Full Report

Traditional Mainstream Media (MSM) is on its way out. Most people under 50 today get their news from social media. Social media is more immediate, you get feedback on whether the news is potentially fake, manipulated or otherwise incomplete, and little (much less!) is censored. The news often comes raw from people on the ground in the form of raw cell phone videos.

The problem with social media as a news medium is that there is a very short attention span and often the context and meaning of whatever is happening cannot be conveyed. Even if someone tries and writes a longer piece on where things fit, it will not necessarily get in front of them because of how social media algorithms work, and even if it does when we are on social media our attention span is switched to “short mode”.

Context and full story is incredibly important to understanding the news. As the saying goes: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You may read that something “bad” happened somewhere. How often does it happen in that place? How often does it happen elsewhere, what is normal? Murders and rapes happen even in the most peaceful societies. Is there a trend? Is this “bad” thing now happening more often or are things actually getting better? What preceded this event? Was it provoked by something? Etc. This requires some data, which requires some research meaning time on behalf of the poster., and this often does not happen on social media. Not having this context can not just cause one to be misinformed, but some people actively push “news” (not even necessarily fake) which once put in context aren’t relevant. They do it for engagement or because they have an agenda.

There is another reason why social media is not a place for such context: news about a place or an event come out every so often. Even if context is provided once, it is usually not provided every time. People forget or may have never seen or paid attention to it the first time. And now all that context is gone.

Social media is great for the sort of “headline news” but is simply not a place for a full understanding of the world.

Full Report is.

VISION

I had started writing this context of some of the news on X about a year ago to good reception. Most of it was simply result of my own research into events that I did for myself, so I shared a report with everyone. Of course, it is not just me: lots of people are doing the same thing on various topics and a lot of them are doing a great job.

This site starts as an archive for my own reports. But I think it would be a lot more interesting for readers to aggregate a lot more authors who I think have the issue I do. In fact, as a reader and a consumer of such analysis, I want to see them better organized. My goal is to get 10-20 authors to do exactly what they do on X and simply keep an archive of their write-ups here. The authors though, unlike other similar aggregators, will be a bit more diverse, as in worldwide diverse, not West-centric.

And of course, ultimately, the goal is to cover not just news or geo-politics, but art, lifestyle, tech and gaming as well. Perhaps even fiction. And also include other formats, audio and video podcasts.

Towards that end, this site implements something else–a different monetization model, that I think solves a couple of other issues in this content “business”.

What that is and why is explained in detail on the Monetization page.