22 Theses on News and Journalism

BASELINE ASSERTIONS

1You should consume less — much less — news.

2How much less depends on many things. But outside of people who track issues for a living or write based on current events? As a strawman, you could cut your news consumption by 90% with little or no ill effects.

3Generally, news is a terrible way to learn about a subject. This was always somewhat true; it has become acutely true in the past 20 years.

4Undisciplined and nearly continuous consumption of news is bad for you, your relationships, and society. Bad for you because people who consume more news are generally less happy. Bad for your relationships because firehose news consumption is a time sink and (to reiterate the point) makes you less happy. And bad for society because consuming a lot of news offers the illusion that you’re up to date and know what’s going on, while almost never offering depth or detail necessary for real insight.

5Consumption at scale doesn’t aggregate depth or understanding. The most knowledgeable wine connoisseurs don’t drink gallons of two-bit Thunderbird daily.

FILTERS AND HALLMARKS

6Most people, most of the time, consume much more national and global news than local news. This is a function of scale, tribal dynamics, business-model failure in local news markets and a bunch of other things. But it’s also the thick layer of unhealthy fat in most news diets, begging to be cut.

7Corollary: Generally, the less local your news diet is, the less actionable it is.

8The less actionable a news item is, the more it’s just entertainment wearing a fancy suit.

9Being actionable isn’t a must-have requirement, but it’s a strong marker of how useful and relevant the news is to you. That makes it a good primary filter for deciding which news you will and won’t consume.

10“Staying informed” is a very weak — maybe the weakest — form of actionability. Your newly in-depth knowledge of how a minisub can implode may help with water-cooler chat, but the odds it will help you in your own sub-engineering endeavors are slim. See also: Daily war-porn reporting from Ukraine and Iran.

JOURNALISTS, JOURNALISM, AND SOCIETY

11Democracies need journalism. But journalism is both an act and a business. And we need one much more than the other.

12Business first: In profit-driven Western democracies, journalism is sustainable only with sufficient attention aggregation. This is likely, on net, the best-case scenario and preferable to state-run or state-subsidized journalism.

13The zero-sum nature of attention aggregation means the interesting will always win out over the important. On any day, you can dig and find exceptions. But overall? Interesting over important. Everywhere and at all times.

14Because of that, the act of journalism — asking questions, separating facts from opinion, sussing out the truth — is increasingly falling on news consumers. Or at least, news consumers whose actionable priority is knowing the truth of a thing, rather than merely staying informed.

15None of this is necessarily bad; journalistic objectivity was always a chimera. Yes, DIY journalism is both more work and subject to the siren call of pre-existing biases. But many, many surveys of newsroom attitudes and demographics for decades have shown those biases are already there. We can’t eliminate bias, but we can take responsibility, individually, for how aggressively we seek to counter it.

16To repeat: Democracies need journalism. But the journalism (act) they need is increasingly uncoupled from the journalism (business) industrial complex. News consumers can fill in the gap between those two things badly, with a firehose of in-group-reinforcing noise, or thoughtfully by deep diving — on their own — any time a topic rises to the appropriate personal level of importance.

NEWS AS GLUE, NEWS AS CURRENCY

17When information is scarce, news can support a localized, shared set of facts and priorities. This is news as glue and is recognizable to anyone who grew up with a local paper when local papers mattered, or who belonged to a tight-knit organization with an old-style bulletin board or forum.

18When information is abundant to the point of practical limitlessness, it’s trivial to find news that supports your worldview and, via democratized megaphones like social media, allows you to trade in that curated information. This is news as currency.

19Neither glue nor currency should be the primary role of news. But most consumers gravitate to one model or the other because they’re consuming so much content — and so much of it is irrelevant or unactionable — that these are natural filtering responses.

MODEST PROPOSALS

20Consume less news. Consume a lot less opinion/analysis.

21Filter by actionable news or news helping you pursue a truth important to your life.

22Assume responsibility for your own fact-checking; ask questions about the news you do read and dig up your own answers. That likely means reading material you disagree with. And that’s OK.

Greg W. Brooks. First published on Facebook, July 8, 2024.