My consumption of news has decreased over the last few years and I think I’m becoming less informed. I think its my lack of interest in breaking news along with the new’s declining credibility.

Publishers are incentivized to push the extreme, breaking news because it’s how they get more clicks, and that means more revenue. There is such a need for publishers to keep the user’s attention that the “news” is more often click bait hyped to make them think it is important. Once the user is on the page the only thing important is not the article that got them there, but the ability to keep them clicking, so anything you read is surrounded by junk. I’ve frankly given up because headlines write checks that their articles don’t cash.

So much of the news is breaking news which is boring and incorrect. If you try follow anything breaking you have to wait through the whole thing just to get to the good parts with no guarantee that anything worth seeing will happen. Plus, what is first reported is typically incorrect, out of context and not understood.

The solution offered is usually to filter the news according to my interests. But I don’t want what I’m interested in, I want what’s important to know. The internet has no concept of “all the news that’s fit to print,” because there is no constraint in available space. Whatever filters I proactively place to make the news more relevant to me will always find a “top 5” no matter how unimportant it is. It is similar to the productivity-killing recurring meetings in the office – when an amount of time has been allotted, things will be found to fill the time even if they are irrelevant.

I only want the news that’s been vetted, acknowledged as worthwhile, analyzed and interpreted into the larger scheme of things. I want to learn about the way things work along with what is going on. I want a service that sends me an email only with news that is worth reporting. It would have no regular scheduled cadence. I’m wary of any publisher that promotes a “top 5” list of articles, because again, if it claims five articles every week, irrelevant articles will be found to fill the “top 5” quota — if I don’t get an email for a couple weeks even better, nothing worth knowing about has happened! Until this service exists I’m opting out of news site online and am going for books that are based on well-understood truth instead of the latest rumor.