I do pay for news, however one request I have for news providers is a greater emphasis on presenting news from all sides. Over the last 4-5 years most news providers have picked a political side (to a much greater extent than I recall in the past). This is true in both countries for which I follow news (India and the US). Given an event I can predict the coverage that venues will give it. This is troubling to me, and I have to visit multiple news providers (And at times augment that by reading comments on relevant subreddits). I would really like some reputed news organizations to try to pitch a "big tent" and try to get a diverse set of opinions on the news of the day.
While we are at it - please ignore data that long form journalism is dead, the current race to the bottom leads to nowhere. The people who value understanding the world enough to want to pay for it also value understanding the nuance and the multiple perspectives - these are hard to capture in a single paragraph. Do not design your product for the lowest common denominator.
Lastly - please drop the clickbait ads on your websites that you run to augment your income. These ads often contain fake news, and by association they lessen the credibility of your organization in my eye.
In short - respect your audience, build a premium product that is worth subscribing.
I would appreciate less emphasis on pretending to cover news from several angles. By doing so they imply that both sides are equally valid even when they're not. For instance I've seen them bring on a climate change denier to give the "other side" on a climate change story; anti vaxxers, et cetera. It's particularly bad when one side is willing to lie.
Completely disagree. I want the facts, backed by people who know the situation. I do not want “fair and balanced.” Not all sides have equal grounding and I’m tired of this false equivalence.
We are seriously in times where one side denies climate change. There is zero point in giving them time because it elevates their point to being equal to the one backed by actual climate scientists, not industry that has a vested interest, like coal, in continuing to deny it.
I've also resigned myself to reading multiple articles on the same topic to try and pick out the facts. My least favorite tactic of most papers has been to leave out pertinent facts to better fit the narrative that they're known for, or to simply not cover what should be major news.
Here in Brazil, publications pretend they are publishing the "truth" while they are controlled by a handful of the richest families of the country. I'd like that they at least recognized their bias. They won't get a cent from my pocket.
I disagree. Most issues are in fact not best viewed through a lens of two equal and opposing "sides". Multiple opinions are meaningless (or in fact a net-negative) if those opinions aren't factually grounded.
There's also the fact that the MSM has made complete asses of themselves over the last few years.
Has "Fake News" ever knocked trillions of dollars off the stock market because they ran an unverified story that implied the president would be impeached?
At some point there needs to more accountability for these organizations than "Oh, sorry about that"
I'm not sure why the media and journalists still get held up to some nostalgic ideal of brave upholders of truth. The majority of news organizations are owned by billionaires pushing their own agenda or giant corporations that only care about profit. Truth is secondary at this point.
A few complaints I share with the other people in this thread:
- It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. As someone in tech I can clearly see what they get and what they don't. Extrapolating it - it's not at all clear they understand economics or foreign policy or policy impact or environmental concerns and how to address them ...etc.
- Bias: every single one of them have bias. The burden is on me to spot bias and think objectively. Why do I have to pay do that? At least present news as it is? I'm not sure if even that would work - there could be bias in what gets chosen for reporting.
- The user experience is pretty bad. That I have to use an adblock after paying for the already expensive subscription is ridiculous. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of pixels and tracking embedded in their site.
- Big picture: By design, news focuses on the now and misses the big picture quite often and usually by a huge margin. E.g., the relentless focus on petty issues in last election (both major party candidates) and not enough attention at all on concrete policy measures. This extends to privacy issues (Facebook and the like) until it's too late. Wars/conflicts, foreign policy, long term economics.
For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier.
It's better following individual journalists via twitter or whatever instead of the organization itself for quality content for subjects you like to read about.
Personally, I use the main site just to scan headlines and see if there's anything interesting.
Everyone's biased, but I don't think I'm more of an objective thinker than a trained journalist who's taken classes to study it and write about it specifically. I don't believe many people can spot bias as well as they think they can just from a reporter's writing.
And yeah, they aren't experts at everything they cover. It's not a scientific journal. They should use sources for that stuff and if they don't, you should move on. Remember they also don't write specifically for experts so details get left out.
NYT's feature stories often seamlessly weave in certain choices of words that reflect the author's personal bias/ignorance. It's like enjoying a decent dessert then suddenly chewing on a piece of fingernail in it. Even WSJ doesn't really have this problem.
> For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier.
I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well?
Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's not who the audience is. Plus you might discover that interesting events do take place outside of the US. (And uninteresting events. Brexit seems like it should be interesting, but all the daily political ins and outs are, in my non-UK view, a bit tedious...)
> Bias: every single one of them have bias. The burden is on me to spot bias and think objectively. Why do I have to pay do that? At least present news as it is?
This has always been and will always be the case. There is no possibility for objectivity; unless they compile every fact about the universe and present them all to you (quite a dull read), there’s inherently an editing process and selection of facts the writer thinks is important. You will, and should, always have to think for yourself. Even if news were presented in as dry a fashion as possible, you’d still have to think (or what’s the point?). And the facts will always be incomplete.
This is exceptionally difficult. My favorite example is choosing which photo to run for a story. Let's say a photographer take photos of Trump at an event. He has a photo of Trump smiling, a photo of Trump frowning, a photo of Trump scowling and a photo of Trump laughing. Which one is correct? They are all technically correct because they happened, but they all convey different tones, some of which will be completely inappropriate in the context of the story it runs with.
>"It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently."
Doesn't the Washington post charge for articles with named sources?
Almost every time I follow a link to them the source has been "someone familiar with the matter". However, one time I was surprised see there were actual names attached to the quotes, but they obscured most of the page and wanted me to pay a dollar to read it.
> It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently.
Example: Washington Post pushed the "Covington boys surround and intimidate native man" narrative that's been completely shattered by about 200 hours of video footage in the last week, and led to Twitter disabling the account that spread it, refutations (oddly enough from the NYT) and various apologies from those who came after the child on question.
After becoming a paying customer they do not remove the ads from apps, pop ups on the website, etc etc. I was annoyed so I decided to cancel. The cancellation process was also quite annoying. Couldn't just do it through a form, I had to chat or call. I was on hold in the chat room for 35 minutes before someone got on and asked me what I wanted. At that point I was quite annoyed.
The person in chat was perfectly friendly and handled the rest of the cancellation process swiftly.
I am happy to pay for content but I'll be damned if I am going to pay and still be subjected to popups and ads between every paragraph.
The problem is that newspapers still make the majority of their income from advertising. This is why ads still appear after you're subscribed and logged in to their websites.
Shifting to a subscription-only revenue model is not an easy proposition, and requires a huge adjustment that most newspapers are not yet ready to make.
Source: I used to work for a major regional newspaper.
It's similar to the newspaper. You still see the advertisements in the newspaper even though you paid for it. I guess it would be more expensive without ads.
Full disclosure: as my handle implies, I'm one of the co-founders of presscast.io. Obviously, I have a horse in this race.
I want to point out that advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. While this isn't appropriate for an independent journalistic institution like the NYT, the vast majority of for-profit publishers actually can continue with an ad-driven model without degrading their site's experience. One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well.
I have a NYT digital sub and I never see any ads or anything. I think uBlock Origin is required, when using any website, even for websites you pay for.
If I wanted to cancel, I'm not going to be able to call though, as I live in Australia. I thought there were laws in some states of the U.S. that meant you have to be able to unsubscribe through a form though?
I can't help but drawing a parallel between the news industry and software industry here. People hate paying for software for a reason; an expensive solution is not necessarily better, and there are tons of unscrupulous business practices in the software industry. Furthermore, most people can't discern quality software and bad software (especially when it comes to invisible elements like reliability and security). The same goes for news organizations. We (at least some of us) don't know what's quality journalism, and even in a reputable news organization there's some shady part. We've lost faith to them and thought that we deserve something better. I don't know. I'm paying for NYT for now as well as paying for crappy software that I sometimes use grudgingly. Maybe it's an age thing, but I can't go radical and dump everything just yet. I feel that our new system (whatever it will be) isn't going to be drastically better than the current ones.
Stopped reading after this. Whining does not suit the NYT well. It is an outstanding newspaper and has basically, also thanks to the internet, a world wide audience. It is better prepared to the changing business model as most other newspapers. Whining here about google and facebook is rent seeking.
I paid for a newspaper and the only thing factual was the cartoons. Fake news has been around longer than the Internet. Look at Supermarket tabloids. Look at all of the journalists being fired now.
Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well.
Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter and she died. They rushed her to the hospital in their van knocking off the rack on top to get her help because they couldn't wait for an ambulance. She died anyway, and they charged the parents even if they did everything correctly to save her. From that day I learned of fake news.
Want me to pay for real news? Be worth paying for.
90% of "news" (like everything else) is crap that isn't worth supporting. I am not inclined to subsidize the good things by paying for bad things.
That being said, I do wish google or some other search engine would get better about favoring original sources rather than other sites that just take stories and rewrite them. I hate seeing a headline to a story only to find out that it is just re-reporting what some other site reported. Often it is a game of telephone where site A rewrites a story from site B that rewrote a story from site C.
If a search engine could find a way to return the original site first then it would help highlight original reporting and make re-reporting less worthwhile.
I would love to pay for real news, but I can't find anyone making it consistently. The New York Times at its best produces "mostly believable" if slightly confused material, and at its worst outright propaganda.
Didn't the NYT have the dark pattern of being one-click subscribe, yet made you fill forms and emails and physically call them to unsubscribe? (At least up until a few months ago, last I heard)
Stuff like that is an absolute deal breaker and turns lots of users away from subscriptions entirely, before even talking about article/content quality.
I want a service where I can subscribe to journalists not news papers. I want to know that they are getting a portion of my subscription and being successful. I want 0 advertising in this news paper.
Where do I get it? Is this something we need to create? I'd love a fact check o meter on each journalist as well, but I think that'd be very open to bias, so I don't know how that'd happen.
Anyway, I don't subscribe to newspapers because I don't like their model, not because I don't want to support the journalist. I have no clue if I'm missing a massive part of how the newspapers actually front a lot of money to make journalism better by paying expenses for journalists. I'm no expert on the ins and outs of journalism. I just see a lot of crap reporting that doesn't hold water and I'm tired of reading op-ed pieces falsely labeled as journalism.
* https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - the local paper. They're the only ones with a reporter sitting through sometimes excruciatingly long city council meetings full of stuff like 'modifications to the sign code' - but also things like zoning reform that may make housing not so horribly expensive.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/ online - seems to be a decent national level newspaper. You can also get a deal on it via Amazon Prime.
* https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of events around the world, and some more in depth analysis.
It's probably too much, but... I feel like these are critical times in terms of being informed and involved.
I do, broadly, agree with the sentiment. I pay for The Economist, The Financial Times, and the Australian Financial Review. Plus I read BBC and Thompson Routers regularly.
If there's something particularly contentious I'll have a look at what the Guardian is saying about it to try and get an alternative perspective.
There's definitely a huge bias in almost all news sources. The Economist explicitly states their position on matters, The Financial Times and AFR are much more implicit. The BBC does pretty well on sticking to facts, but now they're appending their stories with opinion pieces from editors.
TR does do a very good job of simply fact reporting.
Not sure about anyone else but every time I read an article about something I'm actually an expert in or few times about myself or a company I've worked for I see at least a handful of factual errors and/or exaggerations that aren't real.
I think these articles are pretty comical coming from the New York Times, a for profit company, that has been cutting costs amidst really serious editorial failures.
I would believe this much more if it was from an independent news source. It’s like a car salesman telling you great buying a car is.
It’s reasonable that the Times would have such a biased, unfounded article. But not so much that anyone pay attention to or make decisions based on it.
> Not sure about anyone else but every time I read an article about something I'm actually an expert in or few times about myself or a company I've worked for I see at least a handful of factual errors and/or exaggerations that aren't real.
News is only the first rough draft of history [1] [2].
Newspapers are definitely not perfect, and they definitely make errors, but there's no better way to get such a breadth of timely, relatively reliable information to a general reader.
I have witnessed the same and would also like to include that the journalists often land, shall we say, sub-par 'experts' as interviewees. I can rattle off 50 highly qualified, well respected professionals in my field who have opposing viewpoints yet time and again I read the hyperbolic opinions of an under qualified "Dr Phil".
Paying does not stop people from lying to you,as long as there is interest in it. The crowd has been manipulated throughout the history, and is destined to be so, because there's interest in it. If you want not to be part of the crowd,use your own discretion, which you cannot outsource,by paying.
I think what's happening isn't that suddenly they are posting fake news, but rather it has been fake news all along. Tons of celebrities have said how they've been misquoted or otherwise smeared by news for a very long time.
What's different today is that everyone has a smartphone where they can verify the facts of the story and discover that the news is fake.
The journalism crisis is self-created because they have been pushing a fake narrative and are now getting caught. Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative.
Basically, a story of a person driven to suicide by biased, sensationalized and unfair coverage. To say it doesn't make me sympathize with the members of the outlets committing the deed is a large understatement. While I understand that not everybody in the press is like that, such things are considered totally acceptable, and people doing this would probably be then welcomed to work in any other press outlet. Until the time that producing such baloney has real consequences enforced by the people in the industry, I would have very little sympathy for them complaining about declining respect - and declining money that comes with it.
It's worth having ads unblocked on Twitter to get the weekly-or-so NYT ad in the form of a sponsored tweet, click on it, and see that out of hundreds, sometimes thousands of replies to the sponsored tweet, literally zero of them have anything positive to say. Allowing all replies to sponsored tweets to be visible seems like a poor marketing strategy but at least it provides ample entertainment.
Reading the comments here, I am surprised that so many comments are saying that the New York Times and mainstream media in general are fake news. I'm no fan of the NYTimes (I think it is too much filler and not enough substance) but I'm curious as to what commenters think is real news or what makes the NYTimes fake news.
I subscribed to a year of Washington Post and received a ton of spam-ish content, notifications, and pleas to renew during the entire period. Lesson learned, cancelled with predjudice.
The news as a written medium is losing traction: youtube rules the next generation (anecdotally from what I see with my daughter & friends).
I wouldn't mind paying youtube premium channel if I can get a truly centrist opinion pieces, factual reporting and random excerpts into topics like science/philosophy/comedy/culture.
Sadly afaic again, most of the 'online' content is way too left (or the worse option: way too right). What I wouldn't give for a bbc like channel in the US that runs 1-1.5 hrs every day of content. Any recommendations?
[+] [-] dman|7 years ago|reply
While we are at it - please ignore data that long form journalism is dead, the current race to the bottom leads to nowhere. The people who value understanding the world enough to want to pay for it also value understanding the nuance and the multiple perspectives - these are hard to capture in a single paragraph. Do not design your product for the lowest common denominator.
Lastly - please drop the clickbait ads on your websites that you run to augment your income. These ads often contain fake news, and by association they lessen the credibility of your organization in my eye.
In short - respect your audience, build a premium product that is worth subscribing.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|7 years ago|reply
We are seriously in times where one side denies climate change. There is zero point in giving them time because it elevates their point to being equal to the one backed by actual climate scientists, not industry that has a vested interest, like coal, in continuing to deny it.
[+] [-] throwaway9d0291|7 years ago|reply
For example take a look at the news for their upcoming vote: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-depth/vote-february-10--2019
They have numerous articles on the issue (urban sprawl) and unmodified opinion pieces from people on both sides of the issue.
[+] [-] cujo|7 years ago|reply
https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
I've found that just browsing through their opposing headlines is a nice balance.
[+] [-] ishjoh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neves|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doktrin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tossaccount123|7 years ago|reply
Has "Fake News" ever knocked trillions of dollars off the stock market because they ran an unverified story that implied the president would be impeached?
https://nypost.com/2017/12/02/abc-news-corrects-flynn-bombsh...
At some point there needs to more accountability for these organizations than "Oh, sorry about that"
I'm not sure why the media and journalists still get held up to some nostalgic ideal of brave upholders of truth. The majority of news organizations are owned by billionaires pushing their own agenda or giant corporations that only care about profit. Truth is secondary at this point.
[+] [-] SrslyJosh|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 8ytecoder|7 years ago|reply
- It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. As someone in tech I can clearly see what they get and what they don't. Extrapolating it - it's not at all clear they understand economics or foreign policy or policy impact or environmental concerns and how to address them ...etc.
- Bias: every single one of them have bias. The burden is on me to spot bias and think objectively. Why do I have to pay do that? At least present news as it is? I'm not sure if even that would work - there could be bias in what gets chosen for reporting.
- The user experience is pretty bad. That I have to use an adblock after paying for the already expensive subscription is ridiculous. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of pixels and tracking embedded in their site.
- Big picture: By design, news focuses on the now and misses the big picture quite often and usually by a huge margin. E.g., the relentless focus on petty issues in last election (both major party candidates) and not enough attention at all on concrete policy measures. This extends to privacy issues (Facebook and the like) until it's too late. Wars/conflicts, foreign policy, long term economics.
For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier.
[+] [-] Novashi|7 years ago|reply
Personally, I use the main site just to scan headlines and see if there's anything interesting.
Everyone's biased, but I don't think I'm more of an objective thinker than a trained journalist who's taken classes to study it and write about it specifically. I don't believe many people can spot bias as well as they think they can just from a reporter's writing.
And yeah, they aren't experts at everything they cover. It's not a scientific journal. They should use sources for that stuff and if they don't, you should move on. Remember they also don't write specifically for experts so details get left out.
[+] [-] ssnistfajen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdschouw|7 years ago|reply
NYT went berserk after the 2016 elections if you ask me. Now every article feels like an opinion piece.
[+] [-] my_first_acct|7 years ago|reply
I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well?
Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's not who the audience is. Plus you might discover that interesting events do take place outside of the US. (And uninteresting events. Brexit seems like it should be interesting, but all the daily political ins and outs are, in my non-UK view, a bit tedious...)
[+] [-] ashelmire|7 years ago|reply
This has always been and will always be the case. There is no possibility for objectivity; unless they compile every fact about the universe and present them all to you (quite a dull read), there’s inherently an editing process and selection of facts the writer thinks is important. You will, and should, always have to think for yourself. Even if news were presented in as dry a fashion as possible, you’d still have to think (or what’s the point?). And the facts will always be incomplete.
[+] [-] sosborn|7 years ago|reply
This is exceptionally difficult. My favorite example is choosing which photo to run for a story. Let's say a photographer take photos of Trump at an event. He has a photo of Trump smiling, a photo of Trump frowning, a photo of Trump scowling and a photo of Trump laughing. Which one is correct? They are all technically correct because they happened, but they all convey different tones, some of which will be completely inappropriate in the context of the story it runs with.
[+] [-] zakm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonbel|7 years ago|reply
Doesn't the Washington post charge for articles with named sources?
Almost every time I follow a link to them the source has been "someone familiar with the matter". However, one time I was surprised see there were actual names attached to the quotes, but they obscured most of the page and wanted me to pay a dollar to read it.
[+] [-] nailer|7 years ago|reply
Example: Washington Post pushed the "Covington boys surround and intimidate native man" narrative that's been completely shattered by about 200 hours of video footage in the last week, and led to Twitter disabling the account that spread it, refutations (oddly enough from the NYT) and various apologies from those who came after the child on question.
[+] [-] nemacol|7 years ago|reply
After becoming a paying customer they do not remove the ads from apps, pop ups on the website, etc etc. I was annoyed so I decided to cancel. The cancellation process was also quite annoying. Couldn't just do it through a form, I had to chat or call. I was on hold in the chat room for 35 minutes before someone got on and asked me what I wanted. At that point I was quite annoyed.
The person in chat was perfectly friendly and handled the rest of the cancellation process swiftly.
I am happy to pay for content but I'll be damned if I am going to pay and still be subjected to popups and ads between every paragraph.
[+] [-] bovermyer|7 years ago|reply
Shifting to a subscription-only revenue model is not an easy proposition, and requires a huge adjustment that most newspapers are not yet ready to make.
Source: I used to work for a major regional newspaper.
[+] [-] sneeze-slayer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presscast|7 years ago|reply
I want to point out that advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. While this isn't appropriate for an independent journalistic institution like the NYT, the vast majority of for-profit publishers actually can continue with an ad-driven model without degrading their site's experience. One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well.
[+] [-] e40|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iOsiris|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|7 years ago|reply
If I wanted to cancel, I'm not going to be able to call though, as I live in Australia. I thought there were laws in some states of the U.S. that meant you have to be able to unsubscribe through a form though?
[+] [-] OJFord|7 years ago|reply
If I was going to have to go through that to cancel my subscription to a British newspaper, I'd just cancel the DD - a few taps in my bank's app.
[+] [-] euske|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayalpha|7 years ago|reply
I had never considered the click-bait outlet "HuffPost" as "quality journalism".
"We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism." Well, paid journalism is not a guarantee either: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-relotius...
Stopped reading after this. Whining does not suit the NYT well. It is an outstanding newspaper and has basically, also thanks to the internet, a world wide audience. It is better prepared to the changing business model as most other newspapers. Whining here about google and facebook is rent seeking.
[+] [-] RickSanchez2600|7 years ago|reply
Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well.
Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter and she died. They rushed her to the hospital in their van knocking off the rack on top to get her help because they couldn't wait for an ambulance. She died anyway, and they charged the parents even if they did everything correctly to save her. From that day I learned of fake news.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|7 years ago|reply
That being said, I do wish google or some other search engine would get better about favoring original sources rather than other sites that just take stories and rewrite them. I hate seeing a headline to a story only to find out that it is just re-reporting what some other site reported. Often it is a game of telephone where site A rewrites a story from site B that rewrote a story from site C.
If a search engine could find a way to return the original site first then it would help highlight original reporting and make re-reporting less worthwhile.
[+] [-] lazzlazzlazz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreack|7 years ago|reply
Stuff like that is an absolute deal breaker and turns lots of users away from subscriptions entirely, before even talking about article/content quality.
[+] [-] bargl|7 years ago|reply
Where do I get it? Is this something we need to create? I'd love a fact check o meter on each journalist as well, but I think that'd be very open to bias, so I don't know how that'd happen.
Anyway, I don't subscribe to newspapers because I don't like their model, not because I don't want to support the journalist. I have no clue if I'm missing a massive part of how the newspapers actually front a lot of money to make journalism better by paying expenses for journalists. I'm no expert on the ins and outs of journalism. I just see a lot of crap reporting that doesn't hold water and I'm tired of reading op-ed pieces falsely labeled as journalism.
[+] [-] davidw|7 years ago|reply
* https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - the local paper. They're the only ones with a reporter sitting through sometimes excruciatingly long city council meetings full of stuff like 'modifications to the sign code' - but also things like zoning reform that may make housing not so horribly expensive.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/ online - seems to be a decent national level newspaper. You can also get a deal on it via Amazon Prime.
* https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of events around the world, and some more in depth analysis.
It's probably too much, but... I feel like these are critical times in terms of being informed and involved.
[+] [-] qp_nn|7 years ago|reply
There's definitely a huge bias in almost all news sources. The Economist explicitly states their position on matters, The Financial Times and AFR are much more implicit. The BBC does pretty well on sticking to facts, but now they're appending their stories with opinion pieces from editors.
TR does do a very good job of simply fact reporting.
[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|7 years ago|reply
I think these articles are pretty comical coming from the New York Times, a for profit company, that has been cutting costs amidst really serious editorial failures.
I would believe this much more if it was from an independent news source. It’s like a car salesman telling you great buying a car is.
It’s reasonable that the Times would have such a biased, unfounded article. But not so much that anyone pay attention to or make decisions based on it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
[+] [-] tivert|7 years ago|reply
News is only the first rough draft of history [1] [2].
Newspapers are definitely not perfect, and they definitely make errors, but there's no better way to get such a breadth of timely, relatively reliable information to a general reader.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Barth#Legacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Graham#%22First_rough_dra...
[+] [-] ademup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roylez|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|7 years ago|reply
I think what's happening isn't that suddenly they are posting fake news, but rather it has been fake news all along. Tons of celebrities have said how they've been misquoted or otherwise smeared by news for a very long time.
What's different today is that everyone has a smartphone where they can verify the facts of the story and discover that the news is fake.
The journalism crisis is self-created because they have been pushing a fake narrative and are now getting caught. Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative.
[+] [-] smsm42|7 years ago|reply
Basically, a story of a person driven to suicide by biased, sensationalized and unfair coverage. To say it doesn't make me sympathize with the members of the outlets committing the deed is a large understatement. While I understand that not everybody in the press is like that, such things are considered totally acceptable, and people doing this would probably be then welcomed to work in any other press outlet. Until the time that producing such baloney has real consequences enforced by the people in the industry, I would have very little sympathy for them complaining about declining respect - and declining money that comes with it.
[+] [-] adamrezich|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccalhoun|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ademup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SubuSS|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't mind paying youtube premium channel if I can get a truly centrist opinion pieces, factual reporting and random excerpts into topics like science/philosophy/comedy/culture.
Sadly afaic again, most of the 'online' content is way too left (or the worse option: way too right). What I wouldn't give for a bbc like channel in the US that runs 1-1.5 hrs every day of content. Any recommendations?