Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools
cepr.org
cepr.org
My town publishes city meeting minutes - "debated to change zoning regulations in [development], it passed 2-3". What changes were made? What were the debate points? Once I get that information who do I vote for/against in the next election if I care about the change.
I really want a local news paper that covers the above types of things. I can't find it and in turn I have no idea who to vote for. Town positions are partizan so I at least I know democrat/republican (for whatever that means...). I also know all candidates are married and have kids - and the family picture was taken by someone who knows how to make them look good. They all will "fight for me" as well, but never do they promise anything that might be controversial (unlike their opponent - they are obviously biased against their opponent and yet they are my best source of information about their opponent)
National news I will hear about and I can form opinions. However local it is much harder. The newspapers I have access to are not helping.
Plus, there's the visual cue to those around me that I'm not just idly scrolling, I'm actually looking at something.
> 30/40 yr old, middle class women with just enough spare time to feel guilty about other people's behavior
The audience for the written paper is not less-than-high-school educated. Do you think the wording is at this level ?
Eg: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/09/08/pisa-202...
I guess it is meant as hyperbole, though I read NRC, Le Monde and NYT and can confirm that le Monde is the leading newspaper of France but it is not the newspaper it was. Mostly opinion and lifestyle, not a lot of investigative or even just in-depth journalism. Mostly preaching (some of it for causes I happen to agree with, but still)
The investigative journalism is still there - they're usually on the same big international stories as the guardian or NYT (which, okay, I get it are not enough to the left to be considered serious in this thread, we get it. Meanwhile the vast majority of people think they're red bastion and watch hard right "news" tv channels and tiktok reals, but let's all pretend it's the same thing to continue feeling smug about ourselves.)
However, they're VERY bad at putting those "deep" article in the front page of the website. The "paper" paper does a better job - when a 10 lines articles sits next to a full pager, you get a sense of hierarchy.
When there is only the title on the front page, you don't get this.
Also, they have "live threads" for everything , and "alerts" for anything.
English version: https://mondediplo.com/
Seriously, you call that "entertainment" ?
As for calling them to be "preachy", that's another thing; but then presenting the Diplo as a counterpoint is weird, right ? ;) (there is hardly any major newspaper more preachy and self-righteous than them. But, I mean, I'm very glad they _exist_ as long as you don't require me to read it, that's fine.)
Selection at university, which happens everywhere else in the world, is "controversial". When you read the article, you realize that the main opponents are communists (well, the Stalinist branch, since France has 3 or 4 communist parties), who do around 2-3% in elections. So it's not very controversial, actually.
The Diplo is biased but doesn't try to hide their bias with this kind of tedious astroturfing, which I believe is quite toxic for teenagers reading a newspaper. It's a different format, I agree with that, though.
(it was about "Tagesschau", a major news outlet by the public broadcasting system)
I don't want to deny a modern problem may exist based on additional signals, but this statistic isn't necessarily bad: News ought to be consistently exposing viewers to vocabulary they don't know.
Not just as a way to help people naturally grow their vocabulary by seeing it used in context, but also because the news should cover topics and specialties that are outside any individual's usual work and leisure.
I would have imagined they would have been targeting less than high school literacy since their inception. At least the ones intended to be read by the masses. I'd actually expect that they target somewhere in the 4th-6th grade literacy range.
My local paper (basically a reprint of Gannett stories with a few local ones, mostly sports) tends to use a very basic vocabulary, often organizes stories as a set of questions/answers, or bullet point lists under a "What you need to know about..." headline.
When I think back to newspapers I read in high school (1980s) or even in the 1990s they weren't written at that low a level.
I will agree that the Attention Economy has replaced most of the traditional "news" with angry click-bait.
We were actually taught in journalism school to write straight-up news for a Grade 5 level audience. You could get fancy if you chose in opinion pieces.
To your second point, if it bleeds it leads. That's always been the case. Journalism is, and always has been, a business. A sensational news story of yesteryear is today's viral content. It's the same thing — both are desirable because they sell.
It was the most boring and soul-crushing class I've ever taken in my life. After that remote learning course about Quality Assurance in college, of course.
His time was a nice success for the newspaper and a sad addition to the average stupidity of the world.
Not saying there are not great news content in other languages. However English should be expected to dominate over the whole world.
Obviously the best coverage will be in the country's majority language.
However for world events coverage English is the more likely language. For niches that might interest you English might be the only option since odds are someone in every country speaks English and reports on that niche. (odds, but no guarantee)
Can you explain how you arrived at this conclusion?
Certainly when I lived in Japan and picked up a copy of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world events coverage was in Japanese. And when I've traveled in France, Le Monde was entirely in French. The international section didn't become English.
> For niches that might interest you
I'm not sure you're talking about newspapers at this point.
They taught the teenagers how to question and interrogate the claims presented in the newspapers, which is far more effective than blindly branding 'MSM newspapers' as propaganda. (The study was conducted in France; are you sure that conventional French newspapers are propaganda of any inclination?)
We're either propagandized by reading the news or watching it on TV OR we're holed up in a confirmation biased world by social media (which is also propagandized).
The Guardian, AP, Reuters, NPR, etc. Hell, the New York Review of Books is crazy good, although their world news coverage usually is slipped into book reviews.
I use to search for random blogs. One day I ran into something truly special. Their first post was an extremely crude draft for a book the size of a tweet. All following postings described what part of the book they worked on, the information they found, the decisions they had to make, spreading things over chapters and naming them, details that didn't make the cut. The RSS feed has 2-4 updates per day.
In the end he deleted it all, thanked the readers and pointed at a page where the result of his effort could be purchased.
The news today all to often describes some event in isolation while it is really part of a context involving many events. Reading the articles doesn't inform you about what is going on. I get that from other places and the papers don't compliment it.
I hope this says something about me :)
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Fixed it for you.