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On paper, it was always The Economist.

by pg 17y ago

kierank 17y ago
And in my opinion the BBC World Service does the same thing on the radio.
wheels 17y ago
The Economist and The New Yorker are both high-quality and put almost all of their content from the print magazines in their RSS feeds, and between the two of them it's nice getting a European / US and center-right / center-left perspective. The biggest problem is that The Economist RSS feed is only updated once a week, so you've got this deluge of info. Still I find it my primary source for serious news. The New Yorker features some of the best investigative journalism and high-quality writing, but doesn't make an attempt to cover the full spectrum of ordinary news in any given week.
- bengebre 17y ago
  Thumbs up to the New Yorker and the Economist. For daily news I find that the New York Times does an excellent job. You'll never see something like 'All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing' there (I pulled that from CNN's "latest news" just a second ago). The top-left column (to the left of the center image) contains the current top stories. This is always serious news. The Business, Science and Technology sections (among others) are always worth reading as well. For offline news I really recommend The News Hour on PBS with Jim Lehrer. Excellent in depth coverage of important happenings worldwide. Each night they focus on 2-4 issues and speak on them for 10-20 minutes each. I learn a ton from that show. They gave that boy in a balloon story the other day about 10 seconds of coverage in the intro update before they moved on and started talking about real news.
ComputerGuru 17y ago
I keep track of The Economist online, but the problem is, it's not a general news service. You don't find news in real-time (with the breaking bar, etc.) and it's more geared towards discovering the effect of a particular story rather than learning about the story itself for the first time. e.g. You wouldn't find news about a shooting in a school in real-time on The Economist.. nor would you hear about foreign stories until they've had time to be analyzed and stripped down. It's pretty much The Economist paper edition in online form, and ergo it suffers much the same as traditional media on the front of news discovery.
- pg 17y ago
  Disconcerting that school shootings are now a recognized category of news. That was not true when I was growing up. But I would argue that it's not a coincidence that the more serious news source is a weekly. News that happens suddenly seems more likely to be fluff. Plus if anything really important happened, friends would tell you.
percept 17y ago
I had a subscription for a while but was really surprised by how slanted many of the stories seemed. That doesn't mean their bias didn't match some pet bias of my own, it's just that I was expecting more factual analysis and less opinion than I perceived. It was a little disappointing because they're usually so favorably reviewed. Relating this to some of the other comments, maybe the solution is to get closer to the sources of information (disintermediate) so we can make our own decisions instead of relying on opinion-makers to make up our minds for us.

On paper, it was always The Economist.

by pg 17y ago

On paper, it was always The Economist.

kierank 17y ago

And in my opinion the BBC World Service does the same thing on the radio.

wheels 17y ago

The Economist and The New Yorker are both high-quality and put almost all of their content from the print magazines in their RSS feeds, and between the two of them it's nice getting a European / US and center-right / center-left perspective. The biggest problem is that The Economist RSS feed is only updated once a week, so you've got this deluge of info. Still I find it my primary source for serious news. The New Yorker features some of the best investigative journalism and high-quality writing, but doesn't make an attempt to cover the full spectrum of ordinary news in any given week.

bengebre 17y ago
Thumbs up to the New Yorker and the Economist. For daily news I find that the New York Times does an excellent job. You'll never see something like 'All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing' there (I pulled that from CNN's "latest news" just a second ago). The top-left column (to the left of the center image) contains the current top stories. This is always serious news. The Business, Science and Technology sections (among others) are always worth reading as well. For offline news I really recommend The News Hour on PBS with Jim Lehrer. Excellent in depth coverage of important happenings worldwide. Each night they focus on 2-4 issues and speak on them for 10-20 minutes each. I learn a ton from that show. They gave that boy in a balloon story the other day about 10 seconds of coverage in the intro update before they moved on and started talking about real news.

ComputerGuru 17y ago

I keep track of The Economist online, but the problem is, it's not a general news service. You don't find news in real-time (with the breaking bar, etc.) and it's more geared towards discovering the effect of a particular story rather than learning about the story itself for the first time. e.g. You wouldn't find news about a shooting in a school in real-time on The Economist.. nor would you hear about foreign stories until they've had time to be analyzed and stripped down. It's pretty much The Economist paper edition in online form, and ergo it suffers much the same as traditional media on the front of news discovery.

pg 17y ago
Disconcerting that school shootings are now a recognized category of news. That was not true when I was growing up. But I would argue that it's not a coincidence that the more serious news source is a weekly. News that happens suddenly seems more likely to be fluff. Plus if anything really important happened, friends would tell you.

percept 17y ago

I had a subscription for a while but was really surprised by how slanted many of the stories seemed. That doesn't mean their bias didn't match some pet bias of my own, it's just that I was expecting more factual analysis and less opinion than I perceived. It was a little disappointing because they're usually so favorably reviewed. Relating this to some of the other comments, maybe the solution is to get closer to the sources of information (disintermediate) so we can make our own decisions instead of relying on opinion-makers to make up our minds for us.