Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

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With all our media resources and technology, it's crazy that there is no easy way to answer questions like "what happened politically in France in the last month?", "what were the economic developments in Africa in the last quarter?" or "what were the biggest battery technology advances in the last year?".

With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions.

I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...).

One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum.

I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still).

Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.

The Economist paper edition has a spread with summarized news for the past week. I have been thinking of isolating myself from the news cycle and keeping myself up-to-date with a one week latency, using the Economist's summaries. The problem is, I have not found a suitable replacement for national (in my case Swedish) and also local news. Would also pay for a similar aggregator.

If you can stomach Hakelius then Fokus was some good quality journalism when I was a subscriber.

Good suggestion. I can stomach Hakelius, certainly. He is one of the best writers in the editorial space in Sweden today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_France

Does an alright job imo

This is a fantastic idea! To me, it seems like this would be possible only by human curation and not using any automated system which means someone with foresight will have to invest upfront the capital, time and energy to make this a reality (as opposed to a few talented engineers go off with some ML/NLP thing to figure this out).

I’ve often wished that journalistic institutions would also publish a more long-term view on what they think is going on in the world. I think the most important effect of this could be that it would push them to consider how much their daily coverage is in line with what they actually consider to be important developments. If you explicitly state that climate change is one of the three most important challenges on the scale of the current decade, for example, can you justify the attention (or lack thereof) you give it in your daily coverage? A daily newspaper implicitly makes these judgements of how much attention each topic deserves, but they rarely have to explicitly state and defend these judgements.

There is no incentive to weigh news as proportionally more or less important. Indeed, it takes some time for some news to be shown to have had a disproportionate impact, so that is part of the problem. But news outlets are even more strongly incentivized to highlight the current as the biggest, most urgent problem, over and above curating and continuing to examine trends and events of the recent past.

You can do that right now with Google News.

Here's "what happened politically in France in the last month":

https://news.google.com/search?q=when:30d+french+politics

Have you scanned the list? I would not describe that as giving a good overview of French politics for the last month. My two other examples are considerably worse.

The query also seems to be limited to a month. When increasing the query param to 60 or 120 days, nothing changes.

Sounds like a ranking problem; not very hard to solve.

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