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Ask HN: What news sources do you use to maintain a broad perspective?

23 points| JadoJodo | 4 years ago | reply

I'm setting up my feed reader and wanted to get some perspectives on good, quality sources for news. In particular, I'm interested in good sources for US news, international news, and left-leaning sources. I lean conservative, so I've already identified several sources that lean in that direction, but I'm happy to hear more.

65 comments

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[+] NikolaNovak|4 years ago|reply
I read daily :

Axios - good format that makes it easy to explore in as much depth as desired. As objective as anything I've seen ((understanding we are all human).

Guardian - avoid opinions columns. At times it gets too preachy even if I agree in principle so I read a bit of fox news monthly just to reset :->

Al Jazeera - increasingly find them more readable and detached than some more popular north American sources

I renew my Stratfor subscription every now and then.

[+] dhimes|4 years ago|reply
As an American I find Al Jazeera indispensable. It's the only place I can get the context for things going on in the Middle East aside from friends who are from there.
[+] nindalf|4 years ago|reply
I like the Economist. They don’t do breaking news, only a weekly roundup of the most important stuff. Often they’ll analyse broader trends that are missed by newspapers focussing on the latest breaking story.

For example, here's an article from 2011, titled "Print me a Stradivarius" (http://www.economist.com/node/18114327). If you were already familiar with 3D printing, the article might have struck you as elementary. But the vast majority of people don't work in tech, especially not in hardware tech. Such people almost certainly would not have heard of 3D printing in 2011, and learning about this would have been very valuable.

I trust them because they pass the Gel-Mann test. I’ve never seen them print something wrong about an area I know about, which is technology. Not saying they’re infallible, but they pass the test to the best of my knowledge.

They’re also careful to not assume expertise in any of the fields they cover. There might be an article about income/wealth inequality but they’ll only use Gini coefficient after explaining what it is.

But the reason I’m really fond of them is the obituaries section. Most times it’s someone you’ve never heard about but after you read it you’re glad you read it.

[+] wppick|4 years ago|reply
The economist and non fiction books. You will learn more about the world by reading about, rhetoric, linguistics, cognition, psychology, and history than you will from news, which is usually extremely transient and not important a few months after.
[+] Witeshadow|4 years ago|reply
They can be pretty biased though. But good source of a lot of topics and being aware of bias helps since it can't really be eliminated.
[+] troyvit|4 years ago|reply
I agree with other posts that national and international news is often just click bait designed to enrage. "If it bleeds it leads."

Local news however can be a different story. Don't get me wrong there's some awful stuff there too (lookin' at you Sinclair) but the things that truly affect you rarely happen at the national level. City council meetings, your local culture, hell how Covid is doing in your town ... all those things have a lot more effect on your life than almost anything at the national level.[0] Hell if your ad blocker is off you're even ostensibly helping local companies by viewing and clicking their ads.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/why-does-loca...

[+] agomez314|4 years ago|reply
WSJ, Daily Wire, Washington Post, HN (obvi), Twitter, Politico, NYPost are a few i like to use. I've found that following prominent people on particular niches on Twitter give more nuanced, intelligent takes than popular news headlines would lead you to suggest.
[+] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
Aaron Swartz: I hate the news.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

The even bigger take away from this is that he wrote this before he died in 2013. In the last ~8 years news had dramatically become worse.

I challenge all readers, on every subject verify they are telling the truth. You'll find the overwhelming supermajority of the time the news are wrong. The new thing that Aaron never saw, news outright publishing self-contradictory stories on purpose.

After you do this exercise, you find out the news is fraudulent. Why would you read something that is so fraudulant? Then again why would anyone get their news from the court jesters? The Daily show was just the court jester even in Aaron's time.

[+] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
I like the daily email 1440, which provides a quick summary of the day's news, with links to a variety of news sources if you want more detail. https://join1440.com/
[+] JadoJodo|4 years ago|reply
I'll have to give it a go! Thanks.
[+] WelcomeShorty|4 years ago|reply
Personally I like my news from different countries / cultures / languages to keep things in perspective.

No TV news, no moving pictures, just plain text.

I spend no more than about 15 / 30 minutes scanning / reading these sources in the morning and refrain from news for the next 23,5 hours.

It gives me enough input to be able to have water cooler exchanges without being agitated about issues I have absolutely no control over.

[+] cainxinth|4 years ago|reply
I work in content, so I need to know what’s going on at all times. I read the following news sites and aggregators every single day:

Forekast, trends24, Google Trends, Google Finance, Drudge, Slashdot, NYTimes (personal favorite and the only one I pay for), Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, HN, NPR, 503 engineering blogs, Newsbreak (local news), Bogleheads, and Kottke.

[+] RealityVoid|4 years ago|reply
Is Digg still alive? I looks like a click bait newspaper now.
[+] warrenm|4 years ago|reply
I use a site I built for this purpose - datente.com

I subscribe to feeds I agree with

And ones I don't

And ones that may (or may not) happen to have interesting items periodically

[+] JadoJodo|4 years ago|reply
> datente.com

This is fascinating. I'll bookmark and revisit later. Thanks!

[+] menotyou|4 years ago|reply
Do you provide a RSS feed for this?
[+] mothsituation|4 years ago|reply
You might like Breaking Points with Krystal Ball (yes that's her real name) and Saagar Enjeti - they're a left-leaning/right-leaning pair who cover current events from a populist anti-establishment perspective. As a result you get lots of takes about stories the mainstream media are neglecting. They're also both really smart. You might not agree with them (I don't necessarily) but it does make legacy media seem lame, boring, and corrupt by comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints/videos

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-k...

[+] BuckRogers|4 years ago|reply
I limit my news sources on purpose to avoid being overwhelmed. I limit myself to one international source and one local source. Then I have one video source. For me these are the BBC, Chicago Sun-Times, and PBS NewsHour. I used to follow tons of news sources but most are poor quality and just repost AP articles. For someone that drives a lot, NPR is a decent as well, but I find it inferior to the BBC. I don't consider any of these to be "left leaning", they're generally down the middle, but that depends on ones personal perspective. I used to caution people that if you watch the news too closely, you'd think the world is coming to and end. That was ten years ago. These days, you need to watch the news so you know when you're in your last week on Earth.
[+] TessierLabs|4 years ago|reply
Summary sites that list "What the papers say" for your country of choice, e.g. for the UK the BBC "Newspaper headlines" [1] gives the front page of the major papers. It's pretty interesting to see how papers owned by the same parent company will present the same news with pretty much opposite takes on it.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-58591785

[+] memling|4 years ago|reply
> It's pretty interesting to see how papers owned by the same parent company will present the same news with pretty much opposite takes on it.

Ideally you'd get this from the same paper, and not different papers in the same family.

[+] berdario|4 years ago|reply
CGTN: https://www.cgtn.com/world

Especially nowadays, when opinions hostile to China are bipartisan, it's important to see how they treat these topics from the other side

Also, TeleSur: https://www.telesurenglish.net/SubSecciones/en/news/world/in...

[+] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
> Especially nowadays, when opinions hostile to China are bipartisan, it's important to see how they treat these topics from the other side

That logic is too simplistic. The "sides" aren't symmetrical and equivalent. CGTN is meant to be China's version of RT, it exists to further China's foreign propaganda goals, that doesn't include accurate and honest journalism when that would conflict with those goals.

CGTN banned from use on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CGTN

> China Global Television Network was deprecated in the 2020 RfC for publishing false or fabricated information. Many editors consider CGTN a propaganda outlet, and some editors express concern over CGTN's airing of forced confessions.

Telesur is also banned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

> Telesur was deprecated in the 2019 RfC, which showed consensus that the TV channel is a Bolivarian propaganda outlet. Many editors state that Telesur publishes false information. As a state-owned media network in a country with low press freedom, Telesur may be a primary source for the viewpoint of the Venezuelan government, although due weight should be considered. Telesur is biased or opinionated, and its statements should be attributed.

[+] JohnDeHope|4 years ago|reply
You asked for specifically left-leaning so I'll leave out all the usual wacko-right stuff. Most of this stuff is not left as in liberal, but is more left as in not right. Some of it is not news exactly, but content that is a barometer for where center and left thinking is trending. - Moon of Alabama - Glenn Greenwald - No Mercy / No Malice - Perception Indexed

I'd like to see your wacko-right content list, if you don't mind.