(2025 7commitments)

[elainegrey]

Today, i'll just inventory my sources as i become more intentional about news reading.

I'm not currently the intentional news reader i would like to be. I scroll through headlines and skim articles about "lifestyle" topics. Nonetheless, it seems we are doing our best to keep text based journalism alive. Not necessarily print, but traditional reporting. We subscribe to

• the Guardian (Christine)
• WaPo (Christine, truth done died)
• NYTimes (me)
• (NC) The Assembly (me, recently)

I think there are other news subscriptions Christine's made but i haven't bothered to connect to. The Economist, perhaps? I was glad when Christine asked about supporting the Guardian as i read many links that Dreamwidth's oursin posts and appreciate them. I never really read WaPo and am certainly not starting now.

The NY Times i read more in 2016. I now find it comfortable source of cultural topics -- style, fashion, cooking, sports, science -- i read the website headlines and don't usually read deeply.

I just subscribed to The Assembly, as i am suspecting that political involvement at the state level is going to be necessary to roll back the political gerrymandering and corrupt money that has brought us to this point. It has very long-form reporting and i hope it enables me to be more informed and more effective.

I had been supporting the county newspaper, but it was sold and became irrelevant, so i stopped a couple years ago and haven't found a replacement. The county has a semi-moderated mailing list and online newspaper maintained by a local.guy who, when i arrived in NC was running a forum site that seemed full of tea party/MAGA radicalism. I don't trust him, but the resource is an insight into the county attitudes. I looked around and found some campaign statements from him in 2008: he seemed reasonable then.

Other sources of news:

• https://www.electoral-vote.com prior to 2016 this wasn't such a daily news site, but with Trump's first election this became a good site for meta reporting (covering the coverage) along with analysis. I couldn't tell ages ago what the "bias" of the site was, but it was written by two highly educated professors for folks who could stand complexity. Which is now a bias.
• https://yaleclimateconnections.org/topic/eye-on-the-storm/ this used to be the WeatherUnderground blog but after selling the Weather Underground the blog moved here. Long form pieces about climate, hurricane analysis, and a steady drumbeat of round up reporting about hottest month, hottest year.
• https://spaceweather.com/ A different sort of news.
• https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/ Just started this recently and i'm not really taking to it, but it's yet a different summary.

I guess these coming weeks i should observe my news consumption.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Thanks for the info about Yaleclimate Connections; I didn't know about the sale of Weather Underground. (The blinking stuff on their main page was so bad I avoided going there. I was told by a friend that that was their strategy for getting paid subs, to make it go away.) I have always found WaPo deeply frustrating—so many assumptions about what matters, so little coverage of what's happening, including among the residents of that interesting city who aren't members of Congress or their hangers-on. And that was before it was bought ... NYT has let me down so many times and in so many ways, but is still sadly the best we have, with flashes of what the city used to be. I subscribe to the daily digests from AP (and sometimes go to their site for updates on a big story), but they are sometimes strangely late covering stories considering their national reach, and always so neutral it can feel strangely hands-off. I added the NPR daily feed, but it's a pale ghost of what I used to get from All Things Considered, only a few items and they keep trying to get me to read chit-chat. I also read the Guardian, but my primary UK-based news site is still the BBC. You have to dig into their UK and World coverage for yourself, they keep trying to feed sports and stuff instead of more granular news, but their coverage is actually still excellent.

[elainegrey]

Years ago they sold to IBM which i think really wanted to data mine people's locations from their preferred weather locations.

I only read Eye on the Storm entries, but i presume the whole site is good for balanced news -- balanced in the sense that there's news about positive discoveries and change as well as the continued warming.