Saturday, February 10, 2024

Weekend Sources

 Meeting up with the web versions of the leading news services on a daily basis is like stopping by your local coffee shop or pub every day — you eventually get to know the regulars.

But the neighborhood has seen better times, you know, so you try to choose a table with only one chair. Otherwise, some of the down-on-the-luckers will find you, like Time, Newsweek and US News & Report. 

Or a guy from a network. And “Glory Days” will start playing on the jukebox.

But most of the customers are fine.

The New York Times, for example, which must have a character count for its headlines, because most of them are of a very specific length. The Times considers itself the leading U.S. (paper) newspaper, of course, but for a long time now it has been emphasizing its digital subscriptions.

And in that category, subscription revenue, the growth has been impressive but when it comes to online advertising, where the bigl money is, the Times is a tiny thing — three-tenths of a percent or so of industry-leading Google.

Nearby, the Washington Post has worked hard to avoid any appearance of being a kept person since Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, bought it and I have to say the Post has done a fairly good job on that score. But it is losing money and laying off staff. As is the Los Angeles Times and almost every other major daily newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal remains schizophrenic. The news pages are excellent while the editorial page is almost childish in tone. Now the Times and Post have deep editorial biases too but the voice in their editorials resemble that of an adult compared to the Journal’s.

Then there is the good old Associated Press. As a former wire service stringer myself, I have a special fondness for the wire services and AP is as good and reliable as ever, plus in recent years it has added in an impressive investigative component from time to time.

There are tons of other useful American players in the news business, including weekly or monthly magazines that are adapting to the 24/7 digital news cycle, like The New Yorker and the Atlantic.

The British sites I check include BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Independent and Reuters. There’s a lot more attitude among the Brits, of course. Reuters has been one of my favorite news services since we partnered with them when I was an exec at Wired Digital in the 1990s.

In Asia, NHK, the Japanese’s news service, Asahi Shimbun, and the South Chia Morning Post are all quite good. 

In Europe, AFP, Le Monde, Der Speigel, DW…the list goes on.

Back in the U.S., NPR, PBS, and public media in general were slow to embrace digital journalism but they’ve come along in recent years. NPR in particular has strengthened its web version substantially.

The previously mentioned television networks, including cable, are generally speaking uneven sources of news online, but I check CNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS every day. CNN is very good; Fox is useless. It isn’t a news outlet; it’s a propaganda channel.

Digital-only sources like Politico and The Hill are quite good at what they do, which is inside-the-Beltway stuff.

Everybody else shows up now and then but probably the biggest surprise-regular for me is Google News. I don’t know how they do it, but this algorithm-driven aggregator is usually very much on top of the breaking news, plus it includes many random news stories I don’t see anywhere else.

So much for tradition! In the virtual world, the biggest media company of them all, Google, has gotten pretty darn good at mastering the digital news cycle. As are the technology sites like Wired, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc., especially for stories on AI. 

Everyone else is playing catch up.

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