New & Newsworthy

About: what snew

New, News & Newsworthy definitions give some clues, the latter of which is the nubbin.

Newsworthy - Of sufficient interest or importance
to the public to warrant reporting in the media.

This gets back to the importance question. What is important? The word new, of course, is as interesting as the word now & calls into being the infinite loop.

blogs are usually not the primary source of information & usually depend upon the discovery thereof by others so are they really a source of news? I say rarely!
polls - are they news ? probably not - they are usually presented with conclusions which are distortions, deletions & generalizations of questions submitted to a sample of individuals. IMHO questions like "Do you think North Korea will attack the US ?" are stupid in a poll because the random person on the street is unqualified to answer that question.
stories about murders, deaths, fires, robberies & other crimes - why do we care? This is a central piece of the meme. Does the information about a murder contribute to our survival. Perhaps if the perp is still at large then the answer is yes.
war & the fog of war (& terrorism) - probably news although there is a lot of repeat of the same stories in slightly different wording.
etc... the clarity on this resolves to emphasis on the phrase importance to the public

I'm in general looking for intel & information at various levels of life from personal to international that can have an effect on what I am doing or will be doing - the rest is noise!

I think that if the media dropped the reports of politicians saying ridiculous things about eachother and the terrorist bombings & atrocities that the world would go on quite nicely without it.

Fair and balanced assumes that one side is not lying - which may be a big assumption!

I wonder if this is a good job for selective spending? I will begin NOW to spend my eyeball time somewhere else!

Comments

Mark de LA says
I think what I am looking for is pull media vs push media !

Yet are there any services that would do that ? Would you trust anyone to aggregate & put into a searchable database all the news you might want to look at. Is there a difference between that & google news ?

Seth says
This is an interesting item. Let me think out loud about it.

It goes almost without saying that the national media news, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN etc, cannot satisfy everybody ... so they must target some dumbed down non-existant demographic which is stastical fit ... a fantasy of these coproration's bottom line and or adgenda. In this country i believe that fantacy leads rather than follows the people ... or at least that targeted demographic.

The Internet does a better job. At least there one can pick and choose where to look ... i can go to memeorandum, digg, slashdot, reddit, google, or some prticular news search and/or my own selection of feeds. So that is an improvement (more pull than push) for me and the rest of those priviledged to be have good enough Internet access and time enough to care to look and form their own opinions of what is important. Without the Internet items like this one would tend not to exit.

And it goes almost without saying that what is news and newsworthy is subjective to each individual and to the groups to which they choose to belong. That is almost the quintisential definition of Freedome with a capital F. Again the Internet does a better job than hapinstance in allowing each of us to choose which groups are ours to blelong ... my physical neighbors are unlikely to share my interests except where my neighbors have been chosen by my demographic ... ie those who have bought into the American Dream as defined by ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN ets.

So, in summary of my meanderings, i wold say that the Internet ... and bear in mind that the Internet is still in it's pre-infancy ... points the way, however flawed, to more Freedome and a better mechinism to determine what is news and news worthy to me.

Mark de LA says
Basically, what I think you are saying is that the Internet does a better job of distributing the news, eh ? I have noticed a trend in some of the major news sites of including video, also.

One thing I am beginning to dislike a lot is misleading headlines. Hence, I prefer a database approach that can avoid them. A pleasant & effective way of searching for news would be interesting - more in the style that I imagine an intelligence analyst mines vast amount of info to develop intel. The Drudgereport aggregates news in his own style & interest & essentially rewrites the headlines. I wonder if there was a way to remove headlines someway & still find what a person was interested in.

- maybe a website called Headlineless News

Mark de LA says

M 2006-06-25 07:38:16 3784

Speaking of headlineless news & I was - Scripts-Howard has an interesting site (more like going in the right direction) here. I like their metadata in the upper right hand corner of the story like for example this one on surveillance (their slug).

& while I don't normally read the NYTimes this article on the business end of news on the internet this AM is interesting. Advertising seems to be their only business model. I don't think any of the majors has figured out the "news" business - maybe there is room for a new one!

New & Newsworthy

About: what snew

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