for $4/week. But today I just subscribe to NYT for $5/month instead.
So yes, I'm also 40 years old and the only thing paper I ever subscribed to was a monthly magazine. Even that today would only be good as a PDF instead. And with PDF, I can annotate and write all over it without screwing up the original version. Even flyers I only look at the PDF version or the store app on my phone for deals. Heck, even my local library has paperless access to current newspapers as ePub download. Paper news is out for almost everything.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:20PM
Use them to weave paper straw baskets [youtube.com].
Or to make moonshine [youtube.com].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:22AM
Newspapers are reasonably priced kindling. They're also good for training dogs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:42PM (1 child)
Yes, because reducing your number of information sources is always best for ensuring you are receiving truthful information!
Oh, and while my newspaper does still print a paper copy they also produce a lovely PDF file (or only html on their website, but I prefer using an offline reader).
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:42AM
And it's still *curated* news.
Someone's entire job is to write those articles, aim them at you, and convince you of a certain narrative one way or the other. They're literally paid to get into your mindset, even if they don't actually believe that, and maybe even to change your mindset. That holds no interest for me. That's not news. That's propaganda. Maybe on the part of a Maxwell-owned corporation, rather than a corrupt state, but it's still curated.
"Train crash in Scotland" is news. I can then research the crash. The cause. Has there been underfunding. What was the *full* statement of the guy interviewed. What's curiously missing from his statement? Who was in charge of maintenance? Was that company properly investing in the infrastructure? Was this foreseeable? Is this a common occurrence on that rail line, track, area, company?
Now, that's an exaggeration, but if I cared about the news that's what I do. As I say above, I spent 3 days online after 9/11 just working out what happened. Not in some conspiracy-theory-nut manner, but I just wanted to know who this ME group were that I hadn't really heard much of, who was this guy sending videos from a cave (in the early days, not so much!), etc. That the US had - yet again - funded a guerrilla movement against a guerrilla movement that it had previously funded and who turned on them, and so on.
The headlines hold no interest for me. The sterile, factual news is the seed. Beyond that I can trail off into the depths of a link tree that ends up in actual new, useful, confirmed, factual knowledge for myself that makes clear the parts of the story that don't make sense, or are glossed over.
It's like studying - reading the dry facts that someone cherry-picked for you and memorising them isn't education. It's memorisation. But re-deriving those facts from first principles, researching them, finding their history and origins and alternatives, and studying the area and the aims and achievements of that area? That's so much more rewarding and worthwhile.
Meanwhile the tabloids are running weeks of celebrity sex gossip, and footballer's wives, and trying to influence my vote. I have no interest in that. When was the last time you saw a newspaper with a "The Taliban" section (or similar) where they explain the deep history of their origins, predecessors, etc. evolving over time, almost like a Wikipedia but written for people to understand and for the newspaper to "link to" if you want to know more? Almost never. The BBC, for instance, often have a nice one-page summary of such things that they link to on every related story, but it never goes anywhere near deep enough, and it's written by the same journalists who wrote the previous articles.
Where's the knowledgebase? The deep background digging? The informative sidelines? The mass-web of links between all the major news items that explain things they'd never have time or column inches to explain? That's the real news.
Even online, curated news isn't really my thing. I don't care much for it, but I can sometimes pull facts from it as a seed. When I follow the Trump stuff, I don't care what's happening on Fox or CNN, or in the papers. There's far more interesting stuff just lurking on the periphery that's either going to come out, be buried, or explode. That's where my news lies.
The BBC, though I think they were pioneers in TV news, online news, and still lead the way in terms of "style" even if they are still becoming quite one-sided, they don't go far enough for me, and papers go even less far. And yet they are DAYS behind stuff that I poke around in, some of it never making the mainstream at all. And, like I say, I'm far from a conspiracy theory nut - probably because of this fact-checking stuff.
But newspapers? Newspapers are written purely to sell. They hire people to write what you want to hear, and you buy the paper that most closely matches your expectations (i.e. rallies against your rivals and cheers on your friends). And they're between 4 and 24 hours out of date at any one time. The only interest in that is the raw fact of the headline. And I can get that better from many other sources. Hell, sometimes the Internet in general beats the newspapers to a headline by days, let alone places on it that are specialised in one particular subject.
Newspapers are for the general news-ignorant populous to buy their favourite narrative for the day. They take one side and stick to it for 30, 40, 50 years. And, sorry, but for nearly 75% of the available newspapers, something like 50% of their content is puerile trash. How can you take a paper seriously when one minute it's telling you who to vote for and next it's telling you which footballer slept with a prostitute and claims both are "in the public interest", while their editors and funders are wrapped in scandal on a constant basis that never comes to light? We had newspapers in the UK that were "shutdown" for doing things like hacking into a dead girl's voicemail and deleting messages to free up her mailbox because THEY wanted to be first with the scoop if someone left a message on her phone, and then taken to court by dozens of celebrities that they'd been doing that too for years. The next week, the same owners started the same paper with a different name. These people aren't reporting facts to you, or want you to be aware. These people want your money, in any way possible, even if it involves sick acts like hacking into and tampering with the phone of a girl suspected dead, deleting voicemails from her friends and parents to achieve that.
I take my news from reliable sources, with unreliable ones being used purely as a trigger to start reliable research. I will happily, actively, and deliberately exclude such out-of-date and biased "sources" as those, except in the most basic starting points, in the same way that you could accuse the local university researcher of "reducing the number of information sources" because he won't listen to the drunk crackpot on your apartment landing who keeps talking about UFO's, when he's trying to research deep quantum physics. Absolutely I'll exclude them. That's what you do. You determine reliability, and remove the cruft to get to the facts, story or real narrative. I don't have to listen to every drunk crackpot's ramblings about everything, written in their daily biased propaganda sheets, in order to be well-informed, properly-informed, unbiased, and extensive in my knowledge of those subjects I'm interested in.
Sorry, but if you think the static daily newspapers are adding much to the background of the over-arching happenings of the world, then you're living in 1910. They're a well-funded propaganda vehicle, often driven by the same small handful of millionaires for decades, there to make money. I don't like news sources that are there to make money. Unless 100% of that money is going back to more journalism and research.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:33PM (1 child)
They may be losing money, but rich dudes are clambering to buy them. They still form the Overton window, they still serve as a trebuchet to attack your political enemies.
I've been thinking how a newspaper could still be a profitable enterprise by itself. The national news and significant commentary are already owned by the big boys; more often than not you can get that from a website. But local still matters, and in flyover country, state coverage can be lacking in the national media. And as the lockdowns have shown, those levels have a greater impact on our lives than many thought.
Add to that classifieds: garage sales, moving sales, pets, cars, bikes. And if you can get them, legal notices. Make use of people's ability to quickly scan a newspaper page vs navigating a website.
Price is important, nobody is going to spend $2+ for the local paper that just fills itself up with wire service trash. Report the facts, don't tolerate political animosities in the news section that will offend half your customers. Keep the price as low as possible: free, 25¢ or 50¢, a convenience purchase. USA Today (do they still exist?) kept the 50¢ price for nearly 20 years, so keep costs contained. Change the format to tabloid to make it easy to handle. If color is expensive, forget it. Don't give out your assets for free on a web page, unless the ad revenue truly makes it a positive.
I think that would go a good way to a viable print product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:10AM
Craigslist and local alternatives like kijiji.
Hyperlocal newsprint still exists but it's mostly just run by local ads. I don't envision any of this run by subscription service. When you move away from the hyperlocal into a market with 100+k customers, you are getting squashed by the Internet. Soon enough, the hyperlocal news will also get squashed like the classified sections.
Print news is dead or dying. Trying to hang on to it is like trying to hang on to a BBS.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:46PM
I've always hated the feel of the paper, the fact that all the ink rubs off on your hands, that when you unfold the paper to read an article you end up looking right through the paper which makes reading it a lot harder, that you have to unfold the paper to read an article, that you have to jump around to find the second half of the article. I never buy papers due to those issues. Their usability is crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:07AM
I suspect there will be services that print out requested web pages and deliver them via mail or express carrier, but the dedicated for-print paper will end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:26AM
In my neck-of-the-woods, which is a quintessential police state, the local paper is mostly nothing but LEA bait intended to appeal to the community ne'er-do-wells. It's a waste of paper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:59AM
If we can't figure out a business model for the press, the press that keeps check on the gov'ment...
Well, I guess we will all turn into China, Russia, or Brazil. You know, the "shit-hole countries."
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday August 12 2020, @07:20AM (4 children)
The problem is NOT what's commonly trotted out: "virtual beats physical", "atoms versus electrons", blah blah blah.
The reason people are giving up on papers, and to a lesser extent magazines, is personalized content versus non-personalized.
Google/Facebook/LinkedIn/promotional emails now feed you all the personalized news and content you want -- things tailored to what you're interested in at the time. Newspapers and magazines are still stuck in the non-personalized era: mass media news, common ads, common everything.
Unless newspapers print "The Daily You" - at least as an insert to the main paper - and keep personalization locked up in their online editions - they're doing down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @07:53AM (2 children)
I disagree. Personalization is pushed by the internet advertising giants (as the reason for their existence), but I think most people will still balk at the idea of preferring to consume news that promises to be "tailored to them". It would make them aware they are being filter bubbled.
IMO, the reason why people are giving up on papers is because the national news is available, for free, through *many* different outlets. There are probably people who can spend the entire day on cnn.com, nytimes.com etc. and get much more than their local paper could offer in national news.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday August 12 2020, @08:48AM (1 child)
It depends on who's doing the tailoring and for what purposes. If Google or Amazon are tailoring ads for me, that's different from paying money to nytimes.com to get me hard copy information. I don't trust internet advertising giants with that - but the hard copy papers have a really good ethos about reporting content distinct and independent from editorial and advertorials.
Decades ago, I remember devouring three different newspapers a day every day. Even now there's nothing that beats paper. But I have to push myself to buy the occasional paper for old times sake. Yes, I get free news but I have to go find it. And, really, most of it's junk.
Say the 'real' paper provided an open source browser plugin -- some way I can let it know what I am really interested in. Then, the paper can syndicate content for me (say, as part of a buying group in combination with other papers) and print it specifically for me. It can use AI based summarization, use linkages to the online world using AR markers, and so on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:29AM
So you want to implement Fahrenheit 451? Summaries of summaries, "simplifying" things to black or white without shades of grey, banning nuances is exactly what the book is about.
Personalized news leads directly to hell without a way back. If you haven't been awake in last decade or so, maybe you would have noticed this as people isolate themselves in their personal thought bubbles and demonize everyone outside it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:19AM
Negative.
The personalized news is utter garbage and always has been. I subscribe to digital subscriptions but I would never bother with physical. I don't want to deal with more paper waste. There are better ways and digital news is far superior. I can read it on my phone or my tablet or my eInk tablet.. I can share it with my extended family and friends with a click... How do I do that with a physical newspaper? Send in a letter or re-type it? Make a collage?
The only personalizations I get from digital is I can re-order sections of the news according to my interest. I can put International News first and hide the junk Sports section ;) But that's it. I would never hide individual stories just because I may not like them. Hell, I even visit FoxNews.com on occasion to get an idea of what North Korean style propaganda looks like -- Fox is even worse than RT in that regard. And it's easier to read Fox than translating pravda.ru into english.
(Score: 2, Funny) by RandomFactor on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:11PM (1 child)
take broadcast news with you?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:20PM
Nah, that propaganda mouth piece will be with us for quite some time to come.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"