Breaking News

Scott Hardie | May 18, 2014
Is the fundamental problem with the consumption of breaking news that it's a pull model?

When an emergency happens, we stay glued to cable news for hours, but there's not much to say between the genuine updates. Most of the air time is often just a reporter standing around repeating the same scrappy half-facts to fill some minutes, like a high school student trying to pad out a 10-page essay with 1 page of material. Or, if we avoid TV, we keep refreshing the same news articles and news web sites over and over, hoping for something new, but this means trudging through paragraph after paragraph of information that we've already digested, panning fruitlessly for new material like a gold prospector arriving too late to an exhausted riverbed.

The Internet has created a push model for news, in which updates go out to you instead of you requesting them. You can sign up with Google News or other services, and get emails or text messages with alerts. But from what I've seen, these are mostly useless: I've seen business lunches interrupted for events like a plane crash on the other side of the world, which is technically more important than whatever Kim Kardashian is doing, but still isn't worth interrupting anything for; it's almost certainly not relevant to the average American. Even if you apply a filter to receive alerts only about specific keywords that interest you, it's still not helpful, as you get a lot of duplicates and non-news (as parodized by The Onion). And anyway, emailing you occasionally when a news article mentions a person or topic that interests you doesn't really help with the consumption of breaking news, when there's a developing situation and you want new information as fast as you can get it, but not useless information and not repetitive information.

I wonder if there's room for a new kind of media here, a paradigm-breaker that uses technology to escape old limitations, like the ambitious but flawed Google Wave tried to do with communication. We need a news service that offers factual updates in a steady stream, adjusted for relevance to each subscriber's unique interests and sensibilities about what qualifies as news. This shouldn't be an aggregator that merely churns out links to articles on other web sites; it should offer facts that are atomic and relevant, prioritized with the most important at the top, and programmed not to repeat information that you've already seen (although it could offer an archive or other way to bring old information back up). I imagine something like a living news article that revises itself as you read it, letting you swipe away facts that you've digested and automatically showing new information. The service would need to earn our trust: If we stayed tuned to it in the middle of a developing crisis and it didn't give us any updates for a few minutes, we would have to trust that there weren't any updates to get, resisting the urge to fall back to scrounging old media like we used to do. This method of monitoring breaking news would be a whole lot more efficient and convenient than what we put up with now, but it's so different that shaking off old habits to take advantage fully of its benefits would be difficult.

Would you use such a service? Do you have ideas to improve it, or otherwise to consume breaking news differently? Are you as sick of the old way as I am?

Samir Mehta | May 26, 2014
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Scott Hardie | May 27, 2014
How did CNN become so shitty? I used to trust them too, ages ago. They had to create sister channel Headline News because they had stopped treating news seriously and digestibly, but eventually Headlines News morphed into the same useless airtime-filler as its older sibling. MTV did the same thing: They stopped playing music videos, so they created spinoff MTV2 just to play videos, but eventually that channel succumbed to the same marketplace trends toward mindless faux-controversial reality shows. It's too bad. As much as I enjoy when The Daily Show nails Fox News for their hypocrisy and editorializing, Jon Stewart is even better when criticizing CNN for being so hilariously incompetent.

Erik Bates | May 27, 2014
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