I tend to triangulate when I get my news sources. Or maybe, ‘jump around depending on my mood’ is more accurate. Sometimes I want fairly neutral, unbiased, ‘just the facts’ news. Sometimes I want something more opinionated and to the left: “can you believe what these idiots did now?” type news. Other times I want to get a feel for how some story is being spun on the right, so I go to a site like foxnews[dot]com and try not to throw up in my mouth a little.
My usual go-to “start my day” news sites recently have been nbcnews[dot]com and ms[dot]now. I have a lot more sites I visit, but those were the ‘top of the morning scan the headlines pages’ for me. nbcnews has more neutral ‘just the facts’ style headlines, while ms[dot]now’s headlines (and articles) often have a much more opinionated tone to them (I tend to think of ms[dot]now as ‘rawstory lite’).
But lately maybe 50-60% of nbcnews’ articles are ‘subscriber only’. I know, people need to get paid, and apparently ad revenue alone doesn’t cut it for most news sites. More and more news sites that used to be free seem to be moving to subscription models, like CNN news. I want to support a free press (well, not so free anymore, haha). But I’m already getting nickel-and-dimed to death with subscriptions. ms[dot]now alone is not neutral enough for my liking. abcnews[dot]com still seems to be free, and neutral enough, so that may become my new morning go-to for now.
So I ask you-- where do you get your news these days? Do you have one or more news sites that you trust enough to subscribe to? Say, is nytimes[dot] com worth the sub price? What (still, so far) free sites do you like? Do you have some sites you prefer for political news, and others for more general, ‘scanning the headlines’ news?
I pay for Washington Post and New York Times and for my sad local newspaper–all online.
I donate to NPR, but I’m in the car so seldom anymore (which is where I used to always listen to it on my 45 mins X 2 commute) that it’s not much of a news source.
I watch Rachel Maddow, but NO other TV news at all and haven’t for 25+ years. Hate the talking heads who keep saying nothing over and over while laughing and smiling. Bring back Walter Cronkite!
And, of course, here–the best news aggregator around. I would gladly pay to subscribe to the Dope, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that.
For politics: mostly Talking Points Memo. I’m a paid member, but you can see most of their stuff free. It’s a fantastic left-leaning news outfit, with plenty of genuine, high quality original reporting as well as analysis and opinion.
Yes, NPR is a good one. And I do like BBC for an outsider’s perspective of what is happening in our country. I visit both those sites, but I wouldn’t count them as my 'top of the morning go-to". Not that I’m asking just for that type of site, just saying.
Yes, for sure! And I’m very grateful for the gift links to articles at sites like the New York Times and the Atlantic that Dopers share.
I used to visit TPM regularly. Didn’t the site and its founder lose some credibility over some political bad call or unpopular opinion at some point? I’m thinking maybe in calling a Kamala Harris win a ‘slam dunk’ or something? I could be badly misremembering this, but it seems like I actively got turned off from visiting TPM for some reason.
Online only.
I subscribe toNYT & The Guardian,I’ll skim Apple News feed for free articles. Local news channels too but they’re thick with ads. As well as progressive news journalists on IG. Aaron Parnas lately.
For gossip it’s TMZ. And the Daily Mail as I like to downvote their maga articles and troll them in the comments.
Also on occasion I like to read what’s reported in the military publications. Military Times, Stars and Stripes.
I’ll listen to Fox on sxm, until I start yelling back.
Here!. NPR, too. I love the Frontline Series, and the local Donnybrook (St Louis). I don’t pay for any of this, but do subscribe to the Atlantic and read it online.
NBC news was completely free until recently. Now a lot of their articles require a subscription, which I don’t have. Their streaming service is still free, at least for now.
The Times requires a subscription, which I also don’t have. But I signed up for their email newsletters, which gives access to quite a few articles.
Interesting. Do those sites tend to heavily lean right-wing? I mean, under the trump / Hegseth regime I’m sure they do now, but have they traditionally been obviously right-biased?
Hmm, somebody didn’t read the OP very well…
But my OPs tend to be kind of long-winded-- I don’t blame ya. I probably wouldn’t read them very thoroughly, either
Well, like I said, I could be badly misremembering. I briefly googled to see if I could find what I was thinking of, but didn’t find anything conclusive in a few minute search.
Stars & Stripes at least use to be non-political but very pro-Military which many consider Right-Biased. But I would say they weren’t rightish in the past, hawkish though. I don’t think I read the Military Times.
(Bolding mine) Ugh, yeah, ‘badly misremembering’ it is
Just to set the record straight, I was thinking not of ‘Talking Points Memo’ but of the whole fiasco with FiveThirtyEight-- Nate Silver selling the site to ESPN, which ABC/Disney took over, mismanaged, and eventually shut down.
I also pay for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Hartford Courant, and still donate to NPR.
(I used to listen to NPR on my commute, but had to turn it off every time Trump’s voice came on. Then one day I turned it off and left it off. That was about ten years ago.)
I also pay for Apple News, which gives me access to a lot of paywalled sites, especially The Atlantic. If I couldn’t read The Atlantic there, I’d probably have to pay for it separately.
Ditto! I hear about all sorts of thing here first.
Just for funzies, I took a look for TPM on the Media Bias chart-- according to it, they are a little ahead of the middle of the pack for ‘reliability’, and ‘skews-left’ to ‘strong-left’ for bias.
Not that I take that chart very seriously at all. Who bias-checks the bias-checkers?
FYI, a good way to post links that aren’t live but can still be copied and pasted is to enclose them in the ` symbol. That control symbol disables the usual automatic link parsing, fancy formatting, etc. So like this:
Type this `nbcnews.com` to get this nbcnews.com.
The highlighted part in the other font can’t be clicked, but it can easily be copied then pasted into your audience’s browser address bar.
My main online news sources are ABC News (free for now), the local newspaper (subscription), the Boston Globe (subscription) and the Wall St. Journal (subscription), Science-Based Medicine and Retraction Watch (both of the latter free), somewhat in that order.
There are generally workarounds for interesting stories on other pay-only media.
