Comment by munk-a
6 hours ago
It turns out there are a few stories that are important to be immediately aware of (declarations of war, local events like service outages or celebration - and only if they're planned with short notice). Most of the rest of the news is important for the purpose of holding people to account but outside the influence of regular people.
We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.
15 years after making the decision, while working for a major news outlet, to no longer read “the news,” I can pretty confidently say: if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway.
Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
6 or 7 years here, no news or socials. I keep telling people the same thing, you find out about the important stuff real quick regardless. The rest is noise and rage bait.
I have seen people who don't follow news confidently say fairly absurd things. They tend to assume things are kind of like they were those 15 years ago and don't want to believe a party of or a country or a situation could have change in the meantime.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
I wonder, do those people you talk about also happen to avoid the other forms of journalism, such as investigative reporting, analysis, essays, documentaries, books, and long-form features in general?
Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.
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The problem is that sometimes declaration of war means bombs are falling on your head. Or you are drafted. Sometimes you want to be a bit ahead of big news.
I used to be somewhat of a news junkie.
When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).
And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.
(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).
Nassim Taleb has a note about this idea in one of his books. Essentially just pointing out how unimportant most news headlines are a few years out.
If you are interested, Daniel Boorstin wrote about similar ideas much earlier in The Image.
The other thing is that I find a fair number of "news" stories these days are basically one or two small details about the latest update on some ongoing situation, followed by a long summary of what happened before. So most of the news is already old.