13 comments

  • hannesfur 1 hour ago
    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.

    • bluGill 13 minutes ago
      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)

  • mint5 1 hour ago
    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.
    • pessimizer 37 minutes ago
      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.

  • waltbosz 1 hour ago
    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.

    • SoftTalker 6 minutes ago
      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.
    • snickerbockers 34 minutes ago
      Im pretty sure I've only ever seen people read usa today when hotels give it away for free with the continental breakfast.
    • bookofjoe 32 minutes ago
      I stayed at that hotel! I think it was the Peachtree something-or-other in downtown Atlanta, around 1980-85.
    • bluGill 11 minutes ago
      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.
    • pfdietz 1 hour ago
    • bestouff 1 hour ago
      I didn't see you capitalized the T at first. The sentence was still somehow making sense.
  • anigbrowl 16 minutes ago
    *In Soviet Union, newspaper read you

    My, how times have changed.

  • barumrho 48 minutes ago
    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?
    • danavar 40 minutes ago
      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
    • cowpig 27 minutes ago
      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

  • MikeNotThePope 50 minutes ago
    "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."
  • BitWiseVibe 57 minutes ago
    Imagine paying a billion dollars for some contract software devs to add tracking cookies to your websites.
    • etc-hosts 4 minutes ago
      What does a newspaper need "actionable intelligence" for?
  • ChrisArchitect 52 minutes ago
    Title could be closer to: USA Today Co. partners with Palantir to analyze audience data
  • seydor 1 hour ago
    That's like eating dinner with a chainsaw
  • eth0up 1 hour ago
    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.

  • webdoodle 11 minutes ago
    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.

  • bpodgursky 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • threecheese 1 hour ago
      You’ve enquoted “Palantir taking your data” as if it’s not factual, but the only one with data privacy guarantees here is USA Today.

      You can’t “convert the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated first-party relationships” without compromising your privacy.

    • kevin_thibedeau 1 hour ago
      If the storage is on US soil their contractual privacy declaration is meaningless. They can either be forced to hand over data or they can be backdoored to take it without their knowledge. They are becoming the Cloudflare of digital life patterns and that is a tempting target for the powers who want that data.
    • thinkindie 1 hour ago
      they were the one coming up with forward deployed engineers, weren't they? The least I would expect from this model is that I own the whole infra.
      • glaslong 1 hour ago
        I've still never quite understood the difference between an FDE and a contractor SWE the client hires through their parent consultancy, other than that with the contractor it would be clearer the hiring company owns all the work, data and infra produced.
        • etc-hosts 41 minutes ago
          FDE sounds like they are allowed to open carry
        • glaslong 1 hour ago
          Pessimistically I might think that the client demands data privacy and ownership on paper, but also doesn't want the liability of actually owning and maintaining or even touching their own vast stores directly. While the firm would love to learn from the data to better their systems... and more. So there's just a nice wink and a nod about what's not happening. But that is an uncharitable conspiratorial lens. I'm sure it's fine.
  • kittikitti 1 hour ago
    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.

    • kergonath 47 minutes ago
      > 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.

      • bluGill 8 minutes ago
        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)