I enjoy reading news online. I also subscribe to a newspaper (the Dutch NRC Next), but get most of my breaking news and background information and opinions online. I have been reading the item “Media Diet” on The Atlantic Wire with a lot of interest. The idea is to ask journalists about their media diet, or how they get their news and other things they read. Obviously it’s hard to compare yourself to the interviewees since they are all professional journalists, who are supposed to keep up with all the latest for their work and can spend a whole reading site, newspapers and magazines and still call it a productive day. So don’t be overwhelmed if you read many of these people receive three to five newspapers and finish them before breakfast, only to continue their news reading online. I’ve found an especially good read if you’re looking for some interesting blogs that are a little less well known.
As I said, it’s hard to compare yourself (myself) with some of these guys, but I still can tell you how I get my news and what I read otherwise. I get a newspaper, but most of the time I save it for when I travel or have some time to kill out of the house. For my main source of online news I use an RSS reader with a twist called Feedly. It uses Google Reader as input for news, so you have to load some feeds into that, but than it makes a newspaper/magazine style front page. On this page the stories are displayed which are most read and shared by other people, so you get the most interesting stories on top. After that you can always zoom in on some specific news sources.
This works best if you have many different news sources in there, as long as you don’t oblige yourself to keep up with them all (you don’t need to, you get the best of the best on the front page). I have added the feeds collection of Zee of The Next Web at one time to my reader. It’s a file (OPML) which you can import into Google Reader which will add all the feeds to it. There are many interesting blogs and news sites in there although it is very tech centered. A bundle with 13 of my favorite feeds can be found and imported into a feed reader here. Some more favorites in the Dutch language can be found here.
Besides these feeds I like to read things on Digg, I have to keep myself from visiting too often, so I go there once a week and read some of the top stories. After this I enjoy browsing the site of The New York Times, especially Opinions (Krugman and Friedman first) but I also like the Technology posts by David Pogue. New Scientist is great for popular science and Physorg features some more detailed scientific news, it’s quoted/linked to a lot by other news sources. For economic article the Harvard Business Review is one good source.
Obviously there are many more interesting news sources. One way of finding them is by using your Twitter friends. You can watch their stream for good links, but Twittertim.es gives an overview of the most interesting things for you, quite similar to Feedly. I’ve written about Twittertim.es before.
Allright, I’d love to hear what blogs you don’t miss a post of. Or have you started a real media diet for yourself and are you trying to cut back on reading online? Let me know on twitter or right here in the comments.
