Do you remember the glory days of newspapers? Of one source of news that you could read and then be confident that you know all of the current world news? Well I do not, and I am not sure that is what those glory days were like either. Regardless, those were the days without algorithms controlling our news intake. Question is, what do those algorithms do?
In Predictions for Journalism 2022, Tamar Charney notices a change in how people take in the news of the day. She notes that "Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s just a pendulum swinging back, but data suggests people are moving in the direction of more finite forms of news in their diets." You would think that people would jump from news site to news site, headline to headline, until their phone dies, but that is not what Charney is seeing. She suspects that after two decades into this new century full of algorithms that give you news that you would be interested in, the people are starting to tap out. They instead just find something to listen to for less than an hour and call it a day. And I think that's a good idea. I think it is better for a person to know a lot about a few things then be equally basic in everything.
Until next time,
good afternoon, good evening, and good night.
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