Google cuts dozens of jobs in news division
This might just be a contrarian take on my part, but maybe we&#x27;d be better off without Google News--and most of the publishers it features.<p>When was the last time you read a news article in any &quot;major&quot; news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, &quot;This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story&quot;?<p>I don&#x27;t remember having had this experience since I was a child, decades ago. I was a teenager when I first extrapolated that if they couldn&#x27;t report with even big picture accuracy on the things I did know something about, odds were that they were similarly wrong about all the things I didn&#x27;t know about too.<p>With that perspective in mind, it&#x27;s come down to a question for me of whether it is good or bad for my life to be immersed, near-constantly, in stories about (usually awful) things happening in parts of the world that I can&#x27;t do a thing about. I don&#x27;t think it is.<p>I think that&#x27;s what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this &quot;victimer than thou&quot; culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help. Nobody feels like an agent anymore because they&#x27;re constantly immersed in stories of awful things in which they <i>don&#x27;t</i> have any agency.<p>There&#x27;s this broad cultural assumption that &quot;one must be informed about world affairs,&quot; but it&#x27;s at the expense of local affairs, the affairs we could affect. If you know about violence on the other side of the planet, but don&#x27;t know that your neighbor three doors down is having trouble getting to work and at risk of losing their job because their car broke down, I&#x27;d strongly argue that your priorities are out of whack. People&#x27;s lives everywhere are getting worse because we&#x27;re all worrying about things far away that we can&#x27;t affect rather than local problems we could actually solve.<p>I&#x27;d just as soon see Google News shutter. I think we would all be better off without the 24-hour global news cycle.