Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

We need that again. As I point out occasionally, read news, and ask yourself which stories started out as a press release. For the City News Bureau, nothing started as a press release. They had people pounding the streets of Chicago for a century. Today, the pundit to reporter ratio is far too high.

There's a great book about the Bureau, called "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite". (by Dornfield, not the one by Sears, which is something else entirely.)[1]

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-burea...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/08...

> We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.

I think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.

You're larger point is entirely correct, that there's a ton to be learned from old school journalism, and there are people out there doing it. But it's unsettling how much of it only gets covered by citizen journalists doing this in their free time, not by professionals who are supposed to be doing this for a living.

For example, the D.C. Attorney's Office had been simply dropping 2/3's of the criminal cases that came to them. No one noticed this until a anonymous internet account, DCCrimeFacts, went through the records and realized that this had been happening for years. Once that account wrote about it and it gained traction, major papers like the Washington Post started reporting on the story, it eventually ended up being an issue in Congressional hearings, and lead to changes in the way the U.S. Attorney's Office operates.

The account spent a lot of time digging through records and reporting on issues with the criminal justice system you wouldn't find elsewhere. But it was someone's side project, and there haven't been posts in a year.

Another example is the FAA scandal, when the best information has come from a single blog post by a law student who happened to go through the legal paperwork and was surprised that this hadn't been reported on.

The professional news media outlets do have some good reporters, and sometimes there are important deep dives there as well. But they feel few and far between, usually opting to chase infotainment (or sometimes the pet projects of a particular journalist).

It's amazing how many big stories we only get if some random citizen happens to spend their free time doing a personal journalism project, and if that project happens to get enough traction that people actually read it.

Journalism has all the problems of being a shrinking high status low income industry. Living in NYC I know a few journalists, and if you scratch below the surface on many of their bios they are quite often from wealth of one form or another. At least enough wealth to subsidize them living in an expensive NYC zipcode on awful starting pay with low growth and ceiling.

So it really is quite a monoculture. 20 years ago they all lived in UWS, now it's somewhere between Park Slope and North Brooklyn. Ever noticed how many local color stories used to be UWS focussed and are now Brooklyn? A lot of trends pieces are "stuff I noticed in my friends group" type of depth, and they all have the same friends groups. They literally don't know what they don't know.

> how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed.

Matthew Stoller called the people Derek Thompson called, and some said Derek had misrepresented their opinions. So shoe leather caused the narrative of this so-called reputation to collapse as well.

I've been involved in a lot of discussions about "what is journalism? what do real journalists do?", and the best response I've heard was from Ian Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame), who told me "Journalists pick up the phone." It may have already dated as a pithy description, but the idea of literally calling[1] people to fact-check or dig deeper is a low bar that a surprising amount of current journalism doesn't clear. And I say this as someone who has definitely done the non-journalism: just writing an opinion, or a column, or blog post, or whatever. Or, perhaps most insidiously, when you have a thesis for an article and you just collect the (partial) facts you need to flesh out that thesis.

I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do. But it's as Thomas says, that scarcity means that it's still as valuable (and recognisable) as it always was.

[1] Or emailing -- but emailing, and emailing, and emailing, then calling, and emailing again until you get an answer.

> all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed

Did it collapse, or he simply created another dubious narrative to replace the previous one?

I sometimes think back to a passage in "dialectic of enlighenment" where the authors write what amounts to "input without analysis is meaningless, but analysis without new input is madness as the analysis eventually becomes only analysis of other analysis".

I think that generally a true problem nowadays. Popular culture does a lot of "analysis", but not a lot of reality seeking.

This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a society much more welfare oriented with a substantial degree of labor and resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets) but I don't know a single leftist who actually cares about this housing shit except to think that houses should be cheaper by any means necessary. Like the idea that there is an active contingent of leftists trying to construct some kind of defense of the current housing system or critique of reforms (in general) aimed at making it easier to build houses strikes me as truly bizarre.

There may be some environmentalists who have housing as a pet peeve or something, and there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way.

Abundance YIMBYism has many shortcomings. It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement, the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing, or the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities. Journalistic ideologues deserve little praise for dismantling the weakest counterarguments of their opponents while ignoring core criticisms.

What does it mean that “so much of what we read is […] barely reported”?

This has nothing to do with journalism. Both sides of this argument are advocates for points of view.

I agree - journalism isn't that hard - Derek Thompson does a good job here. There's lots of good journalism out there.

Still, probably more expensive that having ai write something, and it's not politically on point. Agendas aren't well-served by attempts to describe the truth!

Yes, and I found Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein to be very credible on Lex Fridman:

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo

I like when the right and left can actually talk to each other -- solutions are more likely to emerge that way.

They had a meta-discussion of the fact that Fridman has been "coded" by the left (Thompson and Klein firmly representing the left).

I get that, because Fridman can be so uncritical that it can rise to the level of shilling.

But I also find it curious that many on the left won't sit for 3 hours with him. In contrast, Thompson and Klein sat for 3 hours, which shows me that they have something to say which stands up to scrutiny.

They have something to say that doesn't have to be carefully boxed into 30 or 60 minutes of talking points.

---

Related: even though Fridman can be annoyingly uncritical, I think this also serves the purpose of journalism. Because he gets the primary sources to talk freely.

For example, IMO this part an interview with Demis Hassabis is revealing. He asks if they're worried they will run out of high quality training data:

https://youtu.be/-HzgcbRXUK8?t=3931

From my perspective, Hassabis gives a mealy-mouthed answer about generating synthetic data of the right distribution, and then they change the subject. I would bet there's a lot more to it than that. If they had a good angle of attack, I feel like he'd be more excited to talk about it, and say something more substantive.

I guess you can argue that he's being cagey to not reveal anything to competition, but it seems like a real point of concern to me.

The rest of the interview is talking about AGI time frames and similar sales talk. Whereas my takeaway is that there's significant worry that LLMs are limited by training data, because they interpolate from it (rather than extrapolating), and are inefficient at using it.

>We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.

The average article posted to HN is actually of far higher quality than the average newspaper article. Sit down and read many of the “big names” cover to cover. You’ll cry. Contrast them with the same newspaper twenty years ago and you’ll lose hope entirely.

I have a hypothesis. In the 2000s it became more common to Google things instead of asking people. For years, this worked out well, but today the quality of Google (and websites!) is terrible. Today we have an entire generation of journalists that know to do their research with the internet, and surprise, when your inputs are garbage, so are the outputs. The inputs are also homogenized content slop, so there aren’t any real different perspectives. Take any topic, say road construction or a controversial bill or new technology, and read articles about it twenty years ago and now. Twenty years ago you might see some really off the wall ideas - but now, all the articles will be the same. Left, right, whatever, nobody really has any new perspectives, they just have their specific bias projected onto the same universal set of 5 thoughts. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

Back to this article, it seems well written and I have no bones to pick - but what the author did (pick up the phone and call people) would have been entirely unremarkable not long ago. The fact that we’re remarking on it now is an indication of how deeply fucked the profession is.

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