I don’t usually go out seeking for news, it always seems like news comes to me. Usually, when I go to sign onto my Gmail and/or Yahoo e-mail accounts, the sign-in page with headlines of news around the world catches my eye. I almost never watch news on the television anymore; in fact I don’t think people have the time to sit down for the evening 6 o’clock news like the previous generation. I know my parents used to sit down and watch the news right after dinner. I see the future of news as being dynamic in scope and less regulated. For example, CNN has a feature on its Web site where viewers can send in their own video to be judged if it is newsworthy or not. With the amount of camera phones and portable video cameras, the age of on-sight field reporters is a dying breed.

 

I get my news online from either Fox News or Valley Fever (Phoenix, Ariz.). I think most people get their news either online or on TV. I think that 24-hour news (in the U.S.) is ridiculous. It focuses on things that really aren’t important at all — like the balloon boy. If we didn’t have 24-hour news, no one would care about balloon boy outside of Colorado because it wouldn’t have made it past the 6 o’clock news. There are some things that matter — the war in Iraq, Haiti, Obama’s failures as president, etc. — that we hear about non-stop for about two weeks. Then they disappear because some idiot, B-list “star” followed in the footsteps of Brittany Spears and flashed her junk while getting out of a car. Given the amount of smut that has infiltrated our news system, I feel less and less inclined to follow it. Not only is it incredibly boring to see news on repeat, it makes the reporters seem dumb since they can’t find something more important to report about. Twenty-four-hour news channels have basically become televised versions of the New York Post. I’m just waiting for “Page Six” to come on after Glenn Beck.

For the last couple of months I have turned almost exclusively to a relatively new website called the Global Post for my news (www.globalpost.com). This site (which is not a blog) was started by a group of seasoned reporters from respectable U.S. and international publications and broadcast networks in order to dedicate more efforts to covering international events. I rarely watch 24-hour news networks because I find that 80 percent of what they say in an hour is just useless babble to fill the time. The other 20 percent that is not dedicated to advertising is recapitulation of the news from the hour before. Many news publications tend to provide little in-depth analysis and critical approaches to the news, seemingly aiming only to shock readers into reading. We are the most globally oriented generation in history yet the news provided to us by mainstream sources does a very poor job of informing us about the what, how, and why of events around this planet. The Global Post (whose reporters actually live in the places from which they report) is a refreshing combination of high-quality writing and analysis with a vast eye to the world beyond U.S. borders.

Personally, my news is sourced from either the New York Times, or www.fark.com, which pulls news from all over the web. I try to avoid a single source, as I feel that real journalism follows common pipelines and it should show up in more than one place, hopefully because it was independently verified and vetted. As far as where “most people” get their news, I have no clue. I imagine a large number get it from television networks, and the Internet. Some people like myself actually enjoy the act of reading and holding a newspaper and consider the cost of such a service to be worth it. The trouble is the blending of the line between news and news analysis. With cable networks like Fox News under pressure to have content all the time that people simply cannot afford to ignore, this line gets blurred to the point of non-existence. An increasingly large number of programs on Fox are presented as news programs, or at least in the style of one, only to be opinionated commentary about events in actuality, regardless of if their being based on actual news. I fear that more and more people fail to see the difference between news being reported and news-styled entertainment. It is this discrepancy that fuels the fire of these entertainers, paid to draw attention, ire and ultimately ratings to their immediate surroundings.

 

Honestly, I usually skim the Times and do the crossword, watch John Stewart or Colbert, and/or look up things that interest me or are pertinent. I find 24-hour news to be unnecessary and repetitive. I hope that with our generation, 24-hour news dies out or joins forces with the Weather Channel. Do we really need to watch Twister (again) instead of local on the 8s? No. Do we really need to hear about the woman in Texas who got her teeth pulled? Probably not (although that stinks). But could we watch radar and get our headlines and facts without news reporters giving their biased opinions in awful suits? Definitely.

I usually get my news almost exclusively from the New York Times, but Rochester hasn’t been stocking it in Douglass so far this year. Otherwise, I rely on RSS feeds, blogs and other people’s postings. This route is not for everyone. The NYT costs a lot and I wouldn’t be reading it if it weren’t free! Blogs and feeds are only useful for the technologically adept. Many people get their news by a combination of word and mouth and popular news programs. I actually dislike/hate all television news except BBC World, as even CNN I found has started doing “human interest” stories that are a waste of time. This is meant to make the stations attractive, but is truly a huge detraction from actual news coverage. Many stations are also biased, with Fox leaning to the right and MSNBC leaning to the left, to the point where it’s impossible to get pure facts and your responses to events are dependent on the channel. News has become entertainment, and I fear that it will continue to lose objectivity at a time when objectivity is needed the most. I yearn for the day when news is just news.