…Words on the Science the Art and the Business of What Lies Beneath the Love Handles.

Everything Has Its Place

Think of the internet like a forest with many different types of trees in different geographic areas.  Such a grouping will allow you to proceed more orderly in your knowledge gathering.

Content-driven news aggregating sites which include traditional media content and also user-generated content: Huffington Post, Newsvine, the Root, Slate.  The main advantage of this type of site is that important content is partly decided by readers by “voting up” a particular story, that may have been introduced from the reader base.  Although official news networks now present stories ranked by popularity with readers, the story list has already been set by the news network. In the old days of radio this is the difference between being able to rank a song on the charts versus being able to also introduce songs that you the user feels should have been included in the charts.  This is “crowd-sourced content” and is the major mode of operation of a few sites such as dig, and reddit.  As a result you will be introduced to more stories of potential importance to you that are not in the regular press.  Users will often pull links from their favorite news sources helping you to discover other sources for yourself.  The comment sections on these sites are also very spirited and seem to come from a more informed user base, developing into virtual debates at times.  Another huge benefit is that these sites are operated like blogs with very regularly updated content and comments putting you on the cutting edge of the information stream.  All content is categorized.

Online broadcast news networks: bbc.com, abc.com, cnn.com, cbs.com, msnbc.com.  Broadcast news networks dictate the scale of the news, and are good with big stories such as elections, natural disasters, etc.  You will get a quick feel for the most popular news of the day.  They are also video-rich filled with small clips of material already broadcast on TV.  Use these to approximate a more useful TV experience without the long stretches of ads and also with the power to choose which stories you want to hear.    Most networks seem to carry a political bias however.  One will need to select other sources with wider input for balance.  Always browse the comments on the article or video.  Mostly they are puerile, but you will be alerted to alternative viewpoints on an issue which may then expose the unfair bias in the piece.  Without these techniques most users of information are not discerning enough to determine when on the spot verification of news is necessary.  The other major use of these sites is in their topic collections on big subjects like Middle East, Abortion, etc where the historical developments in an area can be researched fairly reliably.

Online versions of the print media: From your local city-paper to national rags (USA Today, Miami Herald, New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Times Online, The Independent, The Guardian).  In fact worldwide nearly every country has at least one newspaper with an online presence.  These very traditional sources bear one advantage over the first two groups of outlets: the informed opinion.    Op-ed columnists are better writers whose pieces (though necessarily biased) add good literary flavor to an issue and sometimes by breaking little known information that has been muted in the broadcast media.  Use these sites as further reading on specific issues, and to uncover important stories that have been ignored in the wider press.

Blogs are the pulse of the internet.  A good blog is like an ongoing op-ed piece on developments in your area of interest.  Necessarily bloggers do some research which you benefit from.  They also highlight things they have just learned, keeping you on the cutting edge.  Most importantly however a good news blog moves at a daily pace regularly exploring developments as they occur.

Youtube.com is a video aggregation site which you can use to flesh out your news gathering with more video where you feel the need.  It is home to videos you may not find on the major broadcast news, and user-authored news videos.  It is best for entertainment news that you may have missed.  Reading the comments brings more entertainment, but not useful information.