Having read about, experienced, and contributed to a bit of post-election hot-take fatigue, I stumbled upon a fairly elegant solution I think everyone might benefit from. So apparently facebook doesn’t have to be full of half-baked ideas and “I’m a journalist! Promise!” articles from places like medium or vox or mic or whatever. You can see real journalism and real world issues written by actual professionals! All you have to do is go to the pages of the publications you want to see and click “like” then under the “following” drop-down bar click “see first.”
Maybe I’m slow on the uptake here and you’ve all already done this, but when I did this for 20+ real news sites I experienced a dramatic increase in the quality of my newsfeed. I have to scroll down quite a bit to even get to my first “OMG THIS!” post of an article blaming all the ills of the world on the microaggressions of some sitcom I’ve never heard of or some baby post or cat video or confusingly colored dress debate. Facebook can be useful! It’s really surprising! So if you want to switch your feed over to see actual real stuff instead of the latest word on the power of positive meme-ing, I’ve created this handy list (with links!) of at least what I consider a well-rounded news diet. Maybe you don’t agree with all the sources, but sometimes that’s the point! (Warning, some of these are behind paywalls, which…maybe you should pay for your news so these organizations can continue bringing you quality journalism from all over the world!)
In no particular order of preference…
Normal News:
1. Foreign Policy
2. Foreign Affairs
3. NYT
4. WaPo
5. WSJ
6. Economist
7. New Yorker
8. NPR (Also lots of sub NPR content)
9. BBC News
10. Al-Jazeera English
11. Xinhua
12. Free Press Journal
13. AllAfrica
14. The Guardian
15. Jacobin (If you have to have one, it should be this)
16. National Review (If you have to have one (and you should) it should be this)
17. France 24
18. Afghanistan Times (Don’t say you support the troops if you don’t know what they’re doing)
19. AP
20. Reuters
Then as a bonus, here are a few pretty wonky blogs I read that aren’t on facebook. These can get pretty technical, but the comment sections are usually other professionals in the field and are great:
Crooked Timber
Volokh Conspiracy
Marginal Revolution
Monkey Cage
So yes, I know my South American coverage is severely lacking, and I can’t find a decent Russian website that has a Facebook page (no thanks, RT) but overall I feel pretty well informed with this round up. If you think I’m missing anything, please let me know! Here’s to sanity.
Modern Issue 