Best Online News Sources? Paid or Unpaid?

[Chik]

The Beeb’s website has a bit too much clickbait and tabloid for my liking. The broadcast formats (e.g. World Service) is a lot better. Used to be the gold standard, but I think France24 and Deutsch Welle have at least caught up if not surpassed BBC World Service.

And then there’s the reticence on mentioning Brexit, as you mentioned.

————————————
Onto a broader point, what’s the purpose of opinion columns written by people given frequent (at least once a week) column inches? Very rarely do I find anything of value there (WaPo’s Rubin aside). The columns seem to fall into three categories: analyses of current events; musings based on some small anecdote in order to beat home a point; and prognostications. Often the analyses can be quite biased; the musings sound trite after the twentieth riffing on the same theme (think David Brooks harping on personal responsibility); and the prognostications effectively no better than the throwing of dice.

Before I attended college, there was such a mystique to these columnists. While in college and shortly after, I forced myself to read these and often came away disappointed. And now I straight up skip most of them. I really don’t get most of these, other than as a form of engaging readers, albeit sometimes in a rather cynical manner. Most of these columnist have no issue with opining on issues they understand poorly, yet most believe they have the wherewithal to opine as if they were public intellectuals. Just baffling that at the numerous august institutions mentioned, many are on the payroll…

Their news web site is an embarrassment. The World Service is still good; it's efficient, just the essentials. I used to find the jingle very nearly intolerable but eventually found it to be comforting especially when travelling and hearing it in the hotel room -- odd, that.

[caleb]

This chart is oriented around an imaginary “center”, which I think is a fallacy.

This may not go directly to your point, but I don't think we really have our heads around how much the nationalization of news has enabled and motivated political polarization over the past couple decades.

In, say, 1980, it would have been a joke to try and array the newspapers showing up on people's doorsteps on a clear left-right continuum. The issues were just too local, and less obviously partisan: crime, yes, but also lots of potholes, and schools, and Christmas pagents. The more local the news, the less it tends to support a hyper-partisan lens.

While there are problems with such a left-right continuum today, it's at least plausible because the issues are just abstractions for most people, and we can read onto them whatever we're motivated to read.

Maybe the point is just to read more local news.

[bironi]

Our options just keep shrinking.
I hope that history captures this moment in time.
It's not localized, it is world wide.

[thollandpe]

To the question posed in the title of this thread — I think the answer is paid. There is still solid journalism out there, it’s a profession that must be learned and earned, and a lot of people take it seriously. And they should be paid to do it.

We lose the ability to complain that elements of the media are just doing it for clicks, if we’re the ones supplying the clicks they get paid for.

As to the op/ed section, yeah I’m a consumer. It’s not all terrific, and there’s a lot of stuff put out there as an opposing view that might deliberately be crap (Marc Theissen in WaPo, for example). And George Will is never going to admit he was wrong about money as “political free speech” and the damage Citizens United has wrought. But there is this, and for me it’s worth the price of admission:

This Is A Moral Crime — Charles M. Blow

And I thought this pinned the tail on the donkey, a story that was not widely reported:

Inhumanity Before a Victim of Rape — Roger Cohen

[rwsaunders]

Nobody follows The Onion anymore? I'll admit, their content has dropped a bit since #45 was voted out of office...

https://www.theonion.com/world-s-old...-72-1850021433

[vertical_doug]

This may not go directly to your point, but I don't think we really have our heads around how much the nationalization of news has enabled and motivated political polarization over the past couple decades.

In, say, 1980, it would have been a joke to try and array the newspapers showing up on people's doorsteps on a clear left-right continuum. The issues were just too local, and less obviously partisan: crime, yes, but also lots of potholes, and schools, and Christmas pagents. The more local the news, the less it tends to support a hyper-partisan lens.

While there are problems with such a left-right continuum today, it's at least plausible because the issues are just abstractions for most people, and we can read onto them whatever we're motivated to read.

Maybe the point is just to read more local news.

https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2...an-journalism/

I think it was partly driven by cabletelevision and niche marketing appealing to advertisers which changed the models. Newspapers just followed TV in my opinion.

[j44ke]

https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2...an-journalism/

I think it was partly driven by cabletelevision and niche marketing appealing to advertisers which changed the models. Newspapers just followed TV in my opinion.

That and the government's "decision" to allow companies/individuals to own media outlets in radio, television, and print. Once one mogul owns one of each, other media have to compete with the public appeal of the message(s) rather than the quality of the news for ratings/ad rates/demographics etc. Rupert Murdoch and his cabal-like family.

The end of news as we used to know it was the day Walter Cronkite retired.

[htwoopup]

https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2...an-journalism/

I think it was partly driven by cabletelevision and niche marketing appealing to advertisers which changed the models. Newspapers just followed TV in my opinion.

There was a bigger problem, I believe.

Newspapers revenue, which paid for the journalism, came from 1) Entertainment advertising/ movie theatre listings. It went online and also heavily into linear television. Also, as the newpaper audience aged up and movies have always been a 12-34 demo it lowered their efficiency and drove away advertising. Plus, the internet became a go to for finding screening times. 2) Real Estate went to the internet. Witness Zillow, Street Easy, even Realtor.com for instance. 3) Classified look to Craigslist and then other online basis services.

If you don’t have revenue, then you can’t afford journalists.

Plus, you have high fixed costs for printing plants which just don’t sell that many papers any more (witness even the title of this thread….ONLINE).

Which then attracts the PE guys who just want to cut costs further to “make the numbers” which means cut staff and centralized/ generic-ize the news and do more clickbait-y stuff.

No one ever cut costs/ capex/ investment/ name your building block in any business and grew it.

I am seeing this same movie again in local television and the radio business is also a rerun of the same.

[zetroc]

I subscribe to the FT, NYT, WaPo, SF Chronicle, WSJ, and LA Times digitally, and get the FT paper delivered daily. Of these, I'm closest to cancelling WaPo and the WSJ since they're largely duplicative, even if the NYT's opinion columns are occasionally infuriating. For sports, I like Defector - very much worth it. Subscribe to Defector.

[72gmc]

I am seeing this same movie again in local television and the radio business is also a rerun of the same.

I left radio in 1999 and the previews to this movie were already running … didn’t help, doesn’t help, that regional network owners who prefer a homogenized, often ideological content bullhorn exist. A good owner has to be philosophically committed to staffing for local news and have the pockets to afford it. Bonneville International, owned by the LDS church, was the owner of KIRO for most of my time and seemed to be a big supporter of local people making local content. They even gave everyone coupons for free turkeys at the holidays.

[cny rider]

If you're interested in economics, try Bloomberg.
It's expensive but it's worth it.

[bironi]

Nobody follows The Onion anymore? I'll admit, their content has dropped a bit since #45 was voted out of office...

https://www.theonion.com/world-s-old...-72-1850021433

I miss Mad Magazine as well.

[echelon_john]

The Economist is relatively spendy but excellent. Good balance of business news, geopolitics, macroeconomic trends, and a smattering of cultural commentary.

I consume that, BBC World Service, NY Times/WaPo, and Guardian.

[Mark Walberg]

Nobody follows The Onion anymore? I'll admit, their content has dropped a bit since #45 was voted out of office...

https://www.theonion.com/world-s-old...-72-1850021433

My favorite Onion article was titled "New Starbucks opens in bathroom of existing Starbucks"

[Tom]

In the 'plus de la change' category... when I was a kid down the hill from us lived George Seldes. He was one of the original muckrakers. He told a story of when he was just starting out in the teens of the last century at his first job at a Pittsburgh newspaper. He attended the court session where the son of the owner of a prominent department store in town made it his practice to have what Seldes described as droit du seigneur with any attractive employee he took a fancy to and one figured her job wasn't worth it and went to the authorities. He turned in his story and the editor came back and told him to retype it using carbon paper. He had never heard of that being done but he did it anyway.

The story didn't run, but pretty soon the department store was taking out daily double page ads.

He had quite a career as a foreign correspondent during World War I and between the wars. He says that if the Chicago Tribune had published his interview with Hindenburg immediately after that war history may have been different. Who knows. Another remarkable story was his rapid departure from Italy with the brownshirts on his heels because the Tribune did publish his story about Mussolini's flirtation with Communism before Seldes was quite ready for them to.

After the war he became totally disenchanted with the newspaper industry because he felt that big tobacco was bankrolling the suppression of reporting on the effects. He was kind of the first blogger, starting his own publication he called In Fact. He made Arthur Sulzberger mad enough to declare that no Seldes would ever get their obituary in the New York Times but his offspring relented.

[robin3mj]

I subscribe to the FT, NYT, WaPo, SF Chronicle, WSJ, and LA Times digitally, and get the FT paper delivered daily. Of these, I'm closest to cancelling WaPo and the WSJ since they're largely duplicative, even if the NYT's opinion columns are occasionally infuriating. For sports, I like Defector - very much worth it. Subscribe to Defector.

I will check out Defector. I subscribe toThe Athletic and find it highly worthwhile right now. They were bought by the NYT so I need to merge my accounts, and unfortunately I don’t think that acquisition bodes well for its future, given how thoroughly NYT gutted their sports coverage a number of years ago.

[Scott G.]

My favorite Onion article was titled "New Starbucks opens in bathroom of existing Starbucks"

My favorite Onion.
Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job
PublishedNovember 4, 2008
WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

[Bob Ross]

I’ve heard the Washington Post has a good site.

I have a paid subscription to both the Washington Post and New York Times sites, plus I frequent NPR, AP, and BBC regularly...and I always try to check in on Fox News if there's some hot item that I suspect might have a completely different interpretation for folks who support "alternative facts". (I also frequent the All Sides Now site just to see how different news organizations frame the same story.)

But if I had to use only one news site, it would probably be The Washington Post. Deep, comprehensive, articulate and intelligent coverage, and reasonably objective (except when it's not, and then it's conspicuously labeled "Opinion").

[echappist]

In the 'plus de la change' category... when I was a kid down the hill from us lived George Seldes. He was one of the original muckrakers. He told a story of when he was just starting out in the teens of the last century at his first job at a Pittsburgh newspaper. He attended the court session where the son of the owner of a prominent department store in town made it his practice to have what Seldes described as droit du seigneur with any attractive employee he took a fancy to and one figured her job wasn't worth it and went to the authorities. He turned in his story and the editor came back and told him to retype it using carbon paper. He had never heard of that being done but he did it anyway.

The story didn't run, but pretty soon the department store was taking out daily double page ads.

He had quite a career as a foreign correspondent during World War I and between the wars. He says that if the Chicago Tribune had published his interview with Hindenburg immediately after that war history may have been different. Who knows. Another remarkable story was his rapid departure from Italy with the brownshirts on his heels because the Tribune did publish his story about Mussolini's flirtation with Communism before Seldes was quite ready for them to.

After the war he became totally disenchanted with the newspaper industry because he felt that big tobacco was bankrolling the suppression of reporting on the effects. He was kind of the first blogger, starting his own publication he called In Fact. He made Arthur Sulzberger mad enough to declare that no Seldes would ever get their obituary in the New York Times but his offspring relented.

I think your story illustrates two points. One is that most privately funded newspapers have an inherent potential for conflict of interest, namely that they do not wish to offend because their revenues depend on placating certain parties (which is to say, quid pro quo). Sulzberger's reaction and your story re: the Pittsburgh newspaper very much illustrate the point. This is not to say that public broadcasters are free from their own potential conflict of interests, but rather that on the whole, at least NPR (either HQ or various regional broadcasters) during the time I've listened to it hasn't shied away from stories that paint the government in a bad light. And on that front, whatever we might think of Bezos and effect of Amazon on the American work force at large, WaPo does run stories such as the following two, respectively titled "Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide" and "Amazon fights aggressively to defeat union drive in Alabama, fearing a coming wave" (both links should provide access to full articles). The one thing I'm not sure about is how much publicity articles such as these received in terms of prominence of position on the main page, but at least for the second article there does not appear to be much, if any, judging by the number of comments. But regardless, I could think of a few potential egomaniac billionaires who would curtail things a lot more.

The other point is that given how most outlets provide more or less comparable coverage to "newsworthy" events, in my mind, what sets publications apart is how they do investigative journalism, shining spotlights on underappreciated issues or malfeasance. IIRC, NYT first shed light on DuPont's malfeasance in West Virginia (behind paywall). On WaPo, there's a piece titled "Overdoses, bedsores, broken bones: What happened when a private-equity firm sought to care for society’s most vulnerable", exposing the cynicism behind the deleterious effects of leveraged buyout on the elderly. The "issue" is that these pieces don't come around often (nor should they be, given how resource intensive they are), and we basically have to put up with a fair bit of the droning rest of the time. Overall, I thought the tradeoff worthwhile at least when it comes to WaPo and The Guardian.

Ending on a somewhat lighter note, the Rijksmuseum is perhaps my favorite out of all the museums I've visited, and it will play host to 28 of the 34 publicly-viewable paintings attributed to Vermeer. So far, WaPo hasn't yet written about it, the NYT has one rather in-depth article about it, and The Guardian has four shorter pieces (one of them here). I would expect Sebastian Smee of WaPo to be dispatched to give a review, given how rare this exhibit is and given he's been dispatched to similar grand exhibits before. Personally, these "lighter" articles really help to calm me down from seeing yet another opinion piece written by some hack scribe with a weekly column.

[Philster]

Politico is one that I think is definitely worth looking at. They have a different view of general news issues. For example, how the latest employment numbers or developments in Ukraine will play out in DC. They also have thought provoking weekend essays and interesting EU-based reporting. There are some local teams for New York, Boston and maybe some others.

I'm a capitalist, so I spend a lot of time on CNBC.com. Apart from some shared stories from NBC, they have very straightforward economic/business reporting. It's timely and fact-based. There's not a lot of in depth analysis.