Other than Revanche’s always amazing round-ups, that is! Last September, as you’ll recall, I canceled delivery of the New York Times‘s print edition, because of the frequent nondelivery. Sometimes I do miss it, but nothing like as much as I expected.
Breakfast-time, the usual moment I have and prefer for reading print anything, occupies so few minutes that there was no way I could get through the entire paper before I had to get to work. Along the same line, my guess that a weekly edition of The Economist and a monthly New York Review of Books would suffice to entertain me over solitary meals proved to be correct. I can only get through a couple of Economist pieces before breakfast is finished. And when I’ve run out of Economist copy, the NYRofB’s more than takes up the slack.
Both periodicals contain plenty of interesting and informative copy.
Is any of it current news? Well. No. But how much current “news,” after all, do you want to fill your brain cells with? How many shootings and hit-and-runs and idiotic politicians’ utterances can one mind absorb?
I find myself searching out more news online now, though. Google News leaves much to be desired — such as, oh, say…news. The problem with Google News is that it’s uncurated: the hive mind dictates what appears on any given “page” of Google News. Apparently no real editors exist, and so no real intellect manifests itself there. The result is gestalt, unreliable, and often downright stupid.
What are your favorite news sites online?
Lately I’ve become enamored of Sci-News.com, a compendium of reasonably well educated science reporting. The site is organized by discipline. For the really good stuff, click on the top menu’s right-most link, “More.” Great stuff!
News flash! Men are more narcissistic than women, study says! No kidding?
“New Study Shows What Makes Latin American Telenovelas So Popular!” 😀 Can you spell “f-u-n”?, dear academic?
The nanotechnology section at Sci-News is eye-catching: Scientists Create Artificial Photosynthesis System!” Holy mackerel…can it hold a (heh) candle to the glowing nanocellulose paper?
Raw Story, while often undisciplined, is usually entertaining and often interesting. I like that it tends to run long-form stories. Although I prefer print for longer stories, as a practical matter I don’t get print any more, so this is as good a source as any…assuming you don’t mind a slightly yellowish tinge.
Far more polished and arguably more sophisticated is Salon. Just now they’re having quite a frenzy over the ludicrousness of the Democratic presidential candidates.
Salon, like The Atlantic, tends to skew a little too demagogically to the left for my taste. And really, the present “lite” version of The Atlantic is just fluffy enough and just ill-thought-through enough to annoy. But still: if one must have demagoguery with one’s news, I suppose left-leaning is better than what the right has to offer these days. {sigh}
BuzzFeed is amusing, but if Raw Story smacks of yellow journalism, Buzzfeed is…what? Unprintable? Is it really impossible to deliver news without benefit of click-baiting?
NPR does a halfway decent job of delivering hard news…although sometimes one wonders. “Man Plays Saxophone During Tumor Removal“? LOL! Talk about click bait!
BBC News is consistently good at reporting and interpreting events. Coverage is broad and, for a newspaper, deep.
The Washington Post, like the New York Times, provides responsibly reported, reasonably objective, and fairly thoughtful reportage. Unfortunately, both organizations limit the number of stories you can read before they start gouging you a fee-per-view, and so I tend to avoid their sites unless something urgently important is happening.
Access to local news poses a much bigger challenge than finding acceptable national and international reporting. In many parts of the country, there are no decent local news organizations. One could argue that’s the fact here in lovely uptown Arizona, where the most up-to-date and often most comprehensive local reporting is, heaven help us, on the Fox TV station. That should tell you something…
One local radio station emits a kind of news digest. But like almost all the other local news media, it reads like it was written by lower-division J-school students without benefit of editors. Often the writing is barely literate, full of cliches, factual errors, and bêtises. That leaves one doubting the veracity of anything that appears.
A local business journal produces some OK reportage, but its scope is limited. The local alternative weekly is a haven for yellow journalism, when it’s reporting news at all — mostly it covers restaurants and entertainment. The only halfway decent source of reporting on the rascals at City Hall (or at the Legislature) is solidly barricaded behind a paywall. And it’s very expensive, reinforcing the impression that only the elite can afford to be educated about government these days. Of course, what really costs the dollars is real reporting…but the impression remains.
Where are you getting your news these days?