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It's unreasonable for most to go entirely without news. A good compromise is to get your news edited and curated. I highly value having subscribed to The Econo

It's unreasonable for most to go entirely without news. A good compromise is to get your news edited and curated. I highly value having subscribed to The Economist for a couple of decades now. I try to avoid real-time news and read The Economist once a week to get global news. The weekly tempo reduces the need for the publisher to rush out an opinion on something that recently happened. I know The Economist has biases. I think I understand most of these biases and take them into account. I wish there were similar options for local news.

chongli 7y ago
It’s one thing to read a piece and know the editor’s biases so you can take them into account. It’s another thing entirely when the biases lead to a story going unpublished. How do you account for selective reporting?
- gen220 7y ago
  As somebody who plays a similar game with magazines (physical copies of New Yorker, Wired, Nautilus, and others), I don’t think one can realistically account for it, regardless of how wide and diverse your news diet is. At some point enough is enough, and it’s practically up to each of us to draw those lines for ourselves. For example, it’s not possible to get local news this way (unless you live in a HUGE city), because local news is selectively ignored by major publications. For special interest items (tech, travel, food, cultural things) one can add a more special interest source (like Wired, or random blogs) to your selection, but those kinds of sources are usually more difficult to get in physical, weekly or monthly form; newsletters and podcasts are a godsend here. You can also overcome the blindspots by occasionally browsing less formal sources like Reddit and Hn, but even those can be more of a trap than it’s worth ime, and provide their own very false senses of all-knowledge. To put it another way, the blind spot shoots both ways. I can’t enumerate all of the fascinating things I’ve learned reading those magazines that I would never have encountered any where else. I’m not sure if there’s an optimal solution here, it might be to each their own. :P
dredmorbius 7y ago
A reasonably concise set of counterveiling souces is better. Since biase exists not only in discussion and presentation, but in selection, finding voices which are specifically counter to the Economist's mission (promotion of free market principles, as stated in its prospectus), would also be quite useful. I'd recommend a labour/socialist counter, as well as environmental and underprivileged / non-power elite (by culture or world regions) set of voices as well. This doesn't mean opening the floodgates, but countering groupthink.
- hkai 7y ago
  And how do you counter the sources that you recommended?
randomsearch 7y ago
+1 for the economist Also, try the FT.

chongli 7y ago

It’s one thing to read a piece and know the editor’s biases so you can take them into account. It’s another thing entirely when the biases lead to a story going unpublished. How do you account for selective reporting?

gen220 7y ago
As somebody who plays a similar game with magazines (physical copies of New Yorker, Wired, Nautilus, and others), I don’t think one can realistically account for it, regardless of how wide and diverse your news diet is. At some point enough is enough, and it’s practically up to each of us to draw those lines for ourselves. For example, it’s not possible to get local news this way (unless you live in a HUGE city), because local news is selectively ignored by major publications. For special interest items (tech, travel, food, cultural things) one can add a more special interest source (like Wired, or random blogs) to your selection, but those kinds of sources are usually more difficult to get in physical, weekly or monthly form; newsletters and podcasts are a godsend here. You can also overcome the blindspots by occasionally browsing less formal sources like Reddit and Hn, but even those can be more of a trap than it’s worth ime, and provide their own very false senses of all-knowledge. To put it another way, the blind spot shoots both ways. I can’t enumerate all of the fascinating things I’ve learned reading those magazines that I would never have encountered any where else. I’m not sure if there’s an optimal solution here, it might be to each their own. :P

dredmorbius 7y ago

A reasonably concise set of counterveiling souces is better. Since biase exists not only in discussion and presentation, but in selection, finding voices which are specifically counter to the Economist's mission (promotion of free market principles, as stated in its prospectus), would also be quite useful. I'd recommend a labour/socialist counter, as well as environmental and underprivileged / non-power elite (by culture or world regions) set of voices as well. This doesn't mean opening the floodgates, but countering groupthink.

hkai 7y ago
And how do you counter the sources that you recommended?

randomsearch 7y ago

+1 for the economist Also, try the FT.