Tangent: I'm not sure I can think of recent money I've spent better than a year-long Washington Post subscription.
Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites --- many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that organizations like WaPo do anyways.
Realizing in retrospect how trifling the amount of money we're talking about for a subscription is (it's a tiny fraction of my monthly information services bill [cable/Internet, Netflix, &c]), I feel kind of embarrassed for not having done this a long time ago.
I like WaPo but you might prefer something else, like NYT or WSJ. I'm sure all the major papers are solid choices. Most of you are younger than me. Don't be like me! Subscribe to a damn newspaper already.
Ironically, I've mostly abandoned big-name news sites to listen more to people like tptacek. What I see in the papers is mostly people pushing a story, usually with seemingly little technical expertise, and without the important context, or worse still selective context to support their arguments. The comments on e.g. HN probably have about the same 'median' quality (OK, lower) but if the topic is relevant to the site's interests, the highest quality post will greatly exceed anything you will find in a paper. If it's a contentious point, someone will oppose it. I remember a thread on the Fukushima disaster (sadly I can't find it) containing a detailed discussion of the situation between a few people who had designed / worked on nuclear plants, and its depth and balance made the journalists look like a bunch of children shouting for attention. If there was an issue concerning security, I know I'd want to know what tptacek had to say about it; conversely, I happen to know a couple of WSJ journalists and frankly I'd take anything they say with a bucket of salt, apart perhaps from wine recommendations.
StratFor (for example) seems maybe worth it but I feel like the generalist reach and short form style of big news stops it from ever truly educating. I guess what I'm trying to say here is OK, the experience might be more pleasant, but what makes you think WaPo / Guardian / NYT content is even comparably as good as a blogger dedicated to the topic? (honest question to anyone)
"I'm sure all the major papers are solid choices. "
The problem is that they aren't. Without even getting into operation mockingbird style infiltration of the orgs, the state of journalism as a whole is abysmal, even on the previously well respected journals, and I get this from journalists themselves, at least the ones with integrity.
Honestly right now my method is to simply find the best journalists and writers, and then follow their work regardless of outlet or publisher, and then I smatter in main-stream-media so I understand what the Fox/CNN viewers and WSJ/HuffPo readers, and NPR/BBC listeners are thinking.
In the end though, the problem is all of them are so tied to the money they get from advertising and very subtle but real and powerful editorial influence from the owners/investors/advertisers, that even the ones people have learned to think they trust, like NPR for example, are shining examples of propaganda disguised as anything but, equivalents of Fox news. The oligarchy has infiltrated our mediums of communication because they are a threat.
The internet is the latest version of that threat, which is why we will continue to see attacks on the freedom of speech of the internet as well.
Major shoutouts to the outliers in this equation though who are briding the gap between traditional broadcasting and the itnernet, such as CSPAN, PBS, Charlie Rose, and the universities doing programs such as Conversations with History (UCTV) and Hoover Institute, et al.
PS: WaPo has gone way downhill in their journalistic integrity lately, I expect they are a major mockingbird pivot point. The best traditional source of news I have found? London Financial Times.
It's amazing how many people I know who have subscribed to the WaPo in the last 12 months. I know, I know - echo chamber - but it gives me great hope that quality news organizations have a future. If executed properly, most people are willing to pay for quality content (side note: a major pet peeve of mine is when you pay for a subscription and are then bombarded with obnoxious pop-up ads whenever you try to access said paid content online).
I've been a long-term WSJ subscriber and recently switched to the digital-only subscription due to the quality of their tablet app, but it remains a guilty pleasure of mine to buy up a selection of hard copy newspapers on a rainy weekend and lock myself away for hours.
Once flying from Dubai to DC I got a free copy of Sunday Financial times. It had huge number of topics. I would have never gotten all this stuff in one place sitting in front of Internet.
Funnily enough, I'm also a subscriber of the FT! The app has the full newspaper ordered in the same way (Lex, The Big Read etc) and provides a pretty great experience for a digital consumer. It's not quite the same as having a hard copy in your hands, but for ease of access and portability - I can read it wherever I am in the world - it really is a fantastic product.
You'll note that the two stories are directly contradictory. The claim made by the WaPo is stronger than Senator Sanders' and yet Senator Sanders received 4 Pinocchios for the claim.
Thanks, I hadn't seen that before. I still value a lot of the work they did last year, but it's a great reminder to keep a critical eye on what I consume. Now, please don't tell me the WSJ and FT are guilty of the same offenses? I'm not sure I can handle that much disappointment in one day.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the WSJ is Rupert Murdoch's paper. Take a look at their editorial page.
In this case I think the WaPo fact-checker was unfair in handing out Pinocchios. Four Pinocchios should be reserved for bald-faced, baseless falsities. In this case, Bernie had a source, based directly off of research. The "fact checker" criticized the details, application, and methodology of these conclusions, and offered its own, completely speculative conclusion that the real number is lower. I'm not saying this didn't deserve a Pinocchio or two, but I do think it's a bad call. That doesn't make it worthless, but I do think it certainly undermines its credibility a bit.
To lower the barrier even further, if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber and subscribe via Amazon, the first 6 months are free and then the cost is $4/month thereafter.
What's funny/terrible about this is that I am in fact a Prime subscriber, and didn't know this. I'm tempted to revise my subscription stuff and add the NYT. :)
"Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites"
I agree with this.
I would like to suggest that you extend this discovery from "daily" iterations with, as you suggest, WaPo/NYT/FT to "weekly" iterations with the London Review of Books[1]. Or the New Yorker. Both are very, very good.
Personally, I prefer reading LRB physically (with scotch) and the Kindle delivery of the New Yorker which I read with meals eaten out.
[1] LRB is about 1/3 editorial/commentary/journal and about 2/3 actual book reviews. The editorial/commentary is a very different flavor from any other media source I know of an is very interesting and refreshing. It's also quite progressive and left leaning which is interesting to me because I am not (so much).
They dropped in quality sharply when Murdoch acquired them, and fired a big chunk of the team. Then they started focusing on offensive conservative propaganda on their editorial page. At that point I stopped reading or paying attention to them.
Frankly, I welcome the news about the paywall since it will mean I see fewer links to their "journalism".
Has something changed in the last few years? Did they somehow turn things around?
[edit: Just wanted to point out that the events I'm referring to were about a decade ago. Concretely, before the acquisition, it seemed like the WSJ was driving something like 50% of the daily news cycle with a difficult to discern bias.
Upper management intentionally destroyed that, at least from an outsider perspective.
Reading the other comments and stories about the whole fake news phenomenon makes me think no one has managed to replicate the function they used to serve.]
I've found WSJ to be a very good paper, especially for geopolitics and finance.
NYT and WaPo's political slant is almost becoming unreadable for someone who's moderate and disinterested in either US party. I can't speak for WaPo but I've been reading NYT for a decade now and their total abandonment of any attempt at political neutrality was disheartening this past year.
My only problem with WSJ is it's very expensive compared to NYT. About 3-4x as expensive as a Canadian. So I've been using WaPo recently, they're slightly better than NYT but only slightly. Probably going to go full WSJ soon.
"The Wall St. Journal is the single highest quality news source I'm aware of."
I prefer the NYT and think the reporting is better and broader - especially with regard to the fluffier sections like Sunday Styles, the Magazine, the Book Review and so on ... if I had to pick a single news source I think the A section of NYT would be my choice.
However, I have to say that I enjoy reading the Financial Times more because of their practice of condensing a story into a single page without a fold and without a jump to another page. They explore the story in more depth deeper in the paper, but you can read the front page headline column from start to finish without unfolding and page turning.
Also, the NYT has this habit of vastly over-backgrounding quotes ... a ten word quote will have 2-3 inches of comma-delimited background and qualifications and it just breaks the story and is hard to read.
I'd have a tough time deciding between the NYT and WSJ next, especially since the editorial/opinion section of the WaPo is the least valuable to me (informed opinion is something you can get everywhere on the Internet for free).
(WaPo vs. NYT was basically a coinflip decision for me, but doing WaPo and then NYT would probably create a pretty significant overlap, and WSJ wouldn't. On the other hand, the NYT is a substantially better site than WSJ).
WSJ + WaPo is great IMO. My morning routine is WSJ, FT, WaPo, and sometimes NYT. The NYT is my least favored source partly because they skew too heavily toward my biases and I prefer reading high quality news from alternative perspectives more. YMMV.
They don't seem to be significantly younger or more inexperienced than other journalists. However, they don't have journalistic heavyweights that do month-long investigations or pump out one price winning report after another. Those are rare anyway.
I know that they use a lot of stringers that remain unnamed. It is not unusual to have freelancers do research without naming them but as far as I know they also contribute whole articles. Likely these are people that also work for other news outlets.
Recent events have convinced me not to follow such a course of action. Most of the media seems more intent on printing fake news that fits their agenda than honest investigation, leading to the more sarcastic among us to refer to WaPo as Jeff Bezos' blog, etc. The media has a lot to do to recover their standing in my eyes before I'll read their work, much less pay them for it.
This is exactly why I hadn't subscribed in the past: I figured it was pointless, because what I really needed was the gestalt from all the papers.
Boy was that dumb of me. I'm sure I would benefit from having perspectives from the WSJ and NYT to pair with WaPo. But my previous state was having no newspaper at all to rely on, just free sites like (bleh) Slate and (unbelievably bad) cable news web sites like CNN. Adding a single newspaper to that has helped enormously.
And it's not just, or even mostly, about improving my understanding of world affairs. It's that the process I use to bring myself up to speed every day is so much more pleasant than it was before. It's like a version of the blogaverse where everything is reported by professionals. It feels kind of like a miracle.
Like I said: it was worth the money. So much so that I'm kicking myself for not having spent the money before. I would guess I get approximately as much value from the WaPo subscription as I do from Amazon Prime.
>just free sites like (bleh) Slate and (unbelievably bad) cable news web sites like CNN.
I feel genuinely sorry for you. I can't imagine reading that every single day. That's a lot of exposure to, quite frankly, a whole lot of clickbait. Don't NYT and WaPo have a limited amount of free pageviews per day?
Come to think of it, there are millions of people in the world whose primary source of news is social media like Facebook, Twitter (both news from your own circle), and Reddit (probably the worst offender? Clickbait titles generate likes, news that a small majority dislikes gets hidden).
[I had written a rather lengthy bit of text about how that's all a pretty good thing, still. Far better than hearsay and an inability to verify national broadcasting, and let's not forget that HN falls in the above category as well and I enjoy this. But this summary says much the same as the very lengthy text.]
Personally I regularly read the Economist. The additional audio format is nice; completely ad free news and you can speed up the less relevant bits. It focuses on some of the more impactful events in the world, which sometimes gives me just enough time in the week to even read news about Africa. Besides, as it is a weekly, it expands on topics in the way that sometimes I'll not bother reading the dailies when something tragic happened. Preferring to wait until Sunday to have some of the speculation filtered out.
Also a company subscription to NYT, FT, and some less known ones.
I didn't stop at Slate and CNN; they (along with Bloomberg View) were just my only "magazine" format daily reads. Obviously, I read important stories on NYT or WaPo.
But the point isn't that you can read the "important" stuff with a free pageviews. The point is that you can click your bookmark bar link for WaPo and just browse the whole site, which is an entirely different experience than just reading a couple stories from them over the course of the week in the process of drilling into a story that's trending on other sites.
I always grab a print copy when they're available somewhere free but they're really unpleasant to navigate. Especially when you get into the inner pages and have to unfold the whole paper. Unless you're sprawled out on the floor or have a giant table, it's practically impossible.
Interestingly, a real impenetrable paywall makes me respect the print edition more. FT is a good example. I also like their format, layout and paper quality. But they are a financial paper so the economics are better.
Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites --- many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that organizations like WaPo do anyways.
Realizing in retrospect how trifling the amount of money we're talking about for a subscription is (it's a tiny fraction of my monthly information services bill [cable/Internet, Netflix, &c]), I feel kind of embarrassed for not having done this a long time ago.
I like WaPo but you might prefer something else, like NYT or WSJ. I'm sure all the major papers are solid choices. Most of you are younger than me. Don't be like me! Subscribe to a damn newspaper already.