Where to get your news?
It’s a question facing all Americans buffeted by an almost endless array of content. It’s been magnified in recent weeks as young voters who get a significant chunk of their information from TikTok have taken a far different stance on the Israel-Hamas war than their elders.
How can we find good information and make sure we’re well informed? For me, it starts with a base diet of rigorous print sources. Every morning begins with Politico Playbook and Punchbowl AM — two DC centric morning table setting newsletters. They have coverage of a bunch of key stories for the day ahead, along with links. I also get my friend Michael Smerconish’s morning newsletter, which provides another set of links to scroll through.
Then as the day progresses, I check Politico and The Washington Post multiple times, because I think they do the best job of covering politics. Further, I usually find myself on the New York Times’ homepage every day. Finally, most nights I read Puck’s nightly politically focused newsletter, which has a Capitol Hill segment and a meaty deep dive from a rotating group of very good political reporters.
Other sites I consult regularly or find myself reading a lot of links from: The Atlantic, CNN, The Bulwark, The Dispatch, Axios, The Messenger, & Semafor. Local news also matters a lot and local outlets are the ones struggling most to keep the lights on. So I check the Philadelphia Inquirer multiple times per day and subscribe. Additionally, I try to consume at least some reporting and columns with which I disagree, but which are provocative and worth considering. I often find that content at the Free Press or the Dispatch.
Beyond that, I discover a lot of stories on Twitter. The social media platform is less useful than it was before Elon Musk bought it. Nonetheless, if you cultivate your feed carefully, and populate it with a lot of journalists, you’ll see stories from sources across the web. It’s especially useful for following state level political news and finding news from sources outside of your usual reading zone.
Additionally, especially when it comes to data, reporters and folks in the political world often offer meaty analysis or charts in Tweets themselves. It’s short form, but it can be deeply informative and raise issues that you can dig up more information on elsewhere. That’s why I’ve started adding tweets of the week to this column.
Increasingly, there are good reporters who work either for publications you might otherwise not consult or who maintain their own substacks, as well as scholars/journalists who write for a variety of sources. Twitter is also a good place for finding their work.
The diffusion of news has had mixed results. On the one hand, we get more perspectives than we did in the day before Substack, good center-right journalistic outlets, and the proliferation of digital, politically focused sites. There are just more opportunities to get around group think and a greater number of voices that can reach an audience.
The downside is it has gotten harder and harder to read all of the good sources that exist (and to pay for them). There are tons of publications and substacks that I’d like to read every day and support with subscriptions, and I just don’t have the time or money to do so. As it is, I spend 2-3 hours per day consuming news. But there are at least a dozen writers and colleagues with substacks where I wish I had time to read each post.
I raise this topic, because I noticed when I formatted the 32 links below (plus two tweets) that they came from 18 different sources, including one (NOTUS) that isn’t even fully launched. And I think that’s the key to the healthiest news consumption: consult diverse sources. It helps you stay out of any echo chambers and to avoid missing stories.
For the first time in a while, I wouldn’t label any of this week’s links more must read than the others. The ones that stuck out to me the most: a Washington Post deep dive on the ad that might have won the Kentucky governor’s race, and the story behind it, a New York Times investigative report on how guns supposedly destroyed really aren’t, and a 60 Minutes interview with the Republican governor of Wyoming on his push to fight climate change.
There are other really informative pieces if you want to understand the state of the 2024 presidential race:
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