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.
USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.)
It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.
I decided to spot check a few, including places like Portland and Seattle, and it seems like private ownership by a family for the last century is pretty common. And isn't the main paper in Austin the Austin American-Statesman? That's the Hearst family. Though looking a little deeper, they were owned by Gannett until last year.
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)
They bought the newspaper I worked at in/after college. They downsized significantly, but many folks I worked with over a decade ago now are still there.
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.
My question is this: why is Palantir required for this kind of fairly basic data analysis? Couldn't they use much cheaper, probably open platforms for data science & analytics?
not talking about illiteracy, ~50% of americans read at a 6th grade level or below... that's certainly enough to make an impact, the 2024 election was decided by ~250k votes across 3 states... Michigan specifically has a reading level below national average
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.
Does your local NPR station (or even PBS) have local journalists? Obviously their primary formats aren’t written, but my local NPR has a fantastic website also.
Being awful is easy when you start, but think about how much they have worked, how hard they have worked, how much an anti-anti-christ they must have proved themselves to be, what Indiana Jones traps they must have escaped to reach Palantir's CEO from the lobby, how many kids they probably have sacrificed to Satan, to get a contract from one of the most prominent and established war crime houses in history, to do what Google Analytics could do with copy-pasting three lines of code and signing in with your own Google account — just so they could burn their already-gone reputation and keep being one of the worst ways to waste human labor, office space, servers, and dead trees. This takes work, and I must admit I'm in total awe. This is going way beyond the competition to prove something, even if that something is the stupidest thing the laws of physics can handle.
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
At least in the military aspect, I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family.
I personally find the panic over Palantir, Data Centers, etc to be largely mass hysteria vs anything else. It has become an omni-cause like Israel (I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish, just read any internet comment thread on the topic.)
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
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.
Search traffic is failing for everyone because of AI, you don't need a billion dollars to figure that out.
Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now?
There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and poison the bot to remind everyone that not only are we at war with Iran, but Coca-Cola is still America's favorite soft drink.
"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."
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.
It's a Thiel product, and the subject here is Palantir and media. Ideological adjacencies in media affairs seems relevant to me at such high levels of influence and power integrations.
But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question?
If that is not a fair question, maybe show me evidence supporting a falsifiable general rule showing that all, or the majority of comments in HN threads contain strictly directly related comments -- or at least something showing most HN threads show non-directly related comments being challenged consistently, perhaps by yourself. This would help.
On a deeper level...
As a rogue journalist, I research many things. In this case, I have been researching both Palantir and Thiel, particularly products and things funded by Theil, particularly certain YouTube influencer channels.
My research shows certain contradictions of proclaimed values that very much interest me, such as Thiel Capital support of American Alchemy, which heavily promotes "neuro divergence" and an entire category of ideas that his partner, Alex Karp severely criticizes. Karp has made openly contemptuous claims on "neuro divergence" and drugs, while Thiel Capital is affiliated with American Alchemy, which is not modestly adamant on the subject, but hyper adamant, and promotes what some might call "conspiracy" related material.
However, when you have such individuals deeply connected with the Pentagon, and Law Enforcement, with verifiable influence, profiling abilities, and much more, this is something I take very seriously. As a 'journalist', I tend to see connections. I am sure you resent this, but despite an often rough approach, they have yet to fail in final synthesis. So that is what I am actually thinking, when I leave such posts.
I'm accused of being "way too defensive". For those who would consider this, tick "show dead" and review my comment history. Yes, you will find some slop, often a result of that implied above, but you will find quite a few that should not have been flagged, but were. There is a precedent here. I also get at least one downvote for every comment, however neutral, even on obscure posts with few views. That is close enough to a pattern to wonder. So I do.
Asking why a Thiel related media organization is relevant to a Thiel related media organization is odd, to me. It's not as if Thiel or Palantir aren't involved in many things. Am I supposed to voluntarily compartmentalize them?
This "simple" question has an easy answer. Sometimes questions with exceedingly simple answers do seem awkward.
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.
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?
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.
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.
USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.)
It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.
I decided to spot check a few, including places like Portland and Seattle, and it seems like private ownership by a family for the last century is pretty common. And isn't the main paper in Austin the Austin American-Statesman? That's the Hearst family. Though looking a little deeper, they were owned by Gannett until last year.
Yes for big cities, but there are very very few independent local papers in less populated areas, for example: https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/with-a-new-media-conglo...
Jokes aside, I do honestly wonder what they expect to learn from this kind of analysis.
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)
They bought the newspaper I worked at in/after college. They downsized significantly, but many folks I worked with over a decade ago now are still there.
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.
My question is this: why is Palantir required for this kind of fairly basic data analysis? Couldn't they use much cheaper, probably open platforms for data science & analytics?
I don't see where it says who's paying whom. Maybe the deal is that Palantir gets more personal data to throw in a national profile database.
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.
Im pretty sure I've only ever seen people read usa today when hotels give it away for free with the continental breakfast.
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.
The people who can only read at a 5th grade level are precisely the people who need to be more informed about what's going on
Why? They mostly don't do anything very impactful. Voting and other civic engagement is very low amongst the illiterate.
not talking about illiteracy, ~50% of americans read at a 6th grade level or below... that's certainly enough to make an impact, the 2024 election was decided by ~250k votes across 3 states... Michigan specifically has a reading level below national average
https://www.amazon.com/Were-Eating-More-Beets-Trudeau/dp/080...
I stayed at that hotel! I think it was the Peachtree something-or-other in downtown Atlanta, around 1980-85.
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.
Does your local NPR station (or even PBS) have local journalists? Obviously their primary formats aren’t written, but my local NPR has a fantastic website also.
I didn't see you capitalized the T at first. The sentence was still somehow making sense.
Is Palantir getting access to any data it didn't already have about the newspaper chain's readers?
In Soviet Union, newspaper read you
My, how times have changed.
Being awful is easy when you start, but think about how much they have worked, how hard they have worked, how much an anti-anti-christ they must have proved themselves to be, what Indiana Jones traps they must have escaped to reach Palantir's CEO from the lobby, how many kids they probably have sacrificed to Satan, to get a contract from one of the most prominent and established war crime houses in history, to do what Google Analytics could do with copy-pasting three lines of code and signing in with your own Google account — just so they could burn their already-gone reputation and keep being one of the worst ways to waste human labor, office space, servers, and dead trees. This takes work, and I must admit I'm in total awe. This is going way beyond the competition to prove something, even if that something is the stupidest thing the laws of physics can handle.
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
At least in the military aspect, I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family.
I personally find the panic over Palantir, Data Centers, etc to be largely mass hysteria vs anything else. It has become an omni-cause like Israel (I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish, just read any internet comment thread on the topic.)
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
Imagine paying a billion dollars for some contract software devs to add tracking cookies to your websites.
There are a bunch of "emperor's new clothes" companies in the economy today. Palantir certainly seems like one of them.
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.
I immediately thought they might be trying to de-anonymize article Commenters. Maybe I'm being too paranoid.
Oh, I'm sure they are doing that too. Something else they think they can monetize (never mind that most of them are probably bots).
That's like eating dinner with a chainsaw
Title could be closer to: USA Today Co. partners with Palantir to analyze audience data
Search traffic is failing for everyone because of AI, you don't need a billion dollars to figure that out.
Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now?
There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and poison the bot to remind everyone that not only are we at war with Iran, but Coca-Cola is still America's favorite soft drink.
I believe we saw that this week - https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-diff...
"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."
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?
It's a Thiel product, and the subject here is Palantir and media. Ideological adjacencies in media affairs seems relevant to me at such high levels of influence and power integrations.
But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question?
If that is not a fair question, maybe show me evidence supporting a falsifiable general rule showing that all, or the majority of comments in HN threads contain strictly directly related comments -- or at least something showing most HN threads show non-directly related comments being challenged consistently, perhaps by yourself. This would help.
On a deeper level...
As a rogue journalist, I research many things. In this case, I have been researching both Palantir and Thiel, particularly products and things funded by Theil, particularly certain YouTube influencer channels.
My research shows certain contradictions of proclaimed values that very much interest me, such as Thiel Capital support of American Alchemy, which heavily promotes "neuro divergence" and an entire category of ideas that his partner, Alex Karp severely criticizes. Karp has made openly contemptuous claims on "neuro divergence" and drugs, while Thiel Capital is affiliated with American Alchemy, which is not modestly adamant on the subject, but hyper adamant, and promotes what some might call "conspiracy" related material.
However, when you have such individuals deeply connected with the Pentagon, and Law Enforcement, with verifiable influence, profiling abilities, and much more, this is something I take very seriously. As a 'journalist', I tend to see connections. I am sure you resent this, but despite an often rough approach, they have yet to fail in final synthesis. So that is what I am actually thinking, when I leave such posts.
> But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question?
I don't see why you "must" ask such a question?
You're being way too defensive for such a simple question.
I'm accused of being "way too defensive". For those who would consider this, tick "show dead" and review my comment history. Yes, you will find some slop, often a result of that implied above, but you will find quite a few that should not have been flagged, but were. There is a precedent here. I also get at least one downvote for every comment, however neutral, even on obscure posts with few views. That is close enough to a pattern to wonder. So I do.
Asking why a Thiel related media organization is relevant to a Thiel related media organization is odd, to me. It's not as if Thiel or Palantir aren't involved in many things. Am I supposed to voluntarily compartmentalize them?
This "simple" question has an easy answer. Sometimes questions with exceedingly simple answers do seem awkward.
reply
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.
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?
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.