I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper.
I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.
Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.
With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had to be really angry to follow through on writing a physical letter, getting a stamp and walk to the post box just to complain.
I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.
What happened is there used to be local newspapers with local reporters who at least knew something about the local community. Even if you hated the bias you could at least learn something useful about your community.
USA Today as a "my country Today" edition - but they don't have local reporters who understand my community and uncover the important stories. 3/4s of the "local" paper is fluff pieces that go into every local paper". If something nationally important to me happens I'll find out about it, but nobody is telling me what my town council is doing (the published minutes are "debated a proposal for X and voted on it, it passed" - I have an opinion on this and want to inform my next vote based on this issue, but I don't know who did what (importantly there might be a consideration I'm not aware of that would make me change my mind - which is why I don't want to lookup their vote even if I could)
Even with moral issues aside, Palantir is absurdly expensive and seems to be focused on selling buzzwords over actual value and tech. It’s like crack for non-technical big wigs.
They'll get a discount for publishing good things and suppressing bad things about Palantir.
edit: prepare for a lot of interesting op-eds from the nation's first newspaper printed in full color and targeted exclusively at morons. The most well-printed comics section in the industry.
They always have been. A few times I've read it and I was always disappointed. They are about all that is left though. I keep looking for someone with real reporters who cover my local area and I can't find it. Just big city papers that have an edition for my area but no reporters to dig into local stories.
Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?
some of their value comes in as they're an outside party with carte-blanche to organize your data....do you have 10 internal teams that can't agree on a schema or organize themselves well due to political reasons? hire palantir
Their contracts give them a preposterous amount of control over their customers. All of the "Sovereignty" messaging is kind of ironic because it basically boils down to "don't trust them, trust us"
Besides that they're basically the most expensive, white-glove, enterprise-y version of what they do
"After 12 months of data analysis, we have arrived at the conclusion that our average customer was born before 1957 and thinks the country to going to hell in a hand basket."
To quote the CEO, "that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value."
So they view their readers as something to be monetized. Not to be educated, not to be intellectually stimulated, not to have their questions answered, not to have their curiosity satisfied, not to provide them with anything a newspaper traditionally did. Nope, they are just a source of money. Get them to click, serve them an ad, sell their tracking data.
Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.
This is the continuation of Operation Mockingbird. After it was exposed in the 70's by the Pike and Church Committee's, they reorganized privately using Allen & Co's Billaionaire's SummerCamp to consolidate the media (and now Social Media) industries for maximum control of the narrative. Each year they meet to further consolidate the media industry.
I've been protesting there for 7 years now, and this was the first year the Democratic Socialists of America showed up. It was a major improvement. Next year the rest of you need to show up.
Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies. The propaganda was much too obvious. I don't think a Palantir partnership is going to change my mind.
Hacker News occasionally indexed Palestinian voices but this was a breath of fresh air compared to outlets like USA Today. I'm actually constantly conflicted about the sources I consume and still seek alternatives. If they want me to view more of their content, including more authoritarian surveillance technology is not the right move.
> Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies.
That is not helpful, and a very good way of falling down rabbit holes just because you find a source that agrees with you on one subject. That’s how you get manipulated and radicalised.
It’s much better to have a variety of sources, even if you occasionally disagree. It keeps you grounded and reminds you that other people have other opinions.
I cannot stress this enough: do not get polarised because of a single issue. That is how rational discourse dies.
The irony of leftists trying to kick people out for having opinions they don't like always makes me sad.
And before someone mentions the paradox of tolerance: The paradox clears itself up if you look at what tolerance actually is. It's simply not interfering with people's agency over themselves. Given that your right to self-agency doesn't entitle you to restrict others' self-agency, behavior that does try restricting others' agency is automatically not included in "tolerance."
It's one thing if both sides believe they are attempting to restrict each others' self-agency. It's also possible that both of you are wrong. Whose place is it to say what is right OR wrong? Is there even always a right or wrong? I don't think so.
As I said elsewhere, I can't even find a single source....
For important world news there are a lot of options. However the most important news is my local community. Who covers my local school district - nobody. (This isn't true, they do send a sports reporter to the school games - but not to the school board meetings even though they matter more)
When that single issue is a genocide, the calculus changes. Would you feel the same about a news source that argues the Hutus were acting in self defense?
I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper.
I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.
Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.
With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had to be really angry to follow through on writing a physical letter, getting a stamp and walk to the post box just to complain.
I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.
What happened is there used to be local newspapers with local reporters who at least knew something about the local community. Even if you hated the bias you could at least learn something useful about your community.
USA Today as a "my country Today" edition - but they don't have local reporters who understand my community and uncover the important stories. 3/4s of the "local" paper is fluff pieces that go into every local paper". If something nationally important to me happens I'll find out about it, but nobody is telling me what my town council is doing (the published minutes are "debated a proposal for X and voted on it, it passed" - I have an opinion on this and want to inform my next vote based on this issue, but I don't know who did what (importantly there might be a consideration I'm not aware of that would make me change my mind - which is why I don't want to lookup their vote even if I could)
Even with moral issues aside, Palantir is absurdly expensive and seems to be focused on selling buzzwords over actual value and tech. It’s like crack for non-technical big wigs.
They'll get a discount for publishing good things and suppressing bad things about Palantir.
edit: prepare for a lot of interesting op-eds from the nation's first newspaper printed in full color and targeted exclusively at morons. The most well-printed comics section in the industry.
I dislike USA Today. It feels like lowest common denominator fluffy news.
Also, I remember staying at a hotel once where they delivered one to every guest room.
USA Today is news written for 5th graders. It has always been a waste of time and paper for anyone who really wants to know what's going on.
Im pretty sure I've only ever seen people read usa today when hotels give it away for free with the continental breakfast.
I stayed at that hotel! I think it was the Peachtree something-or-other in downtown Atlanta, around 1980-85.
https://www.amazon.com/Were-Eating-More-Beets-Trudeau/dp/080...
They always have been. A few times I've read it and I was always disappointed. They are about all that is left though. I keep looking for someone with real reporters who cover my local area and I can't find it. Just big city papers that have an edition for my area but no reporters to dig into local stories.
I didn't see you capitalized the T at first. The sentence was still somehow making sense.
*In Soviet Union, newspaper read you
My, how times have changed.
Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?
some of their value comes in as they're an outside party with carte-blanche to organize your data....do you have 10 internal teams that can't agree on a schema or organize themselves well due to political reasons? hire palantir
Their contracts give them a preposterous amount of control over their customers. All of the "Sovereignty" messaging is kind of ironic because it basically boils down to "don't trust them, trust us"
Besides that they're basically the most expensive, white-glove, enterprise-y version of what they do
"After 12 months of data analysis, we have arrived at the conclusion that our average customer was born before 1957 and thinks the country to going to hell in a hand basket."
Imagine paying a billion dollars for some contract software devs to add tracking cookies to your websites.
What does a newspaper need "actionable intelligence" for?
To quote the CEO, "that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value."
So they view their readers as something to be monetized. Not to be educated, not to be intellectually stimulated, not to have their questions answered, not to have their curiosity satisfied, not to provide them with anything a newspaper traditionally did. Nope, they are just a source of money. Get them to click, serve them an ad, sell their tracking data.
Title could be closer to: USA Today Co. partners with Palantir to analyze audience data
That's like eating dinner with a chainsaw
Let's also remember: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/can-ai-judge-journalism-a-...
Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.
How is this relevant?
This is the continuation of Operation Mockingbird. After it was exposed in the 70's by the Pike and Church Committee's, they reorganized privately using Allen & Co's Billaionaire's SummerCamp to consolidate the media (and now Social Media) industries for maximum control of the narrative. Each year they meet to further consolidate the media industry.
https://webdoodle.substack.com
I've been protesting there for 7 years now, and this was the first year the Democratic Socialists of America showed up. It was a major improvement. Next year the rest of you need to show up.
Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies. The propaganda was much too obvious. I don't think a Palantir partnership is going to change my mind.
Hacker News occasionally indexed Palestinian voices but this was a breath of fresh air compared to outlets like USA Today. I'm actually constantly conflicted about the sources I consume and still seek alternatives. If they want me to view more of their content, including more authoritarian surveillance technology is not the right move.
> Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies.
That is not helpful, and a very good way of falling down rabbit holes just because you find a source that agrees with you on one subject. That’s how you get manipulated and radicalised.
It’s much better to have a variety of sources, even if you occasionally disagree. It keeps you grounded and reminds you that other people have other opinions.
I cannot stress this enough: do not get polarised because of a single issue. That is how rational discourse dies.
The irony of leftists trying to kick people out for having opinions they don't like always makes me sad.
And before someone mentions the paradox of tolerance: The paradox clears itself up if you look at what tolerance actually is. It's simply not interfering with people's agency over themselves. Given that your right to self-agency doesn't entitle you to restrict others' self-agency, behavior that does try restricting others' agency is automatically not included in "tolerance."
It's one thing if both sides believe they are attempting to restrict each others' self-agency. It's also possible that both of you are wrong. Whose place is it to say what is right OR wrong? Is there even always a right or wrong? I don't think so.
As I said elsewhere, I can't even find a single source....
For important world news there are a lot of options. However the most important news is my local community. Who covers my local school district - nobody. (This isn't true, they do send a sports reporter to the school games - but not to the school board meetings even though they matter more)
When that single issue is a genocide, the calculus changes. Would you feel the same about a news source that argues the Hutus were acting in self defense?