The New News
These days, between fake news, echo chambers, and clickbait, it’s pretty hard to find reliable, informative, fact-based news sources. Here’s the lowdown, from politics, to culture, to business.
Before we begin…
Be aware of sensationalism. Even from news sources with high quality articles, titles are often misleading. Look out for words like threatens, attacks, vanishes, triumphs, and similarly strong verbs. When reading a news article, understand that while the bulk of the content may be true, the writer is framing these facts through a particular perspective. Be cognizant of over emphasis or under emphasis of different facts. Was that bill defeated, or narrowly passed? Are the protesters triumphing, or the police threatened? Framing matters, and as readers, it’s important to be aware of the bias.
Another recent trend in media: what’s opinion, what’s fact? With the rise of bloggers and internet media, opinion stories are often taken as fact, just because it’s published by CNN or Fox, and they aren’t always (properly) labeled as op-eds. A couple rules of thumb for separating the two: lots of personal pronouns, explaining the how or why of an event without quoting or paraphrasing from people directly involved in an event, and guides to X. Good signals that a piece is opinion, not fact (e.g. this piece).
The Good Stuff:
The Daily Digest: The Skimm
The news equivalent of a morning cup of coffee. The Skimm is a daily newsletter dropped into your inbox promptly at 7 am every morning, covering ~5 of the day’s biggest news stories. Content-wise, they do a good mix of international news, pop culture, politics, and science & tech, and the hefty dash of humor and sass makes it go down easy. The Skimm rarely produces original content, but if all you’re looking for is a quick way to stay in-the-know, it’s reliable, true, and won’t take more than five minutes out of your day.
The Classic, with a grain of salt: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (both ~$200/year, depending on discount deals) are two of the most highly respected traditional newspapers in the business. Article titles tend to be relevant, but slightly exaggerated. The Wall Street Journal leans more conservative, the New York Times more liberal. The New York Times is slightly more guilty of slipping op-eds into a reporter’s clothes. Both report extensively on international and domestic politics, economic trends, policy changes, science & tech innovations, and culture & the arts. The Wall Street Journal, in particular, is the most up-to-date outlet to find financial sector news, as one would expect. Currently, neither is particularly data-driven in their journalism.
If you know what topic you’re looking for, these are your best bet for in-depth information on an ongoing story. Stories are around ~5 minutes each; most of the time to get the full context, I read 5–10 of the most recent articles about a particular topic. Would recommend reading both to counteract a little bit of the bias.
The Weekend Adventure: The Atlantic, Time, The New Yorker
All three are print magazines that have significant online presences (also are all more liberal than conservative). As such, they tend to specialize in long-form, investigative stories: interviews, cultural snapshots, analysis of a space over time, social science studies, that kind of thing.
Many of these stories are more opinion than fact. The New Yorker in particular takes a fair amount of artistic liberty with their stories. Best reads from The New Yorker? The culture pieces, the book reviews, the short fiction, and the political cartoons. The Atlantic tends to tackle more serious issues, from analyses of growing rates of ADHD to a composite of personal stories from the people who have moved into Detroit as the auto industry has faded. Time has become more sensationalist as it has struggled to retain readers, but in most issues, the front page story is always very well researched and organized. The front page features offer a deep dive into important issues (civil rights movements, hidden costs of war, the transforming regional divisions in the U.S.), often incorporating interviews from relevant people and multiple perspectives into these comprehensive stories.
If you’re looking for an afternoon read, these stories will transport you out of your bubble and into another corner of the world for a little bit.
Other mentions:
I also frequently read Fox News, CNN, USA Today, and the Washington Post. Fox News has turned out to be less conservatively biased than I expected. I have regularly seen grammatical typos in both Fox News and USA Today. For political news, CNN and the New York Times usually have stories out the fastest. Fivethirtyeight has a lot of data-driven political stories with a heavy liberal slant. Most of the online new media sites (Vox, Vice, Quartz, Buzzfeed) have clickbait titles and more opinion than reporting, but they can be interesting places to read about opinions from a larger variety of perspectives, and they also often bring up more controversial social issues for discussion. In general, they have more racial/socioeconomic diversity amongst their writers, and this comes through in the multicultural stories that they publish.
Happy reading!
For more how to #adult, check out Advo. If you’re interested in following the current political scene in the United States, stop by Panem et Circenses.
Need a coffee with your new favorite publication? See our guide below.
