<story><title>The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely</title><url>http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-close-google-loophole-entirely/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Tangent: I&amp;#x27;m not sure I can think of recent money I&amp;#x27;ve spent better than a year-long Washington Post subscription.&lt;p&gt;Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites --- many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that organizations like WaPo do anyways.&lt;p&gt;Realizing in retrospect how trifling the amount of money we&amp;#x27;re talking about for a subscription is (it&amp;#x27;s a tiny fraction of my monthly information services bill [cable&amp;#x2F;Internet, Netflix, &amp;amp;c]), I feel kind of embarrassed for not having done this a long time ago.&lt;p&gt;I like WaPo but you might prefer something else, like NYT or WSJ. I&amp;#x27;m sure all the major papers are solid choices. Most of you are younger than me. Don&amp;#x27;t be like me! Subscribe to a damn newspaper already.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dataduck</author><text>Ironically, I&amp;#x27;ve mostly abandoned big-name news sites to listen more to people like tptacek.  What I see in the papers is mostly people pushing a story, usually with seemingly little technical expertise, and without the important context, or worse still selective context to support their arguments.  The comments on e.g. HN probably have about the same &amp;#x27;median&amp;#x27; quality (OK, lower) but if the topic is relevant to the site&amp;#x27;s interests, the highest quality post will greatly exceed anything you will find in a paper.  If it&amp;#x27;s a contentious point, someone will oppose it.  I remember a thread on the Fukushima disaster (sadly I can&amp;#x27;t find it) containing a detailed discussion of the situation between a few people who had designed &amp;#x2F; worked on nuclear plants, and its depth and balance made the journalists look like a bunch of children shouting for attention.  If there was an issue concerning security, I know I&amp;#x27;d want to know what tptacek had to say about it; conversely, I happen to know a couple of WSJ journalists and frankly I&amp;#x27;d take anything they say with a bucket of salt, apart perhaps from wine recommendations.&lt;p&gt;StratFor (for example) seems maybe worth it but I feel like the generalist reach and short form style of big news stops it from ever truly educating.  I guess what I&amp;#x27;m trying to say here is OK, the experience might be more pleasant, but what makes you think WaPo &amp;#x2F; Guardian &amp;#x2F; NYT content is even comparably as good as a blogger dedicated to the topic? (honest question to anyone)</text></comment>
<story><title>The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely</title><url>http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-close-google-loophole-entirely/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Tangent: I&amp;#x27;m not sure I can think of recent money I&amp;#x27;ve spent better than a year-long Washington Post subscription.&lt;p&gt;Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites --- many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that organizations like WaPo do anyways.&lt;p&gt;Realizing in retrospect how trifling the amount of money we&amp;#x27;re talking about for a subscription is (it&amp;#x27;s a tiny fraction of my monthly information services bill [cable&amp;#x2F;Internet, Netflix, &amp;amp;c]), I feel kind of embarrassed for not having done this a long time ago.&lt;p&gt;I like WaPo but you might prefer something else, like NYT or WSJ. I&amp;#x27;m sure all the major papers are solid choices. Most of you are younger than me. Don&amp;#x27;t be like me! Subscribe to a damn newspaper already.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arca_vorago</author><text>&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sure all the major papers are solid choices. &amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that they aren&amp;#x27;t. Without even getting into operation mockingbird style infiltration of the orgs, the state of journalism as a whole is abysmal, even on the previously well respected journals, and I get this from journalists themselves, at least the ones with integrity.&lt;p&gt;Honestly right now my method is to simply find the best journalists and writers, and then follow their work regardless of outlet or publisher, and then I smatter in  main-stream-media so I understand what the Fox&amp;#x2F;CNN viewers and WSJ&amp;#x2F;HuffPo readers, and NPR&amp;#x2F;BBC listeners are thinking.&lt;p&gt;In the end though, the problem is all of them are so tied to the money they get from advertising and very subtle but real and powerful editorial influence from the owners&amp;#x2F;investors&amp;#x2F;advertisers, that even the ones people have learned to think they trust, like NPR for example, are shining examples of &lt;i&gt;propaganda disguised as anything but&lt;/i&gt;, equivalents of Fox news. The oligarchy has infiltrated our mediums of communication because they are a threat.&lt;p&gt;The internet is the latest version of that threat, which is why we will continue to see attacks on the freedom of speech of the internet as well.&lt;p&gt;Major shoutouts to the outliers in this equation though who are briding the gap between traditional broadcasting and the itnernet, such as CSPAN, PBS, Charlie Rose, and the universities doing programs such as Conversations with History (UCTV) and Hoover Institute, et al.&lt;p&gt;PS: WaPo has gone way downhill in their journalistic integrity lately, I expect they are a major mockingbird pivot point. The best traditional source of news I have found? London Financial Times.</text></comment>