I recently subscribed to the New York Times. So far I’m enjoying it well enough - beats Google News Feed. About 90% of the Today articles are anti-Trump, which, I mean, good, but the breadth of coverage seems a bit limited. I’m not getting a lot of variety in their World section, it’s mostly Israel/Palestine. But boy do I love the games! I also appreciate the arts and culture stuff, and how you can save books and movies to read/watch.
I think my second choice would be The Economist, but I can’t afford to subscribe to both right now.
If you had the money to burn for one paid subscription to keep you the maximum amount of informed and entertained, which would it be? I might try out a few at the introductory rate and then make a choice. If you do use the NYT, let me know what you like about it!
My only requirement is it has to have an app with a decent UI.
My local newspaper. I can get national and international news from a wide variety of free sources, but local news is hard to come by.
Right now my local paper is reporting on a school board that paid a superintendent $200,000 in severance for a job he never even started, another school district that will probably be insolvent within five years and has no plan to deal with it, as well as a local sheriff who’s racking up dubious expenditures while threatening not to perform necessary services unless he gets a bigger budget. These are the kind of stories that need to be reported.
Non North American centered news is hard to find these days. This was my go to news source till they went pay to view. So much value in a less NAmerican news source in my opinion.
I found it much more fair and balanced, and obviously less Eurocentric. All positives.
Second choice would be South China Morning Post or The Straits Times.
There are ways to bypass paywalls, so thats not a concern. I used to have subscriptions to the Washington Post and found it useful, but I feel Bezos is kissing the ring now.
Right now I pay for both PBS and NPR, but that is more for ideological reasons than anything.
The NYT often stops short of entirely clear language when describing Republican depredations, though they’ve gotten a little better. Still, Paul Krugman found his stay at the NYT with the current editorial crew to be untenable. They thought Krugman provided too much content for the paper: they said they didn’t like the cadence, whatever the hell that means.
I find the (still imperfect) Economist more helpful than the Times, but if I could afford only 1 subscription I’d choose the NYT for its US focus during an era when the US’s experiment with democracy is no longer a given. To get candid analysis, I’d go over to Substack and get the free content provided by Paul Krugman, Matt Yglassias (Slow Boring), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), Works in Progress, Kamil Kazani, Oliver Willis, Brad DeLong, and Public Notice. Also others. If I felt inclined to support one more subscription, I’d head over to TPM. Their annual fundraising drive ends this week. Prime memberships cost $50/yr.
A couple of years ago i might have said the Washington Post, but Bezos decided to break it rather than upset Trump. I miss it, though.
I have more money to burn on news than you, and also, i feel like those of us who can afford to desperately need to support actual reporting right now. So i have apps on my phone for
Al Jazeera
AP news
Ars Technica
CBC News
The Guardian
NPR
NY Times
Reuters
Substack
The New Yorker
Washington Post (i still get news alerts, but no longer pay for access to the articles)
Wall Street Journal
I pay for or donate to the guardian, npr, Reuters, new Yorker, and WSJ. And a friend gave me her second copy of the NYT. Oh, and i have a paid subscription to your local epidemiologist on substack. I used to subscribe to the economist, but it’s very expensive and their reporting is trans issues pissed me off. And i felt like they had a lot of click bait news alerts.
I don’t pay for any news feeds. The BBC is free for most things. Also there’s Reuters and AP, and as far as I can see just about every other site gets a lot of their material from these. Almost everything that shows up seems to originate from one or the other?
Maybe there are some other primary sources which don’t overlap, or have a different perspective?
I think there are maybe some russian or arabic sites which I occasionally come across. Which need to be approached with due diligence for ideological reasons. Not to say of course that the main western sources are ‘value free’… one has to use the proverbial grain of salt in all cases!
AP’s reporting tends to be less in-depth than Reuters; both are less in-depth than the NYT or WAPO. The New York Times has always had decent analysis pieces, though the internet has provided academics with many more opportunities for commentary. Bloggers can point out howlers in mainstream media reporting which has improved matters, though not as much as it should.
The great majority of material at the NYT (and WAPO) is written in-house. Attacks on the accuracy of the NYT early this decade on this message board could typically be traced to one of the few articles written by AP. Fast, cheap, accurate: choose 2 for your information needs. AP is fast and cheap.
To get a good sense of the NYT or WAPO, I would browse a paper issue at a local library. The AP and Reuters articles will be labeled as such.
NPR’s reporting is solid, but not as comprehensive as NYT/WAPO.
Free non-profit websites worthy of support include pro-publica, which does investigative reporting, and Bolts, which covers a lot of local stories.
WSJ ties together a newsroom which has gotten somewhat more sensationalistic since Rupert Murdoch took over with a longstanding right-wing editorial page that has dubious factual standards. This isn’t commonly known, but while there are universities with conservative economics departments (eg Chicago, Rochester) there aren’t really any right wing supply side universities. So-called supply side economics was birthed from lunch meetings between WSJ editorial page editors and Arthur Laffer. The WSJ mainstreams crackpot stuff: their influence has been toxic.
The NYT’s op-ed section regularly publishes pieces by conservatives, with factual editing that some liberals (eg Brad DeLong) maintain is insufficiently rigorous. WAPO’s is even more lax IMHO. The WSJ’s is a joke.
Analysis can be very different from opinion. A good analyst will weigh evidence, interview a range of experts, state their take on the evidence (which is opinion) but leave the reader with a spectrum of takes consistent with the evidence at hand. The Economist magazine does this routinely. Over at the Times, an analysis piece might give background information that the reader may not be familiar with.
Article length piece on opinion vs analysis. Yes, analysis necessarily involves some subject-matter expertise.
Bolding added:
But the hoary distinction between fact and opinion, enshrined in the organization of legacy publications, leaves out a crucial third kind of writing that’s in very high demand: analysis .
Consider a forecast about the future, such as “Democrats will win the 2026 midterm elections.” This isn’t a fact , because it can’t be proven or disproven with currently available data. And although people might colloquially call it an “opinion”, it’s not a subjective value judgement either — it’s based on facts, even though it’s not a fact itself. A forecast is a third kind of thing .
Another example of a third thing is an assessment — a more complex type of prediction. For example, consider the statement “Russia now has the upper hand in the Ukraine war.” That’s not a fact, because “upper hand” isn’t precisely defined — there’s no universally agreed-upon measure of who has the upper hand in a war, and reasonable people can disagree as to the proper measure. But it’s not an opinion either, because there’s no value judgement involved.
Other examples are theories (e.g. “Wars happen because of scarce economic resources”) and recommendations (e.g. “If you want to win a war, you should secure your supply chains”). These are based on facts, but they themselves are not facts.
Forecasts, assessments, and theories are all part of a category called analysis . Some people casually refer to analysis as “opinion”… But discerning people recognize that there is a salient, useful distinction between value judgements and reasoned interpretations of facts. The way people argue about the two things is fundamentally different — to argue about opinions, you typically have to make an emotional appeal, while arguing about analysis can be done using logic and reason alone.
I currently have digital subscriptions to both the NYT and my local newspaper. But if I had to pick just one, it would be the local paper. There’s plenty of places to get national and international news for free, but only one place to get local news.
If I had to chose one news subscription to read on a deserted island, I’d choose The Economist. It has the greatest combined depth and breadth. But I don’t live on a deserted island.
The New York Times sensationalizes science. As an actuary, a lot of my job was telling true, useful stories with graphs. The NYT graphs frequently piss me off, because even though their underlying data is good, they are misleading.
The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed is terrible. But their factual reporting has been quite good in my experience, and rather to my surprise, didn’t change much when Murdoch took over. I’m particular, I’ve read a few pieces they did about something obscure that i happened to know a lot about. (One on cultivation of currants in the US, another on people doing genetic research in their bedrooms, on low budgets. For that second one, i knew one of the women they interviewed.) When that happens, I’ve been impressed with their overall accuracy. The reporters seemed to actually understand their subject matter and got the important points right. That’s actually pretty unusual, in my experience. Their reporting of sexy new studies generally correctly says, “this study found a correlation between a and b”, rather than a screaming headline that a causes b, which is what most news sources will say.
Also, if i want to argue with conservatives, they don’t generally throw out my argument because they think the source is all lies, when i cite the WSJ.
I guess at the end of the day, i care more about science reporting than political reporting.
Good point, i should add them to my roster. They are often the source for other articles, and they are very good.
I actually subscribe to two local “papers”, one a real newspaper associated with the city i live near, and the other an online newspaper that publishes ~weekly about my home town. I value both, but wouldn’t recommend either to someone on the Internet, who presumably lives someplace else.
Examples please. Or leads. Yesterday was Science Tuesday (aka Science Times) at the NYT. In the meantime, I gathered some data: I took the first 10 articles on their Science webpage. Here are the headlines of the 1st 5:
I am intrigued by #4 and hope to read the article. I’ve already skimmed #3. None of the 10 articles included charts, which tends to support @puzzlegal’s perspective IMHO.
Charts are more likely to be posted to the business section. Let’s look there. Numbers 9 and 10 of the economics subsection had charts.
Number 9 was pretty good. I had maintained that Trump’s ability to corrupt the FOMC (the committee that sets monetary policy in the US) was limited by staggered Fed terms. It’s nice to see this laid out in greater detail. (There are 7 governors, with 5 taken from the Federal Reserve bank branches).
Number 10 : A short, dull, and unimpressive blog-type article with a decent chart. Weird to have one without the Euro though.
Number 10 might support PuzzL’s perspective. A better news operation would graph the decline in the dollar since the beginning of the year and use it as a baseline against the performance of gold, the yen, and Swiss franc. I’m not sure that would support the reporter’s argument though. I think the Euro has outperformed the Yen, but I’m not sure. Point being is analysis involves some drilling down, and detailed analysis will drive away part of your audience. But not on Substack.
ETA: Spice: Yeah, and Tuesday is more difficult than Monday, but easier than Wednesday. Also I am so sick of the Israel story.
