Human Curation Sets Apple News Apart From Algorithm-Focused News Sources Like Google and Facebook

[rom3o]

Does this mean that like Apple Music it will keep suggesting stuff that I’m not even remotely interested in?

To be less cynical: It’s an great thing to have playlists handpicked respectively news bundled by humans. But when it comes to distributing content to a couple million users, there isn’t an alternative to algorithms to make sure suggestions are catered to the taste each of them individually and not only the mainstream.

 

[ravenstar]

Human curation is the worst thing. It will be definitely biased. Those people will decide what you should read or listen. It will be affected by their political, religious views which is bad. At least algorithm curation can be made unbiased, but not the human curation. It will be always biased.
[doublepost=1540527934][/doublepost]

Agreed. I have been a AM subscriber from the beginning. The so called "human curation" is always a miss. But Spotify is always spot on. I never listen to those AM curation. I will ditch AM if Spotify is available in my region in next few years.

As I've pointed out before, all news reporting represents some human bias. It's not as if there are robots out there observing events and documenting them for the news outlets. Some outlets don't seem as adept (or willing) to differentiate between factual reporting and opinion or fantasy, however, and I personally don't have the time or inclination to put the effort into sorting through their tripe to find all the real information. If Apple is supplying people who will do it for me, that's a fantastic service. Maybe I won't like that information, but that's different.

Sure, they could introduce another bias into the equation, but until I see evidence of that, I'm not going to condemn their service. And by evidence, I don't mean demoting tired old discredited conspiracy theories, but obscuring real facts or new information. Perhaps others consider opinion pieces news, but I do not, and I don't care if those are screened. I won't read them anyway.

 

[DoctorTech]

If you really do this then you have no idea about what is happening in the world. With the exception of CNN and Buzzfeed, the NYT and WaPo are primary sources not aggregators. They write the articles that everyone else will reference or modify when writing their own version. I would include the WSJ as well.

You have a choice. You can either live in the real world or you can live in a fantasy parallel universe thinking that everything is a conspiracy. If you don’t want centrist/center-left politics then don’t read their political articles. All will be labeled “opinion.” Politics is just a fraction of news content.

I would not have a problem with the MSM if they limited their opinions to the op-ed page. However, I have seen numerous instances of opinions creeping into "reporting", sometimes subtly and sometimes very overtly.

It was either late last week or early this week that I was listening to Shepard Smith on FoxNews Channel on my SiriusXM app. President Trump was carried live making some remarks about the caravan headed toward the United States as he was about to board the Marine One helicopter. Within seconds of cutting back to the studio, Shepard Smith was blatantly calling the President a liar for claiming there were some MS-13 gang members in the caravan. Was Smith "reporting" the news of the day or giving his opinion on the news of the day?

The same type of bias happens in print media although it usually manifests in a more subtle form. Reporters can be selective about who they choose to get comments from so one side of an issue has their best spokesperson / argument presented while the other side of the issue is represented by a less credible person making a poor argument or espousing an extreme position that is not representative of the majority of people on that side of the issue.

 

[dk001]

..
Go read the IPCC reports, which are abundantly documented and super clear about probabilities. They discuss whether there is warming (not at all in question anymore), whether it is substantially anthropogenic (not at all in question anymore), the probabilities of various impacts, and even necessary mitigation efforts. The most recent report goes into extreme detail about the measures that will be necessary to prevent 1.5C warming by 2040-ish. Spoiler: those measures exceed the Paris Agreement targets, which aren’t even being followed. Low-lying island nations are already being affected and will be devastated by 2040.

Legitimate news outlets will report all this without needing to “balance” it with fossil fuel industry talking points. If they don’t, you know it’s not a legit news source.

Not disagreeing. Just saying it isn't all Black/White.

btw - was concerned over the recent findings about the sub-ocean current Greenland effect.

 

[BruiserBear]

You're committing a few logical fallacies here (composition/division, black or white, and false cause). Equating "Trump supporters" to anyone who holds a view ideologically different from yours.

Then again, logical reasoned arguments tend to evade those who make the bulk of their decisions based on knee-jerk reactions, what the unequivocally biased mainstream media spoon feeds them, and emotion.

You really think you’re fooling anyone into thinking you’re not a fan of Trump?

 

[T Coma]

The truth has a left bias.

The truth has a left bias.

Ladies and gentlemen... Welcome to PRSI, and the logic of popular political discourse.

 

[lowendlinux]

I like my algorithm news feed since it contains no politics and no news that isn't car or tech related

 

[unobtainium]

The truth has a left bias.

Ladies and gentlemen... Welcome to PRSI, and the logic of popular political discourse.

On most major issues these days, the "Left" position is the one based on facts, the "Right" position is conspiracy theory BS fed by Fox News and other assorted blowhards.
All you have to do is look at who supports which position. Republicans have made educated people and experts the enemy. Professional journalists, scientists, etc. -- they're all bad guys according to Trump and his idiot followers. I'll say it again: in 2018, the truth has a left bias.

 

[lec0rsaire]

Within seconds of cutting back to the studio, Shepard Smith was blatantly calling the President a liar for claiming there were some MS-13 gang members in the caravan. Was Smith "reporting" the news of the day or giving his opinion on the news of the day?

While Shep is one of the most fair Fox anchors, he does not have the weight of the NYT, WaPO or WSJ. He is an anchor/commentator and that’s very different from a pure journalist.

 

[JRobinsonJr]

This is a false equivalency. The left- and right-wing in America both have extremist and annoying elements, but your post illustrates one of the most frustrating things about mainstream conservatives nowadays, that they will frame things in such a way as to omit important aspects of an issue, to create a false binary or to suggest any problem is part of some left-wing agenda. Let's rephrase your facts to highlight what you left out.

Fact: The climate is changing
Fact: The climate has always been changing
Fact: The climate is changing far more rapidly than existing climate models predict

Fact: Immigration has great potential
Fact: Immigration has the ability to overwhelm social services
Fact: America underfunds social services in favor of corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy

There's a subtle and false binary in the way you presented those issues and that's not being done by extremists, but by mainstream conservatives. It's an insidious way to frame issues, limit discussion and cut off arguments. I can't think of an analog to this done by lefties.

While we can respectfully disagree on your additional 'facts', your response actually validated my post. I simply stated two sets of facts. Nothing more, nothing less. Both of them are accurate. You, however, reached a conclusion that I may or may not agree with but you assumed I was pushing a specific outcome. Truth and Facts can be manipulated based on your personal bias (intentionally or not), thus it is impossible to have bias-free curated news.

My post was intentionally vague because there is no way to argue the two 'facts' I stated. Reality is far more nuanced, and in my opinion that is exactly the problem with news in general. We have way to much commentary/opinion and too little "just the facts Ma'am" pretending to be news. In the past there were two distinct approaches. First, a reporting of the facts without conclusions. Second, commentary that would attempt to interpret those facts. Today, however, all we have - both liberal and conservative - is interpretive.

 

[Tech198]

I like what Apple is doing with humans at the helm with news

Put users in control in what they see. not the service decision.

 

[kurosov]

Click "Edit" then select the red circle with line through it next to Apple News Spotlight and click remove. Gone.

Now if you’d actually tried what you just said you’d have seen spotlight is the only one that cannot be removed, which is entirely my point.

 

[T Coma]

On most major issues these days, the "Left" position is the one based on facts, the "Right" position is conspiracy theory BS fed by Fox News and other assorted blowhards.
All you have to do is look at who supports which position. Republicans have made educated people and experts the enemy. Professional journalists, scientists, etc. -- they're all bad guys according to Trump and his idiot followers. I'll say it again: in 2018, the truth has a left bias.

Thanks for the chuckle.

 

[LizKat]

Is anyone skeptical of someone having the power of showing you what you see in the news?

Sure but I was also skeptical of when my grandmother pruned her library in the parlor of all her romance novels, once I had learned how to read and tried to select a book from that shelf to show off my new skill set. I read the title page of one of them aloud, and she heard it and said "Oh not that one my dear,,,," and that was the last I saw of any of those books until I was in high school, at which point I'd probably read far more surprising material in middle school libraries.

And... I was even more skeptical of my granddad when he insisted I start reading the financial pages of the damn newspaper at age 8...

Since I don't have a billion bucks now to send scouts out around the globe to fetch my personal news feed to me directly, I have to make some choices about assembling second-hand sources I personally find credible. Rather than just hit on a Google or Yahoo type aggregation, I choose to subscribe to a few mainstream newspapers of record, and a few mainstream magazines right and left of center.

I do glance at Apple News on my iPhone now and then after picking up notifications from some online papers that I subscribe to. I don't have a TV so Apple News is sort of like a quick scroll around a basic cable tier the way I have it set up, but again, the main hard news of the day I subscribe to independently and I decide what to read in those papers. It's definitely not just political stuff. I regard mainstream papers of record like WSJ, NYT, WaPo as true wonderments in their offerings from first to last page, and worth every penny.

On Apple's curation methods: I don't have a problem with how their humans do curate news, probably because I don't regard what I've seen of their picks as having a particular "agenda" past serving up news sources you could explore more of if you want to. Maybe that's because I already read mainstream work from both left and right of center, so what I see in Apple News seems pretty familiar. I never expected Apple to show me material from out there in the wilds of unverifiable conspiracy theories from either right or left online, and so again, they have not disappointed me.