I Am Jack’s News Page

I stopped watching live television news about six weeks ago.

Nothing happened.

More precisely, many terrible, important, stupid, consequential, trivial, unprecedented, previously unprecedented, and expected-to-be-unprecedented things continued to happen.

I just stopped watching people tell me about them in real time.

I do not miss it.

I still use Google News.

I use Google News in Microsoft Edge on an Apple Mac while logged into a Google account.

Brand loyalty died sometime around Internet Explorer 6.

I visit once or twice a day. Sometimes more. Sometimes less.

I read the news.

“Read” is generous.

Most days I read a page about the news.

At the top are the stories Google has decided are important enough to be at the top.

There are usually two that appear especially important, then a couple more that have been allowed near them.

Below that is material selected “For you.”

This is where news begins to lose confidence in what news is.

A political development can sit near a technology story, a consumer item, an entertainment piece, or something from Rotten Tomatoes.

Rotten Tomatoes is not produce.

It is a movie and television review aggregation, audience-rating, recommendation, and editorial site. It collects professional criticism, measures audience response, publishes entertainment news and features, ranks things, tells me what is Fresh, tells me what is Rotten, and occasionally appears on a page that is ostensibly telling me what happened in the world.

This is a can of worms, but at least the worms have a Tomatometer.

Then there are “Your topics.”

Technology.

Politics.

Science.

Health.

Entertainment.

Other categories whose borders become aspirational as soon as an algorithm has to decide where a human activity belongs.

Google sometimes puts things in categories where I would not put them.

This bothers me approximately enough to notice and not enough to leave.

Farther down are sources, more recommendations, things from beyond the front page, and additional opportunities to discover that the world remains available.

I rarely click anything.

That is the important part.

I read the news without reading the news

I recognize some sources.

I know which ones I generally trust more.

I know which ones are likely to place the rest of the article behind a subscription wall.

I know which ones tend to be freely readable.

I know some publications have a political disposition.

I know some stories are straight reporting.

Some are analysis.

Some are opinion.

Some are predictions wearing a headline.

Some tell me what happened.

Some tell me what might happen.

Some tell me what someone expects to happen.

Some tell me what polls currently suggest may happen if the people being polled later behave approximately like their answers.

They all fit into rectangles.

This is one of the great accomplishments of interface design.

Fact.

Forecast.

Opinion.

Rumor denied by three people familiar with the matter.

A thing that happened twelve minutes ago.

A thing that may happen next year.

A review of a television show.

Rectangle.

Headline.

Source.

Timestamp.

Image.

Continue scrolling.

The page does not merely give me journalism.

It gives me a compressed representation of journalism.

Before I see anything, reporters and editors have already decided what event became a story, what facts belong in it, what language describes it, and what headline represents it.

Then Google decides which stories appear, where they appear, which section receives them, and which ones are for me.

Then I decide which five to fifteen words I am willing to absorb.

By the time the world reaches me, it has been through several perfectly ordinary industrial processes.

This does not make it false.

It makes it processed.

Google is unusually candid about part of this. Its own documentation says algorithms determine which stories appear and in what order, and that personalized areas such as “For you,” “Picks for you,” and “Your topics” can use my interests, settings, and past activity on Google services and YouTube.

So the page is looking at the world.

The page is also looking at me.

I look at the result.

We have developed a relationship.

I remain uncertain who is getting more out of it.

The news is disappointing

This is the other important part.

I do not generally finish Google News thinking:

What a wonderful species.

There is very little:

This is cool.

This is going well.

A difficult thing was handled competently.

Everybody behaved like an adult and went home at a reasonable hour.

There is considerably more:

What happened now?

What is the latest?

What is fucked up?

Who has been arrested?

Who is threatening whom?

Which institution has discovered a new way to disappoint everyone?

Also, occasionally:

Any cool new tech things?

The negative texture is not entirely an invention of Google News.

The world supplies material.

Publishers make choices.

I make choices.

And human attention has its own preferences.

One large field experiment analyzed more than 105,000 headline variants shown hundreds of millions of times and found that negative words increased click-through rates while positive words reduced them.

That does not prove Google is secretly sorting my page by misery.

It does establish that an attention market does not need a conspiracy to develop a taste for bad news.

Bad news has customers.

I am one of them.

I do not particularly enjoy the product.

This would seem like a problem.

It is not enough of a problem to stop me from coming back.

That is an observation.

It is not yet an explanation.

I need my fix

I called it a fix.

That may be melodramatic.

I am not sitting in bed at 3:00 in the morning dragging my thumb through an infinite feed until I have personally consumed every collapse of Western civilization.

I open a page.

I scan it.

I absorb some headlines.

I occasionally click.

I leave.

Researchers have a much less dramatic phrase for some forms of this behavior:

News snacking.

Brief, intermittent attention to news in digital environments.

That sounds almost healthy.

A handful of almonds.

Three headlines about institutional collapse.

Maybe something about a new processor architecture.

Back to work.

The strange part is not that the news makes me feel worse sometimes.

That part has plenty of company. Large international surveys continue to find substantial numbers of people deliberately avoiding news at least some of the time, with overload, mood, relevance, and exhaustion among the recurring reasons.

The strange part is that I have already performed my own reduction.

I stopped live television news.

I do not miss it.

I rarely open the articles.

I do not need an anchor narrating the world into my living room.

I do not need fifteen minutes of analysis about a thing that happened in thirty seconds.

I do not need the panel.

I do not need BREAKING NEWS to remain breaking after it has developed a mortgage.

But I kept the page.

I kept a very small version of news.

When I open it, it can answer questions like:

Is the world still there?

Yes.

What did it do while I was gone?

Several things.

Do any of them require me?

Usually not.

Excellent.

Sometimes I come back later.

I have several theories about why.

I am not sure which one is true.

The page can satisfy curiosity

Temporarily.

This is where I originally became too clever.

I wrote:

If I were satisfied, I would be finished.

That sounded excellent.

It was also not established.

A check can satisfy me completely at 9:00 in the morning.

The world can then commit additional changes.

By 5:00, the answer is stale.

There is always another event.

Another update.

Another correction.

Another person expected to do something.

Another market reacting to what someone might do.

Another court ruling.

Another election.

Another war.

Another product.

Another study.

Another Rotten Tomatoes list explaining which television series human civilization has ranked incorrectly.

Google News is a status page for the world.

Unfortunately, the world has no terminal state.

This morning’s top story can become this afternoon’s development and tomorrow’s context.

A headline that says someone is “expected” to do something is not completion.

A poll is not an election result.

An indictment is not a conviction.

A rumor is not an announcement.

A product leak is not a product.

The page mixes all of these in-progress states with completed events because they are all news.

In software we would at least have the decency to call some of them PENDING.

Instead we get a photograph.

The page may satisfy the question I asked at that moment.

The world invalidates the cache.

That is enough to explain why another visit can become useful later.

It does not explain why I personally make it.

That remains annoyingly mine to not know.

This is not Object’s problem

Most of the time.

That may be the most useful connection.

Object exists to evaluate a proposed action against evidence.

Google News mostly gives me evidence without a proposed action.

Something happened.

Huh.

Someone said something.

Interesting.

A company announced something.

Neat.

A politician did something disappointing.

Apparently that remains supported behavior.

No disposition is required.

No ACT.

No OBJECT.

No REQUIRE EVIDENCE.

Awareness is allowed to remain awareness.

That matters because the evidence required to update my attention is much cheaper than the evidence required to justify an action.

A headline may be sufficient for:

Huh. That happened.

The same headline may be radically insufficient for:

Therefore I should sell something, cancel something, repeat an accusation, change a medication, spend money, or reorganize my life.

That is where the compression layer becomes consequential.

The page has selected.

The publisher has framed.

The headline has compressed.

The algorithm has placed.

I have skimmed.

If I turn that into action, the provenance matters again.

Evidence can be sufficient for awareness without being sufficient for disposition.

Most news should never make the trip.

One thing I know I get from it

Connection.

Not connection to a journalist.

Not community.

Not participation.

Not even particularly deep knowledge.

Connection to the fact that the world continued while I was doing something else.

I stopped letting television news occupy the room with me.

That was an improvement.

I kept a small door.

Once or twice a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, I open it.

The world is still outside.

Mostly it has not improved.

Usually nothing on the page materially affects my afternoon.

Some of it annoys me.

Some of it makes me sad.

Some of it is interesting.

Very occasionally something is genuinely cool.

Then I close the door.

This can be an unsatisfying product experience.

It can also do a small job successfully.

Those statements are not opposites.

I do not know whether connection is why I return.

I know connection is something I experience when I do.

That distinction turns out to matter.

Good news

I asked Object whether the essay had actually established the inversion I had given it.

The proposition was:

The narrator returns to Google News not because the experience satisfies his need for news, but because it provides a low-cost sense of connection and world-state awareness while remaining incomplete enough that another check continues to feel useful.

Object returned:

OBJECT

Not because the behavior was unsupported.

The essay established the behavior quite well.

I am dissatisfied.

I keep returning.

The page gives me inexpensive awareness.

The world keeps changing.

Object objected to the word that made the sentence feel finished:

Because.

It pointed out that I had converted coexistence into causation.

I return despite dissatisfaction.

That does not establish that dissatisfaction causes the return.

Habit could do it.

Novelty could do it.

Anxiety could do it.

Boredom could do it.

Social orientation could do it.

Wanting a fresh answer later could do it.

Several could do it at once.

None of them may describe a particular visit.

Object also noticed that the status-page metaphor already supplied a simpler explanation for recurrence without explaining my psychology at all:

A check can be complete.

Then the world changes.

Good news.

Object worked.

Bad news

I did not write the causal explanation.

Not exactly.

I supplied the experience.

I said I was dissatisfied.

I said I returned.

I said the news gave me a sense of connection and diversion.

I called it a fix.

I asked an AI to find the inversion.

The AI wrote:

I return to the news because it does not satisfy me.

That was a good sentence.

I liked it.

It became the essay’s frontmatter.

It became first person.

Then we added receipts.

Research about news avoidance.

Research about negative headlines.

Research about news snacking.

Google’s own documentation about personalization.

All legitimate.

None of them knew why I opened Google News on a particular afternoon.

But once they were arranged beneath the essay, the causal interpretation began to look researched.

Then I gave the essay to Object.

Object read:

I return because...

as the narrator’s claim.

Which it was.

By then.

The lineage had become:

my experience
→ AI interpretation
→ first-person essay
→ receipts surrounding the interpretation
→ Object evaluation
→ me recognizing that I was less certain than the essay

I am the primary source for what I experienced.

Apparently I am not an independent investigator of why I experienced it.

Psychology has been warning people about this problem for decades, which is rude because I had only just discovered it.

The larger problem is not that AI interpreted me.

I asked it to.

The problem is that an interpretation written fluently in first person can return to its subject wearing the clothes of autobiographical fact.

Then receipts can lend authority to the neighborhood without actually supporting the house.

That is a provenance problem.

It is an authorship problem.

It is also, inconveniently, a Jack problem.

I use AI partly because it can help me produce semantic meaning I could not easily produce alone.

Sometimes it produces meaning I recognize immediately as mine.

Sometimes it produces an interpretation I adopt.

Sometimes it produces a sentence that is better than my certainty.

Those are not the same event.

I should probably know which one happened before I put I in front of it.

I am Jack’s News Page

I still use Google News.

I still rarely click.

I still find much of it disappointing.

I still come back.

I do not know exactly why.

That is no longer a defect in the essay.

It is the evidence boundary.

The page does not need to tell me what to do.

It does not need to make me feel better.

It does not even need to explain why I opened it.

One thing it reliably gives me is a cheap, temporary answer to a question that expires as soon as enough world happens:

What happened?

Then I leave.

The answer goes stale.

At some later point, for some reason I may or may not understand, I ask again.

The world continued while I was not looking.

Unfortunately, it did.

Receipts

• Google News Help, “How Google News stories are selected” ↗ — Google says computer algorithms determine which stories appear and in what order. It also says personalized sections including “For you,” “Picks for you,” “Your topics,” local news, and notifications can use interests, settings, and past activity on Google services and YouTube.

• Google News Help, “Customize what you find on Google News” ↗ — Google documents controls for following topics and sources, requesting more or fewer similar stories, hiding sources, and the use of Web & App Activity for Google News personalization.

• Rotten Tomatoes, “About Rotten Tomatoes” ↗ — Rotten Tomatoes describes its collection of professional movie and television reviews, audience response, recommendations, previews, and original editorial features. Its appearance in a generalized personalized news surface illustrates how reporting, criticism, entertainment, and recommendation can occupy the same attention interface.

• Reuters Institute, “Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report” ↗ — The 2026 report describes continuing shifts toward platform-mediated news consumption and reports that 42% of respondents across surveyed markets sometimes or often avoid the news. This provides context for selective reduction of news exposure; it does not explain the author’s own reasons for returning.

• Reuters Institute, “Overview and key findings of the 2025 Digital News Report” ↗ — The 2025 report discusses low news interest and selective news avoidance, including people limiting exposure to coverage they experience as overwhelming or upsetting. It supports the broader phenomenon around the essay without establishing the narrator’s motivation.

• Claire E. Robertson et al., “Negativity drives online news consumption,” Nature Human Behaviour ↗ — In randomized field experiments using more than 105,000 headline variants, about 5.7 million clicks, and more than 370 million impressions from Upworthy, negative words increased click-through rates while positive words reduced them. This supports the narrow claim that negative headline language can attract attention. It does not establish how Google News ranks stories or why this author returns.

• Jakob Ohme and Cornelia Mothes, “News snacking and political learning: changing opportunity structures of digital platform news use and political knowledge” ↗ — The paper examines brief, intermittent forms of digital news attention commonly described as “news snacking.” The concept resembles the author’s repeated headline-level scanning while rarely opening complete articles. Similarity of behavior does not establish similarity of motive.

• Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson, “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(3), 1977 ↗ — The classic paper argues that people can have limited direct introspective access to some higher-order processes responsible for their judgments and behavior and may instead report plausible causal theories. It does not establish the cause of the author’s Google News use; it is included because Object’s objection exposed exactly the category of claim that deserves caution.

• Isabel Thielmann et al., “A Consensus Statement on self-knowledge conceptualization, measurement, outcomes and changeability,” Nature Reviews Psychology (2026) ↗ — An expert consensus defines self-knowledge in terms of accurate perceptions of one’s own characteristics and momentary states while emphasizing that self-knowledge is domain-specific and that contextualized knowledge about motivations, triggers, and reasons for behavior remains comparatively underexamined. This supports treating first-person experience as important evidence without assuming perfect causal access to one’s own behavior.

• Personal news-use observation, August 14, 2026 — The behavioral claims are the author’s own observations: live television news was discontinued several weeks earlier without being missed; Google News remained a recurring habit; the author typically scans headlines and topic sections while rarely opening articles; the experience is often mildly disappointing and sometimes emotionally negative; and the page can provide a sense of connection with the wider world. The author does not claim to know the cause of every return visit.

• Private Object evaluation, August 14, 2026 — Object was asked whether the essay established that the narrator returns because Google News provides low-cost connection while remaining incomplete enough to encourage another check. Object returned OBJECT. It accepted the observed behavior and the page’s status-like incompleteness but rejected the causal leap from “dissatisfied and returns” to “returns because dissatisfied.” It explicitly preserved the narrator’s interpretation as literary material while rejecting it as causally established by the receipts.

• Private author reaction to the Object evaluation, August 14, 2026 — After reading Object’s result, the author agreed that he does not know precisely why he returns to Google News in any given instance and that habit, novelty, anxiety, boredom, social orientation, desire for updated information, combinations of those, or other causes remain possible. This reaction is evidence about the author’s current degree of certainty, not proof of the underlying cause.

• AI-assisted composition provenance, August 14, 2026 — The original causal inversion, “I return to the news because it does not satisfy me,” was generated by the AI collaborator from the author’s description of dissatisfaction, repeated return, connection, diversion, and the metaphor of a “fix.” The author accepted the sentence into first-person essay frontmatter before later recognizing that it expressed more causal certainty than his own experience supported. This receipt exists to preserve the distinction between autobiographical observation, AI-generated interpretation, author adoption, and independently established fact.