How To Read The News

Ha ha ha, seriously, what

Nov 08, 2021

There is a casual way to snack on news without fully engaging your brain. That’s fine.

There is also a more focused, thoughtful way to extract information while on a deadline. This post is about that.

No Really, How Do You Read The News?

There is a famous quote about journalism, often incorrectly attributed to George Orwell or William Randolph Hearst, that goes like this:1

"News is anything anybody wants to suppress; everything else is public relations."

It's about as pithy a summary of how to think about reading the news as one can get. But it might cause some trouble.

The first thing to think about when thinking about how to read the news is what news to read. Here are some ways to do it.2

You should start by making a list of all the sources of information you should read to know what's happening.

For the sake of brevity, I have linked above only to English publications, but really you should read as widely as possible, and that will mean learning some other languages so you can read in French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian and all the other languages.

This is principally about reading the news, but you will also need to watch TV and listen to the radio. There is also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Substack and all the other social media channels.3

Obviously you cannot do all of that, so you need some kind of filter.

Your actual list of what to read will be much shorter than… all the news in the world, obviously. The media industry is in a perpetual state of oversupply, as should be clear from the glut of sources of information listed above. At a bare minimum, if you believe that being a well-informed citizen is an important part of living in a democracy (and it absolutely is) then you will not want to neglect a source of local news. Most of the time, this publication will suck, and you will have to grin and bear it.

A lot of people will tell you that you need to read two newspapers a day before you go to work to be informed about what's going on.4 Ignore them. There is enough light and heat on TV and social media that opposing views will reach you, like it or not.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you will want to purposefully seek out specific journalists who are the best-informed in whatever field of human endeavour you care most about.

Start by thinking about yourself and your needs. You can only care about so much. Your time is limited, so is your attention. If there is a theme running through this series, it is that news media is not really about big brands like CNN and Al Jazeera; it’s really about people. This seems obvious, but it’s easy to forget, and the consequence is frying your brain.

The other big point is that boilerplate advice is mostly useless, far too rigid to rely upon, and capable of obscuring a clear view of the world in front of you. That said: At least, read about what will affect you and the people you care about. At most, read intensely about the topic that most interests you, be it climate change, quantitative investing, or the football transfer window. You can then safely ignore the rest. That still leaves a lot to read.

You'll have to figure out for yourself what's the best mix for you.

Start by Asking: “What On Earth Is This Drivel?”

Aiding you in this task is an important practice, which is to identify which type of news you are reading.5

There are generally three types of news:

News that somebody wants you to read.
News that somebody wants you to read, but knows you probably didn't read earlier because the presentation was off.
News that somebody doesn't want you to read.

The first category represents a large proportion - at least a quorum - of what you read on the internet or in a newspaper. And that holds true whether you're reading Teen Vogue or the Financial Times. It consists of press releases, speeches, interviews and other public pronouncements by people who for one reason or another want you to think a certain way or care about a topic that they think has been neglected.

The second type is broadly derivative of the first type, but occupies a large and growing share of the modern attention-based economy. It comprises aggregated news, hot takes, reprints, most of social media, and repackaged newswire copy. You can save time by ignoring this if you’ve seen it already.

The third type is generally more interesting and usually worth reading. It’s the sort described in the fake Orwell/Hearst quote we started with. This is not limited to a single source of news, so requires the most effort to find.

A vast amount of news is generated by people working in public relations to sell whatever product or service is provided by their company, or their client. If you are a sensitive, intelligent soul, and of course you are, you should be able to see through this sort of thing very quickly. You'll notice when a story comes from a press release - Nick Davies' Flat Earth News is, embarrassingly for the industry, still the best guide to this.

You may also see a rehash of another publication's story amplifying certain hot-button words or topics -- they ought to tell you if the story came from another publication, assuming they haven't ripped the story off outright (there are many news outlets that do).

Compare and contrast: "Boris Johnson announces tax hike" and “Privately-educated, Oxbridge graduate living in London mansion that YOU pay for says British people MUST tighten their belts" are statements that roughly say the same thing, but the framing is different. This tells you something about the perceived biases of that publication's readership, but if you are paying close attention to news already, you won't learn very much from it, besides how to rile up a target demographic.

If you want to find news that you actually want to read, it’s best to locate the community of people who care about it the most. The easiest way to find those people is usually on Twitter, where on any given day, the best-informed people are likely to be talking about the news that most surprises them.6

That was a lot of reading, so let’s have a…

🎶 Musical Interlude 🎶

Get To The Point

This post is about how to extract information from a news report, and since this is what journalists do every single day, there are certain time-saving tricks that can make your life easier.

You may find yourself reading a story with no idea what it is about.

A reporter usually starts with a shapeless pile of blustering legalese, incomprehensible data or unreadable industry jargon, and tries to make it fun to read so that you can banter about it in the pub with your mates. "How would you explain this story to a member of your family" is what editors tell reporters when they've failed at this endeavour. The fastest way to do so is to connect the new information to an existing concept.

Generally speaking, by about the fourth or fifth paragraph in a news story you should have encountered some information giving you the context in which the story appears. This is known in the industry as the “nut graf,” which is essentially an instruction saying “new reader start here.”

If you are still wondering what the story is about at this point, go back to the start and read it again. The more news you read, the more obvious this will be.

If you haven't found that paragraph pretty quickly, the writers of the story are assuming that the context of the story is intuitive. At this point, an alert should go off in your brain that the writers of the story are relying upon your prejudices to drive the point home. This is a good time to interrogate the biases of the article and reflect upon whose interests are being served in its publication.

Find The Source

Let’s suppose you understand the significance of what you’re reading. What do you read after you’ve read the headline and clicked the link?

In almost all cases the next step is to find the attribution. Was the source of the information a phone call? An interview? A press release? A regulatory filing? A tweet that was swiftly deleted? The answer to this question can affect the credibility of the facts presented. At risk of stating the obvious, don’t believe everything you read.

It’s easy to overdo this. Generally, one can assume that reported statements said on the record, on camera, in a public setting, are unlikely to be inaccurate. You don’t need to confirm with two independent sources something that you can see for yourself with your own eyes.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Consider the following:

Sourcing is extremely important if you are making any kind of decision based upon the news you read - even if it's just to hit the share button.

Remember what I said earlier about news that somebody wants you to read? Try asking the following question as you go: Why did somebody want this information to be put into the public domain? What was served by enlisting the credibility of a journalist at an established publication? Why did the publication acquiesce in giving the source airtime, screen space or column inches?

Deals coverage is often illuminating. Is a multibillion dollar acquisition really about to be announced? Well, that may be what the headline on the story says. But a piece attributed to "people familiar with the matter", a common journalistic shorthand for unidentified sources, contains a multitude of possibilities. Are the people involved working directly on the deal? Or swapping rumours they've heard on an internal chatroom at a boozy lunch? What are their motives? Are they leaking the story to the press for a negotiating advantage in the final stages of a deal? There is academic research suggesting that many leaks to the press in financial transactions are intentional.7

Political coverage has its own nuances. What are "sources close to the government"? British cabinet ministers often seem to have “friends” defending them in the press. Who are these people? Passing acquaintances? Or a paid press officer requesting anonymity? A journalist will often negotiate with their source over exactly how to attribute to that person in the final article to provide the most accurate description they can without identifying them. Clearly, not all do.

Even if the source is clearly attributed, sometimes the reporter may not have grasped the importance of the information, why it matters or what details are worth including. And if they use unattributed sources, how do you know if the information is any good? This is a hard question, and we're going to go deeper on following specific writers and kicking the tyres on a story.

But fundamentally, remember that most news is determined by people, not events. People usually do not broadcast their motivations.

Check the Byline

By this point, you should have an idea whether or not to believe the story. At this point, take a moment to figure out who wrote it and remember who they are. This is an important practice.

Time for another…

🎶 Musical Interlude 🎶

Never Forget Mistakes Happen

Every journalist hates corrections. But not all are created euqal. Good editors will stop them from happening.

Most reporters have developed their own internal hierarchy of whom to trust based on years of bitter experience chasing dead ends, getting spun, and fruitlessly pursuing heavily embellished stories from their competitors.

Everybody makes mistakes. You will also need to come up with a process for how you handle errors you find in the reporting of others.

Some errors merit little more than a snicker or a disparaging sigh - such as a spelling mistake (The Guardian is notorious for these, in spite of recent protests to the contrary). At the other end of the scale, you may also encounter a blunder that makes you write off a journalist or a publication in its entirety.

The trouble with using social media as a primary source is that people shoot from the hip, don’t check facts, and are usually more interested in self-promotion than being right. Save time by muting the word “BREAKING”.

During my past life in Abu Dhabi, there were cases where the notoriously unreliable Iranian semi-official state media outlets would publish interesting information about a pipeline or an oilfield or something and attribute it to a speech by the wrong government official. Obviously, that should be a red flag and cast the rest of the story into doubt, since it reveals a problem in the editing process.

Newsrooms that correct factual errors swiftly and transparently build trust. Most publications won't be able to acknowledge when they get the angle wrong. You’ll have to use your judgment with those.

If you are starting to feel overwhelmed, welcome to journalism.

No Really, How Do You Read The News?

But really, hahahaha sorry that seems like a lot of work, surely that is overkill, right? It’s possible to just skim the headlines, isn’t it?

Well, sure. But as a consumer of news media you should be very careful about what you put into your brain. A lot of it is purposefully designed to wind you up, piss you off or otherwise prime you to mouth off on some social network, ideally so you can share a link to their story.

Be alert to this and remember that there are lots of ways to read the news, not all of them are good.

How To Journalist

Discussion about this post