Where do you go first?

Either Josh Marshall or A Fistful of Euros, depending on whether I’ve written anything I think may have drawn overnight comments. Then whichever of those two wasn’t first. Then Daily Kos. Then Washington Post. Then work stuff.

Atrios, Daily Howler, Smirking Chimp, then to Sigalert.com to see how wretched my morning drive’s gonna be! Sometimes I’ll throw in a Crooked Timber, TPM, Daily Kos, etc., but that stuff’s mostly for afternoon and evening enjoyment. And I love watching occasional snippets from The Daily Show’s page.

Everybody starts with blogs? I check out headlines first:
1. news.google.com
2. antiwar.com

I go to:

1. Yahoo! News
2. Volokh Conspiracy
3. Marginal Revolution
4. TerrapinTimes (I’m a Maryland sports fan)
5. CT
6. Instapundit
7. NRO The Corner
8. NRO front page
9. TNR Etc.
10. ExtremeSkins.com (Washington Redskins fan too)

Nowadays I’ve been reading Panda’s Thumb a lot too.

I go to my RSS reader, which has quite a lot of blogs, as well as feeds from the Washington Post and BusinessWeek. Then I read Slate’s Today’s Papers. I rarely go to the newspaper front pages unless I get bored at work. That’s probably a bad thing.

I’m still old-media influenced. I start with NYT (can’t help it; grew up there; been reading it since high school…) and WaPo. Then local Massachusetts papers: Boston Globe, Berkshire Eagle. Then, news wires. I have a serious AP wire addiction (check it dozens of times a day); Reuters; CNN. After all that, it’s on to the blogs. No one has mentioned Juan Cole. Absolutely essential for Iraq coverage (and he posts early). Talking points; Atrios; Kos. But I always check in with Sullivan – just to see how the conintuing tragi-comedy (he’s so often wrong in such stunning ways!) is unfolding. And, of course, CT and its marvelous blog roll of academic sites…..

RSS baby! Blow it out all at once, in alphabetical order.

I have several categories, including news. Sometimes I skip a few categories. But I always read my top blogs first.

My habits have tended to keep me well informed. I rely upon My Yahoo! as my default browser page and I use it constantly. On it, I have a large selection of current headlines from various news sources; and then I have twenty or so links to mostly news/opinion/blogs that I constantly sequence through, looking for new content as it appears. I don’t use Google News, but I probably should; as the way that I use the Yahoo! News is mostly just as an alert to breaking or big stories that I then read about in more depth at other sources. Most of the wire stuff isn’t very good in itself. On my regular menu of news shources are my local paper, the Austin American-Statesman; the New York Times; and the BBC Online.

But I can’t recommend highly enough having some sort of news/current events content as your default browser page (which you then use–some people don’t).

I recognize the shortcomings of traditional news outlets, but I’m a bit leery of the idea of utilizing blogs as a primary news source. That seems to me like using an opinion mag (or mags) as one’s primary source, except a little more dubious.

But a wide variety menu of traditional media, opinion media, blogs, and whatnot is probably best.

Newsmap

This post has reminded me that I need to get my bookmarks properly organised. I’ve now set things up so that all my regular morning news reading (the main Australian papers, + NYT, Guardian and Google news) can be opened in tabs with a single command in Safari.

I use NetNewsWire (an RSS aggregator) to do a quick scan of a lot of blogs, mostly Australian + Brad de Long, Electrolite, Jim Henley and a few others. When there’s stuff happening in Iraq, I follow Juan Cole pretty closely.

I used to have a lot more overseas blogs to read but they all got absorbed into a certain group blog.

I use backflip – my homepage has 32 sites. I read all 32 everyday and am satisfied to drift where they take me. I resisted it at first as too complicated, but now I don’t know what I’d do without it.

mdl

First things first, I check the standings in my fantasy baseball league on ESPN. And baseballprimer.com for any baseball news (unlike all this political stuff, baseball news requires immediate action–I may need to snap up a player before anyone else in my league does if he’s replacing an injured player).

Then, atrios. Then, NY Times. Then, in no particular order, CT, Yglesias, dailykos, kevin drum, pandagon, Juan Cole, Leiter, de Long. I like the howler and TPM a lot, but I don’t remember to read them everyday.

At this point, things take a strange turn: for reasons that I can’t begin to explain, I usually at this point head over to Fox news to see what O’Reilly is all a-twitter about today. And to read that atrocious joke of a “fox news feminist” that writes for their website.

I use a kinja.com account

Oh, and Blogdex for what people are talking about.

I usually just work through my blogroll in order (starting with Kevin Drum, then Matt Yglesias, and so on). But if I’m not on my home computer (e.g. if I have to leave and go to campus), I start with the Washington Post.

BBC website is my favourite for a quick glance. Then Yahoo and Google news.

If I want more, I use NetNewsWire to check a lot of RSS feeds from newspapers and the like at once. I already get tons of papers at work and don’t usually check the online versions for latest news, more for editorials or specific articles or sections.

I tend not to read about current events or politics in weblogs, with a few exceptions like here, and The Poor Man, and a couple of others. Most of the weblogs I like to read often are unrelated to politics and news.

Really, more people need to be using Google news as the amazing resource it provides. Where else are you getting a constantly updated listing of the headlines people are reading, with links to virtually any news source’s coverage of that story? I check first thing in the morning to see what’s breaking, and if I want to read in depth, I choose a source who seems to have adequate coverage. Then it’s usually over to CT to see what blog commentary is like (from CT, I naturally end up checking out other blogs, but I tend to use this site as a guide for what’s worth reading on a given day). But habits are largely shaped by Firefox’s tabbed browsing, without which I couldn’t survive.

First, TBOGG. Then Suburban Guerrilla, Josh Marshall, Atrios and Salon.