Reading Online Newspapers

In My Humble Opinion
1

When in middleschool and high school, I went through two newspapers daily. Admittedly, they were the Seattle newspapers (not national or international ones) but I at least skimmed the headlines and read enough articles in them to have a decent amount of information. (From time to time, I also read the Wall Street Journal)

In college, I went through that local newspaper about 80% of the time, and still stayed reasonably well informed about what happened in the world out there.

Since then, it’s been downhill - I still get the newspaper, but I can only say I go through the Sunday one, the rest of the week is hit or miss, mostly miss. This is probably a discipline problem. Anyway, I’m now amazingly uninformed about the world. (Thanks to the SDMB, I’m not completely clueless, but I feel myself sliding into the ranks of those who know nothing. That scares me.)

So, I thought I’d try reading news online. And I can’t. Though the online newspapers are great if I know what I want to read “Hmmm… lets see what the Times has to say about the new medicare legislation” they’re awful for perusing. (paper newspapers are great for that, you just keep turning pages until you hit the end.) Yet, I know that people do peruse the online news somehow.

So how do you successfully read online news? And are there any papers on line that I absolutely shouldn’t miss?

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What online news sites have you tried to read and been dissatisfied with?

On a regular basis, I read the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, the BBC, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Why restrict oneself to one country? :slight_smile:

I’d also read The New York Times (warning: popups), but I always forget my password. The Miami Herald (popups) is also interesting, even though I was drawn there only because of Dave Barry.

The sites are getting better at navigation, although they tend to be slow to load, and URLs for referencing individual stories can be horrendous. The distinction between ‘newspaper’ and ‘broadcast’ sites is blurred. The BBC is at least as good as any newspaper site.

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Google has a nice overview of news reports from around the world.

MSNBC and CNN are not bad for updates and quick info.

Village Voice is fun to read.

Depends on how in depth you want to go…obviously NY Times and even the LA Times will have more and better information than the NY Post (but the Post does have a killer gossip column).

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BBC online is my usual daily intake.

5

Yeah, great point about Google. Just click on their news section & input whatever you want to read about.