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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I appreciate the distinction you make between urgent and non-urgent news.
Finding out about things quickly isn't necessarily my priority. In fact, one of my problems with "regular" news outlets is that they have poor sense of time sensitivity, and promote news that's stopped being useful. The value of knowing about Icelandic volcanoes grounding all northern European air traffic is actually very useful to me when it's just happened, but in a week's time I may as well read about it on Wikipedia.
I'm more concerned about finding out about things at all. My ad hoc news accretion drops the ball more often than I'd like. My ideal wish-upon-a-star would be a daily digest saying "here are a list of things that have happened today in two sentences or less". I can then decide whether to follow it up or not.
(I have a secondary motive of wanting to associate events in my memory to improve the granularity of my recall. I know, for example, that Eyjafjallajökull erupting was concurrent with the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election, which helps me position it in time quite accurately, as well as position personal events that I remember happening around the same time.)
Do you have some examples in mind of things you never found out about but would have been better off for knowing?
(Of course if you literally never found out about something you can't know. But I'm guessing there are things you did find out about but not until much too late.)
A couple of semi-recent examples would be the referendum on Scottish independence and the Islamic State business in the middle east. I obviously found out about them, but it felt like I found out about them a lot later than I would have liked. It's not so much that these have an immediate impact on my life (Scottish independence does, but it's not like I'd be able to remain ignorant by the time it's resolved), but they're massive news events that I basically didn't notice until everyone else was talking about them. This suggests I'm probably missing other events that people aren't talking about, and that makes me want to up my game.
What about the recent Swedish election results?
Incidentally, it was disturbingly hard to find an article about them that didn't put a misleading spin on the results.
Hilariously, a good option for you may be an actual newspaper. Made out of paper.
It comes once a day, it summarizes a few dozen major events in a reasonably succinct way, and many of them try to minimize reporting bias. You could consider specific papers based on size and editorial style (most offer free or cheap trials), and then sign up for a short subscription to see how you like it.
That hasn't been my experience with newspapers.
I get The New York Times, and I find it pretty good in those regards (depending on your definition of "reasonably succinct"). And as a bonus, its science reporting is not hair-rippingly terrible at all generally.
And the greatest advantage is that it has no hyperlinks to click. Thus, you only spend limited time reading it.
But it has a lot of the same stuff you'd have found beyond the hyperlinks -- right underneath the headlines, without even needing to click. I'm not sure that's a win.
No additional clicks from there, though, so still bounded. You can read through all the interesting stories in a paper (I used to do this) and then you're done; with the web there's no obvious stopping place.
I find daily takes up too much time, and the reporting doesn't have enough distance. So I'd recommend reading a Sunday paper instead - or, better still, a weekly or monthly magazine. If you're in the UK then Prospect is fantastic; I also read TIME (I've heard allegations that the US edition is dumbed down, so try to get a European or Asian edition).
Interesting, so the European edition of TIME is not a complete insult to their readers' intelligence?