Choose News
We can’t say we weren’t warned, in fact we’ve known about this for a while and perhaps we’re part of the problem - our old liberal Achilles heel - we try to be nice, tried to be understand. Hey maybe those rabid vitriolic narcissists parading as philosophers had something useful to say? Maybe we need to hear both sides of the story, we thought. And yet as we searched for balance in news we felt must be there – truth in news has been lost somewhere in a sea of overwhelm. Because who wouldn’t prefer to see fluffy mammals in strange places to understanding complex geopolitical conflicts. News has been eroded and hollowed out eviscerated and shamed and blamed and hung out to dry, a decade of rolling news made reporting exhausting for those doing it and has taught us to sit back expecting news to be as exciting as a box set. Oh we’re bored of that story – we say – can you not make it dance, make it make me cry, get one that’s similar but better. When reality TV and news and drama are all served on the same screens it would take a genius to not apply the same demands to all media.
Those older gens doubled down on the problem – took out a subscription for a broadsheet and blindly believed what it wrote, and the younger gens took to their news feed for actual news – verified or not.
So here we are…..in a time where once the clipped tones of news were narrow but reliable, but that old news doesn’t work for our future, news has had to grow up and is now hawking its’ wares in the realms of fantastical thinking. In our decade of ALSO ideas that seemed fantastical turned out to be real and are now in the mainstream, we remember debating if Democracy could survive the internet – something that seemed unthinkably laughable as an idea back then started - now not so much. Tricksters and entertainers wield more power than governments and are we now seeing all that hate and division created on line spill out of the digital sphere and into IRL. So for all of this it’s time to get serious with news. So we have a curated spine of workshops, talks and workshops on how to find, read and make (dammit we want to know how to make our socials more news worthy too) news in 2023. Through our morning papers show, comedians making sense (or not) of the news, we’ll give you immunity to misinformation, skills to read and make news yourself, and a wild space to re-consider your relationship with information.