Ted’s recent post reminds me of a question I have been pondering recently due to a change in my media use habits. Where do you go first in the morning for an update on current events? I don’t necessarily mean just online, but in general? If online, what site(s) or lists? It used to be that I would just go to nytimes.com as a starting point and then take it from there often clicking on to some blogs (like some of the precursors of CT) to see what other items of news people found of interest. But starting with the New York Times doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I haven’t developed a new system yet. For now, I often just start at whatever site I visited the night before. A friend of mine recently told me that he always starts at Talking Points Memo then he looks at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and finally checks out the BBC. That sounded like a good way to start the day. I’m curious, where do others 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.
My blogroll in order is a pretty good list of the places I go first in the morning (since my morning internet use consists primarily of clicking on each link in order to see what’s new):
Crooked Timber
The Poor Man
Alicublog
Talking Points Memo
Mark Kleiman
Matthew Yglesias
LanguageHat
Making Light
Brad Delong
Calpundit
You guys get pride of place but don’t let it go to your heads now. TPM is the first one of those that I really think of as a “news source”, and then Mark K sometimes fits that description and Calpundit generally does. (I know, I know he’s called Political Animal nowadays.) Somewhere towards the bottom of that list I take a look at the NY Times. Oh and Achewood of course.
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.
Well, I guess I am more catholic in my tastes than most of the commenters. I usually start with Instapundit. Kevin Drum is usually second, then it varies. This blog is about tenth each day.
Everybody starts with blogs? I check out headlines first:
1. news.google.com
2. antiwar.com
I normally start with blogs, though since I read them through an RSS reader it’s hard to get a sense of which is first. I guess CT is at the top of the feed list, so the first thing I read is us.
If I’ve slept in past the time the Age or Sydney Morning Herald has gone up I’ll check those first. But sadly I often have to go to work before they go online for the day.
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.
FWIW I generally work my way through my folder of “news” bookmarks in order:
1. The Guardian
2. Josh Marshall
3. Sullivan
4. Crooked Timber
5. CNN (for any US news I may have missed and for sports)
and, if I have some extra time
6. Slate
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.
Weather Underground. Then NY Times. Then WashPost. Then London Times. Then CT.
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…..
1) Slate’s Today’s Papers. 2) US edition of news.google.com. 3) UK edition of news.google.com.
A bit after 11 pm Central Time (midnight Eastern Time), I read tomorrow’s New York Times on the web. If I’m still awake after midnight, I’ll read tomorrow’s Minneapolis Star Tribune for the local/regional news.
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.
I’m the oddball. I start with Drudge. Then NYTimes. The WaPost. Then Instapundit. Then Lucianne. General themes are the first order, so the aggregators are the spot. Later, TPM, CT, Volokh, and Kaus. Then Wonkette and Sullivan and Bainbridge.
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.
My Yahoo
Josh Marshall
Juan Cole
David Neiwert
Atrios
Bilmon
Tacitus
dkos
Crooked Timber
Misc Foreign Papers
The Times of India
Fleshbot
The Onion
The Dullest Blog In The World
NASA
Financial Times
Rotten Tomatoes
Defence Tech
Rate My Kitten
That pretty much wraps everything happening on and off planet
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 check, in order:
Drudge
CNN
NY Times
Josh Marshall
Kevin Drum
Atrios
Insty
Matt Yglesias
WaPo
Salon
Slate
Then to the aggregator…
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
Google News first, then the bbc and nytimes. Then you guys, mainly because of the handy big ass blogroll on the right which I use as a launching point for further browsing.
Daily reads:
crooked timber
matthew yglesias
jim henley
max sawicky
brad delong
dan drezner
collounsbury
kevin drum (out of habit from the old calpundit days, his site is quickly becoming indistinguishable from atrios, and I’ve already caught myself skipping whole days not reading it)
Not infrequently, also tacitus and billmon, although when the former goes into one of his “kill them all, kill them all, the dirty brown bastards, and all worship the munificent US Marines” tirades I tend to leave his site in disgust for a few months.
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’d encourage more people to start with the BBC. It devotes more resources to its web page than any other news outlet. It’s got high-quality free video-streaming (including, surprisingly, things like live streaming of Howard Dean’s withdrawal from the primaries which was of better quality than the streams from US sites). And it’s entirely free of ads and subscriber-only services. It’s financed by the £100 per year people in the UK pay for licenses to watch television. So it’s not free for us, but it is for the rest of the world.
I use a kinja.com account
When I wake up, Yahoo.com’s little box of headlines. During the day, if I want the very latest, news.google.com. If I want rumors of war, Debka’s news ticker.
Oh, and Blogdex for what people are talking about.
quick run around through:
cnn (homepage)
nytimes
and a few of these -
washington post
globe and mail
toronto star (local)
boston globe
los angeles times
washington post
cbc (national)
national post
cnet (tech news)
nature science update
bbc sci-tech
yglesias
delong
but that’s just the news. i dont read CT, volokh, leiter, legal theory blog, tar, 2blowhards, marginalrevolution, etc for news
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.
Cursor
Talking Points Memo
Daily Kos
Political Aims
Crooked Timber
Daily Show
NY Times
Reuters and Washington Post headlines on Yahoo
Campaign Desk
Wonkette
Every now and then Billmon, Pandagon, and CalPundit/Political Animal.
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.
BBC news is always my homepage. Then the Irish Times. Then Cursor. The The Sun (UK). Then blogs - Atrios, Kos, Roger Ailes and Tbogg when California wakes up.
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.
1. CNN.com
2. Antiwar.com
3. RSS feed of blogs (via Bloglines)
First, TBOGG. Then Suburban Guerrilla, Josh Marshall, Atrios and Salon.
portland.indymedia.org
kinja.com/user/MarshallKirkpatrick
cryptome.org
blogpulse.com
And then I check cascadiamedia.org to see if my co-workers have updated our damn webpage so it looks half as good as the anti-globalization videos they make. they never do.
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