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08:57 pm July 24th, 2008
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I was wondering, does anyone have any recommendations for good sources of news on the internet? Specifically, local or national news.

I've had a "My Yahoo" page set up for some time, that I use as a homepage, with news feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters. I liked that setup, but over time, the My Yahoo interface has gotten sort of bloated and I'm finding myself liking it less and less.

For international news, I really love BBC News. They have real comprehensive coverage, and they also tend to cover world stories that I never hear much about anywhere else (except maybe NPR). I would love to find a site which had the same quality and depth of coverage, but focusing more on the United States specifically.

NPR has a good site, but doesn't always include transcripts of its stories, just the audio, which require the NPR player application to listen to, and I can never seem to get it to work right. Even if I could, I'd rather just read than listen.

I don't like Fox News and CNN's web pages very much. I don't really like Fox News's web page format, and it also has a pretty clear bias to one end of the political spectrum. CNN doesn't have such a clear bias, but it is incredibly sensational, with a lot of focus on pointless stories (like "Kid Rock Waffle House Fight Caught on Tape"). I also have some trouble getting CNN's videos to play nice with FlashBlocker.

Reuters has a website, and it's not a bad source of news, but their stories are usually quite short and not particularly in-depth.

The New York Times has its own bias, but even worse, its site and the Wall Street Journal require registration.

The Cleveland TV stations have web pages, but they're not really that great, and in fact, Channel 3 sometimes puts stories up that don't even feature complete sentences or any kind of coherency. For the most local of news, the Stow Sentry has a reasonable site, but it looks like it was designed in 1998 and doesn't support RSS for reading it on a site like Bloglines.

Which is, increasingly, where I read a lot of news. But it's still not any good for any kind of breaking stories.

So have a I missed anything? Are there any other good sources for American national news, or for breaking news, on the internet?

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Comments
Thread started by Seagem
wurtlesworld From: [info]wurtlesworld Date: July 25th, 2008 01:25 pm (UTC) (Link)
I like cnn because I do like the breadth of their insignificant but interesting little stories. But their coverage on big events is kind of limited.

I do highly recommend google news (news.google.com) for two reasons:

1) It's not their own news, it's compilations of news from other sites. So you get links to the biggest headlines, grouped together, so you access a kazillion different stories about the same topic and really get a well-rounded view of what's going on.
2) you can set your own categories. So I added an Environment category, an Ohio category, an Ohio State category, and a Georgia category. So now I can easily keep up there with varying world-wide perspectives on the big stores AND the little insignificant stories that I'm most interested in.
(Reply) (Thread)
fusionpanda From: [info]fusionpanda Date: July 29th, 2008 01:17 am (UTC) (Link)
I'll have to play around with that. I didn't have a lot of luck with Google News in the past, because it seems to so randomly select stories, but I'm sure it's been improved since I last tried it out.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
wurtlesworld From: [info]wurtlesworld Date: July 29th, 2008 02:23 am (UTC) (Link)
Well, it does do that. You do get random little stories about the environment ministry in Istanbul and such that would never make it onto a regular news site. So there are definitely trade-offs. It isn't perfect.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Thread started by cirrus paxton
cirruspaxton From: [info]cirruspaxton Date: July 26th, 2008 01:08 pm (UTC) (Link)
Dave, you also might want to try the International edition of CNN.com. Less fluffy crap, and there's a lot more world news:
http://edition.cnn.com/?iref=intlglobal
(Reply) (Thread)
fusionpanda From: [info]fusionpanda Date: July 29th, 2008 01:14 am (UTC) (Link)
Oh that's cool! I didn't know there was such a thing!
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Comment by Ben Murphy
bamurphy From: [info]bamurphy Date: July 26th, 2008 02:34 pm (UTC) (Link)
I use yahoo pipes to combine a ton of feeds into one rss feed. It's pretty easy to use (pipes.yahoo.com) but if you need help or want me to make you a combo feed let me know what you'd want to combine together, any particular keywords or info you'd want to flag, etc.
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Comment by Ben Murphy
bamurphy From: [info]bamurphy Date: July 26th, 2008 02:37 pm (UTC) (Link)
Heres a few examples. Pipes is meant for people to mashup and programattically generate their own feeds or JSON output, which I used a LOT for website content and SEO work - it's got some serious hardcore nerd potential, but with a little work its great for straight content consumption too.


http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ZpAF_QnA2xGyPRrrdLq02Q

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=FjNcuFlW3BG43n__GcevXg

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=vCl9sZBj3BGXI4gBAsqenA
(Reply) (Thread)
Thread started by Ben Murphy
bamurphy From: [info]bamurphy Date: July 26th, 2008 02:41 pm (UTC) (Link)
Here dave, try this, I tweaked one of mine a bit for you. Enter a search term/category, the # of results you want, and then save/export the RSS to your bloglines or whatever reader you use. Do this for a few different categories and I think you'll have a good start.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/x32v4c/newsearch

(Reply) (Thread)
fusionpanda From: [info]fusionpanda Date: July 29th, 2008 01:14 am (UTC) (Link)
Thanks for setting that up, I've played around with it a bit, it has some real potential...
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Thread started by Violet Moonwater
moonwater From: [info]moonwater Date: July 26th, 2008 05:56 pm (UTC) (Link)
New York Times articles are free online . .
(Reply) (Thread)
fusionpanda From: [info]fusionpanda Date: July 29th, 2008 01:14 am (UTC) (Link)
Ok, I did some checking on this, you're right. The New York Times *used* to require registration, which was very annoying, but it looks like they don't require it anymore.

I do really like the Georgia font they use. Unfortunately I'm not really fond of the paper itself.
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11 comments or Leave a comment
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