I’m quite sure that others have noted the “Enquirer Magazine-style” news available today everywhere is sensational, eye catching and a complete distraction from the real issues of the world. I am an almost 70 year old retired pediatrician who remembers being able to actually garner important and significant news from a few news sources. This is no longer possible and it saddens and frustrates me greatly. For those of you who are much younger, I can assure you that at one time, information was empowerment. This is no longer the case.
I truly appreciate that Matt and others are making an attempt to distill the meaningful news down to a digestible offering. Wouldn’t it be helpful to compile a list of meaningful sites that Matt’s readers have found? I would be most appreciative for such a list to explore and rate. I’d imagine that Matt’s readers could generate quite a list indeed!
Please respond with your thoughts.
To be honest, I rely on Matt’s site do synthesize the news of the day. I do read the online Washington Post, I watch CNN on TV and sometimes read their online site, and I both read and listen to NPR. I read the NYTimes until I use up my allotted number of articles each month), but I see no reason to pay for a subscription. At times, I look at the Daily Beast. I’m about your age and I am not observing the style of news you’re viewing; I’d be curious to hear what you’ve been reading? (Perhaps it’s because I’m not looking, too).
I find that the credible news sources (those that have been around for years and have a history of good reporting) to all carry about the same content. In terms of news analysis, I can only take so much. I’d rather just read/listen to the events of the world and make up my own mind. My daughter is a huge fan of reddit and has had exposure to a broad range of opinions there. But my concern is that she, like many her age, will take the word of a peer as factual.
There has been a fair amount written about people rejecting experts in news and other fields in recent times because there is so much available on the Internet and a lot of folks just don’t use their critical thinking skills, assuming they ever developed them. If you want to read up on that, check out The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols. Based on what he’s saying, it could be the flashy, tabloid-like news sites think it’s more likely people will be attracted to the sensationalism than they will be to credible, expert writers. Nichols has many examples of how he and others have observed this shift, although it is mostly anecdotal. But as an adjunct instructor at a University, I also see this all the time.
In any case, I’m sorry I can’t provide you with much of a list. I live by the philosophy of not reinventing the wheel. Since my sources have worked for me for years, I’m happy to stick with them. Thanks to Matt, I get exposed to other resources as well. But to be honest, the same topics are covered by most of the larger news sources but maybe not as quickly.
Matt includes his sources with the news items. They’re reliable, and some of them go into some detail about the story. Me, I’m 66. I started reading newspapers at a fairly early age, like at about age 10, and gave up the habit in my early 30s. I was living in D.C. in the time, and even the Washington Post did a lousy job of covering the D.C. I lived in. In the early 1990s, I went back to the newspapers, mainly because war had broken out in the former Yugoslavia, a region I knew very little about, and I wanted to understand it better. It was hopeless. It wasn’t until I read some books and lengthy articles about the region that I began to get it. So I don’t expect the newspapers to keep me informed. I look for analysis based on informed sources and including a big dose of historical background. These days the sites I find most useful are the American Prospect and The Atlantic.
I’m going to try this with WSJ through Chrome! I did try it in “private” browsing mode on Safari on my phone and it didn’t work. Alot of times when I open articles within Twitter on my phone, it works no problem, sometimes I hit the wall… 
WSJ used to have a “first click free” policy via Google, which meant you could go to Google from incognito, search for the URL of the story you wanted to read and get it that way. They pulled it back, as well as most of the free access. I think they usually leave a handful of breaking news stories unlocked though
Or you could just subscribe. I subscribe to NYT, WSJ, WaPo, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Reading makes a good hobby. 
I would…but for the WSJ, I don’t think it’s worth it for the $$ they want. If they had a more reasonable subscription I 100% would. I have WaPo, NYT, Time Magazine & ThinkProgress already.
Google use to require this of all news orgs with pay walls – unfortunately, they recently did away with it.
Totally understandable, WSJ is the most expensive, especially for a historically conservative daily. Although, it is fun to watch them waffle over non-partisan issues. Lol
Two of my favorite things that I discovered after I started WTFJHT was the Economist Espresso app/newsletter and the Foreign Policy Morning Brief. Both are paid products, but together they give you a nice brief of well-rounded world news in 5-min or less. There’s definitely something to that kind of roundup that isn’t about driving clicks back the publisher’s website.
Obviously both of these aren’t exactly “white house political news” but the perspectives are a bit outside my normal bubble, and I kinda like the stuffy/pretentious Euro thing going on with both. Idk why
If you don’t want “Enquirer quality news”, I recommend you stay away from all the publications found at the grocery store checkouts…
Also from FOX “news”, lol… I find that reading & watching from a variety of reputable sources helps a lot. It soon becomes obvious which ones are pushing baloney. And this site is awesome! Thank you Matt!
I’m taking notes on those. Foreign Policy is a great publication, I’m always really glad when I end up there.
Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. A list of a few news sources that were considered informative and empowering by respondents is the following:
Washington Post
NPR (read and audio versions)
CNN (read and audio versions)
NYT
Daily Beast
American Prospect (new to me)
The Atlantic
WSJ
The New Yorker
Time Magazine
Think Progress (new to me)
Economist Espresso (app/newsletter)
Foreign Policy Morning Brief
Foreign Policy
WTFJHT (naturally!)
I have found The Hill and the Guardian to be generally quite good also.
I’d forgotten about Democracy now, which tends to cover things from a progressive angle without relying on punditry and talking heads. It reminds me a lot of older news programs that focused much more on journalistic integrity rather than media personalities.
I’m glad to see PBS & BBC in the middle there too…I consider them balanced.
What a great graphic! I was actually surprised to see CNN smack dab in the middle because I tend to think of them as a bit to the right - certainly on a par with MSNBC. Perhaps, it’s my imagination but it seems as if Fox has come people who are at the extreme left and others who are more moderate. So depending on the time of day, their positioning could wiggle a bit. So here’s a question. Where would reddit fit? Obviously not a very reliable news source, but my 23 year old daughter uses that as a primary source of news. Thankfully, she’s intelligent enough to start there but then go to more credible resources for additional information. But I do believe she often takes the words of her peer group as factual. I’m curious as to what a Complex news source would “look” like if either on the extreme left or right. Or is that just too inconceivable?
Reddit isn’t a news source. It’s a platform, just like FB and Twitter. Have a look:
A very diverse set of stories and sources. Of course there is specific subreddits for whatever you’re into, like /r/conservatives or /r/progressives.
A friend in the UK recently steered me to #Three Quarks Daily”…3 Quarks Daily I believe is the better title. It’s both a consolidator of articles and a platform for original work. Personally I look to The Atlantic, WPO, WSJ and NYT. I take the Sunday Times which gives me access to their digital edition on a daily basis. I know my step daughter seems to feed on Reddit but I have found there are quite a few conspiracy theorists there or a forum for them. Interesting in the graphic I did’t see Breitbart or The Drudge Report. Maybe I missed it.
Drudge rarely breaks news – he’s an aggregator these days. Breitbart is in the lower right-hand corner
I’m pretty sure Drudge hasn’t broken any news since the 1998 Clinton/Lewinsky story (which was only “breaking” news but Newsweek having a real scoop); granted it did launch into a culture of instant breaking news online. 