Slashdot Asks: The Washington Post Says It Publishes Something Every Minute -- How Much Is Too Much? (washingtonian.com) 87
Media outlets are increasingly vying for your attention. But they are also feeding Google's algorithm. Some of them churn hundreds of news articles every day, hoping to offer a diverse range of articles to their readers, and also increase their "search space." The Washington Post is currently running a promotional offer -- letting people get a six-month digital subscription for $10 (pretty good if you ask me). But the Washington Post also mentions that is now publishes a new piece of content every minute. That's like 1,440 articles, videos and other forms of content in one single day. This raises a question: how much content is too much content? How many stories can a person possibly find time to read in a day? Do you feel that perhaps outlets should cut down on the number of things they publish? Or are you happy with the way things are?
Every minute is too much (Score:1)
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Re:Every minute is too much (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that people have different interests. If you have 30 categories of news then 1440 / 30 = a news story every half hour if you are only interested in say "Sports" or "Business". If you're interested in Linux and Programming I bet that only represents probably a story every couple hours at best.
Saying a story every 10 minutes is too much is like saying Netflix has too much content because nobody could ever watch 100,000 hours of television. It's true, but it ignores the fact that there isn't a perfect venn diagram of interest.
The WaPost has 740 staff writers. So that's only a story every 4 hours/writer. If they gave each writer 5 minutes to write a story I would worry about quality but 4 hours is plenty to make some calls and interview people.
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Only every 4 hours ? Lol. What's the point of reading that kind of crap.
There were several news stories posted within an hour of the train crash this morning. 4 hours is plenty to write out the who-what-when-where. Not enough time to write a Rolling Stone expose but plenty of time to cover "news".
"A train crashed today into a crowded station. "It was awful," said Bob. At this time it's not believed to be a terrorist attack but investigators have only just begun piecing through the evidence. About 100 people were injured and as of writing there are no reports of fatalitie
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What are you talking about? That is just a single story every 267,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Planck seconds. Clearly we could be publishing a quarter million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million times more often. Some people have no sense of perspective. Frustrating!
Re:Every minute is too much (Score:4, Interesting)
The bad thing with that is even if you try to do the "right thing" by reading an internet newspaper, you end up in a filtering bubble by only looking up a couple categories you're interested in.
This makes an actual newspaper vastly superior. Even if you skim over or ignore swathes of it, all of the content is there and instantly available. Once in a while you might read something in the "useless" culural sections or among some content you usually don't give a damn about.
A newspaper is a collection of a few dozen reflective, zero power 4K displays that you can bend and fold at will, and where you don't even have to scroll. Scrolling is so 500 B.C.!
The shame is newspapers have shrunk and lowered in quality and merely echo propaganda like TV, radio and internet news sites do. Corporate power and advertisement make them trivially susceptible to pressure. I'm not sure that in my country there is any good daily newspaper left. E.g. war stories are the cartoon-like version where our authorities call for us to be outraged about the bombings of civilians by Russia and Syria, but starving people hit by artillery don't officially exist if they're not in the right areas. It's only a war crime when Syrians defend themselves, not when the West or Israel or Al Qaida does it.
Also, everyone is unemployed, underemployed or underpaid, and tobacco increased 2x in price, food increases despite the zero inflation. So they arbitrate between a newspaper and bread or a newspaper and smokes, and decline to buy the newspaper.
Internet news sites are the shit end of the stick, like video games replaced going outside and free or pirated movies replaced the theater.
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I need an AI app to filter out the crud and look for significant items; very few items per day.
Cookieless browsing is free (Score:2)
From the synopsis: "The Washington Post is currently running a promotional offer -- letting people get a six-month digital subscription for $10 (pretty good if you ask me)."
Browsing the Washington Post in your browser's "privacy" mode is free.
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From the article âoenew piece of digital content every minute.â, so that careful wording means bloody ads are including, as well as the cycling of ads. If fact if you are willing to waste sufficient time, you can see how they have skipped around that detail whilst trying to create the impression they are just talking about news articles et al.
Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't read the drivel that passes for news these days and you'll only have a couple of articles to read a day at most.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Funny)
Don't read the drivel that passes for news these days and you'll only have a couple of articles to read a day at most.
What kind of un-American insanity is this? You *need* to be bombarded with poorly researched, misinterpreted, patently false information on a daily basis. Usually it's better to ingest this information in the form of "experts" yelling at each other but, if you've already seen all of todays yelling matches, you might as well turn to the authority that is churning out 1440 news articles a day. I mean, otherwise, how do you know who to fear/hate/love? HOW?!
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The good kind, I'm not American.
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Usually it's better to ingest this information in the form of "experts" yelling at each other
Careful, this is what leads to post-factual politics and disasters like Brexit. Once people decide that all experts are just partisan agenda pushers, unreliable and untrustworthy, all they have left is their own gut feeling. They make decisions based on what they see in their immediate surroundings and what politicians tell them.
The last thing you want is people thinking that their feelings are more important that reality.
Netfilx.... (Score:2)
as far as I am concerned (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything that traditional media corporations publish is "too much" as far as I'm concerned: they are money-making enterprises that will say whatever it takes to maximize their profit and power, and that usually involves a combination of: (1) trolling the public and causing discord, (2) spreading FUD, (3) kowtowing to politicians and the government. What these media corporations don't do is care about your well being or give your reliable and unbiased information.
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Newspapers are also extensive, experienced intelligence gathering organizations. They look for news. They do a better job than most of identifying stuff that matters. And then, they tell people about it. Some of the bad actors out there are quite good at hiding; it takes time and skill to sift the nuggets of information from the muck.
Yes, yes, publications also produce churn, listicles, FUD, etc. That's a minor annoyance compared to the value of having dedicated investigators on the job.
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What matters first of all is their motivations. The more powerful an intelligence organization is at gathering information, the more effective it is at screwing people over. T
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The distinction between serious content and amusement is the wrong distinction. Newspapers publish self-serving corporate crap even when they are trying to be serious. For example, on some science or technology issue, they may write a perfectly reasonable sounding article, but their selection of experts and quotes may be biased, often probably unconsciously. Books aren't burned or banned, publishers simply don't even publish them. Etc. Furthermore, there isn't some nefarious master plan to "control" the pop
It's junk (Score:1)
Most "news" today is high on hype, opinion, and A or B style reporting. Give me an old fashioned investigation in search of truth rather than opinion A vs opinion B and I'll hand over cash for it. Too many mockingbirds and editorial shills in mainstream news for my taste.
going by google news feed (Score:1)
Most of them are editorials.
Quantity over Quality... (Score:3)
Slashdot Asks (Score:1)
If we have an Ask Slashdot category, do we also get one for these posts?
They've found that it's easier and quicker... (Score:5, Insightful)
...just to republish the talking points directly from the Clinton campaign, without all that wasteful middleman editing and rewriting. Saves everyone time and money...
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Washington Post and CNN have both gone full retard this election season. You expect it from places like USAToday, MSNBC, and NPR but the Post used to be a good newspaper.
Not our job. (Score:2)
When you start losing readers because there is too much content, it's too much. However, it's not our responsibility to tell you how to do your job. I'm certain there are people that specialize in studying these type of things that you could contract. #FuckYouPayMe
That depends... (Score:2)
Across what geographic area, set of topics, etc. are these minutely articles distributed?
If you consider a global scale, and a fairly wide variety of interests(not necessarily serious niche stuff; but all the sections that a major Sunday print newspaper traditionally had); one article a minute is downright patchy coverage.
If you are talking a local news outlet; or a "just the foreign events lar
Like the CNN model (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything is BREAKING NEWS even if it happened yesterday or the day before. Reporting on incidents before there are any real known facts, having EXPERTS come on and speculate on what MIGHT have happened or not without anything to really base an opinion on yet.
Not really news... entertainment for many, boring and shut off for me.
too much? (Score:1)
Reduce it to statistics.
Click farm (Score:3)
So, basically, the Washington Post is proudly declaring that it's just a click farm. Churning out nonsense to get page impressions.
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You just described every piece of media ever used, ever. I wrote a book just to get people to buy it and read it. Warner Brothers made that movie just to get people to go and watch it. Someone writes a blog in the hope to get page impressions.
Just seeing a big number and using the word "farm" doesn't make your comment insightful and doesn't make The Washington Posts' any different to what it has always been.
increasing clickbait isn't journalism (Score:2)
And they want you to pay for online access. But increasing their rate does not ensure nor imply quality. Woodstein is not writing these articles. A tremendous number of them are short--about a paragraph long--and completely inconsequential. Look how many of then are "lists," for example. You may as well read what's on the back of cereal boxes. You might get more content. Another problem is all these sites repeating each other. I get a lot of the same news on Drudge and Above Top Secret (ATS: a cranky conspi
Not all 1,440 pieces of content would interest you (Score:2)
1,440 articles, videos and other pieces of content would be too much for any one person to try to read or watch in a single day.
It is also highly unlikely that any one person could be interested in all the articles, videos and other pieces of content, in all the categories and sub-categories offered by the Washington Post. So the real number of articles, videos and other pieces of content published that one would want to read would probably be mush much smaller
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Ideal Ratio (Score:1)
Quality over quantity, please! It's already enough work separating the wheat from the chaff without publishers working to multiply their daily output in a bid to spoof search algorithms.
1440 pieces of content in one day is ridiculous, nobody has time to read even 1% of that unless you exclusively read the Washington Post.
"Entertainment News" (Score:1)
WaPo's PublishPoop (Score:2)
Infinite Weasels (Score:2)
It is irrelevant whether an infinite number of monkeys posting everything they saw to the net would eventually produce every important news item that professional media organizations now produce.
1. We would never manage to find the important stories amidst the infinite amount of crap they would post.
2. We don't actually have an infinite number of monkeys.
Accordingly, it is necessary to employ a few professional, eagle-eyed reporters to keep the weasels of the world under control.
Is 1,440 a lot? (Score:3)
Pre internet, how many individual articles, editorials, comics, ads were in a typical daily print edition of the New York Times? I would venture that 1,000+ would not be out of the question.
First the radio went ... (Score:1)
It is not the amount (Score:2)
The amount doesn't really matter, it is the relevancy and quality of said content. Obviously they have to post a certain amount of content to stay relevant, and profitable, and support the framework of the weight of the ads they are supporting, but just measuring by the word like a freshman essay is not valid.
News Outlets == News Aggregator (Score:1)
When No Candidate Ever RTFA (Score:2)
Bull poopie (Score:2)
I'm sure they miss more minutes than they hit. I'm sure they mean to average one per minute -- 1'440 per day. That's very different.
Really so much? (Score:2)
You don't have to read everything they post, and they don't expect you to.
I w
What do they count? (Score:2)
Washington Compost (Score:1)
Now with an even worse case of the shits, right from the White House.
No middle man.