Following up on a discussion from the WDT -- Where do you get your information/news? Where do you get your entertainment? Any hidden gems that we might want to know about?
For news, I don't actively seek out a source. I'll occasionally seek out CNN or something of that sort online if I want an overview. Otherwise, honestly, I get most of my breaking stories from Twitter. Then I seek out further information from other sources after that. I read The Tribune and the paper from Milwaukee online a few times a week to get local news, but other than that, the national/global stuff comes to me from a variety of channels. Entertainment-wise, Deadspin, Barstool Sports, and a couple of celebrity gossip/commentary blogs (WWTDD, TheSuperficial, etc...) make up the majority of my daily checks. I go to Dailymail.uk to read soccer coverage but also get a bunch of random entertainment stuff there since that site straddles that British line between news and tabloid.
BBCNews is probably the best. Other than that, Fox News and CNN. I'm pretty disconnected from pop culture and celebrities, but my girlfriend will happily fill me in with anything I never need to know.
Ive always gone with CNNs website just because I like the aesthetics. I'll also purposefully get my blood pressure spiking by reading Huffpo opinions on current news stories, again the aesthetic layout of the site is good as well. Even though Im more right leaning most right leaning websites look about as modern as geocities. For entertainment news I'll usually just click on whats trending on Yahoo's page if something catches my eye.
Always dlisted for entertainment stuff. Michael K is faaaaaabulous! For news/current events/etc, I listen to the no agenda podcasts and browse headlines at drudgereport. The stuff at drudge is pretty friggin biased and a lot of the headlines are misleading, but they are a good starting point to see what's happening and to see if there is anything I want to look into further from other miscellaneous sources.
I'm an uproxx junkie... For TV, I go to warmingglow For Sports, I go to withleather (also ESPN) For Movies, I go to FilmDrunk As a general news aggregate, I love Fark and my custom Google News feed. For Tech, I like Gizmodo and Engadget. I also listen to NPR in the car most days, since I have an hour+ commute to and from work.
I tune into NPR for the commute as well. We get the FW Star-Telegram and the WSJ delivered, and the NYTimes on Sunday, which also gives us digital subscriptions. My daughters keep me informed of entertainment news, whether I want it or not.
I figure if it's that important, it'll show up here on TiB. Unless it's local - that I get from my town's newspaper.com. It's always entertaining to scan over the comments box for any of the hot topics, since the morons don't get filtered out.
Jezebel for quick snippets on what's happening in the world and whenever I want to read a decent comments section, MotherJones when I really want to engage my brain on issues, HuffPo when I am only marginally engaged (but don't want to even glance at the comments), and basically everything a really smart FB friend of mine links to in his status updates. Entertainment news? Just Jezebel, but sometimes also Gawker because it's affiliated and I am lazy. I used to go to PerezHilton and TMZ back in the day, but Perez started getting ridiculously hurtful and mean-spirited and I couldn't in good conscience keep giving him clicks for that kind of assholery. Same with TMZ. Every once in a blue moon I'll find something on Reddit that I actually like, but I mostly just go to reddit for the boobies and r/makeupaddiction.
Honestly, one of my most trusted news sources is The Daily Show/Colbert Report. Yes, I know that both of them are biased, but they do make an effort to show that everyone is an idiot, and the staff on those shows seems to do more work and actual reporting than a lot of straight news sources. Without them, I would probably never see the clips from the floor of Congress because it's not like I'm watching CSpan, and I love when they call everyone on their bullshit by digging something up from a few months or years ago when they're contradicting themselves or otherwise proving that they're a tool. Some of their segments are brilliant. Other than that, for newsy news I go to the Times or BBC. For NYC-specific news, I like Time Out NY, NY Mag, Gothamist and Brokelyn. Jezebel and BUST for lady-specific news, plus entertainment news. Fashionista and Refinery 29 for fashiony news, and Serious Eats and The Kitchn for food news. Then I end up getting pretty much the rest of my news from links posted on Facebook, Twitter, and here.
For my local news I try and watch our local NBC affiliate. The lead news guy is a neighbor and you used to see him walking around hammered out of his mind, but that changed a few years back after he got pulled over and pissed on a police car. Still has his job. We're a forgiving place. It disturbs me now that I've realized how much of my news, particularly political news, I get from Fark. I try and stay away from the comments there because, while some of them are very well thought out and insightful, most of them are different versions of "Because you don't agree with me, clearly you are a traitor to the country and should be shot". From both sides of the political spectrum.
For news nowadays I usually look to factcheck.org, U.S News & World Report, my local paper and I have a subscription to National Geographic Magazine for reading, Al-Jazeera and The National- CBC on TV. R.I.P. Sixty Minutes reporters. For polls I used to pay attention to Gallup, but not so much since Nate Silver and his crew laid waste to other polling predictions with his sabremetrics approach, and in the last two national US elections has predicted 99% of the state-by-state vote correct. He is a numbers cruncher like there never has been and should be given an important position in that country, like maybe yesterday. For entertainment usually Movie Entertainment magazine, which is almost psychic in highlighting the best upcoming films to watch for. For music I only really check out charts for my business. Rolling Stone and the like all suck balls. I love watching The Daily Show because Jon Stewart is wittier and more knowledgable than any pundit on TV and it lays waste to liars and morons while being funny and entertaining. If Jon would just stop it with the stupid "New Yawk" accent he does in every single episode, I would love it completely. Seriously, when he starts that shit I hit mute. Not funny at all.
Let's be clear, Nate Silver is very good at his job and does a really nice job of breaking things down and making them simple, but he's in exactly the position he should be in. Even he would tell you he's far from an elite statistician, just a good one that happened to do well on a big stage (twice). You want to see numbers crunching like there never has been, try Vegas football oddsmaking.
Also, people get too excited about the state-by-state thing, compared to his overall competency. There were maybe 10 legitimately in play states, in 2008 and 2012 combined. Which is nice to get all right, but not some kind of miracle. Getting 66 of 68 Senate races is probably more impressive.
I used to watch CNN and Fox religiously back in the day, but I had to stop (for one thing I haven't had cable in years), because the commentators gave me migraines after a while. Too much about entertainment and not enough about facts and, you know, actual news. I still go to CNN's page to keep up on things, but I don't really even go to news sites anymore. Several pop culture sites I go to along with this one is where I normally go to for my current events fix.
I stay away from websites as often as I can for general browsing. My Twitter feed (yeah, yeah) has the NY Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts who curates other major news from all outlets, Bill Barnwell and Schefter for NFL analysis/news respectively, and so on. For me, I find writers or editors that I like and stick with them. Any outlet is going to have a fair amount of absolute idiots, so I ignore them and focus on people. In terms of hard news, if I hear something percolate through Twitter or when I scan Google News, I'll look for an AP story if it's U.S., Reuters or AFP in Europe, and one of the latter two in Africa. I'd rather support the organizations that basically power a significant portion of the real reporting printed in most papers (or on their sites) today.
I try to keep up with news/current events from a number of different perspectives/through a number of different news sources. That being said, people who watch FOX News do worse on current events surveys/questionnaires than people who watch no news AT ALL. So I use that as a justification to avoid it altogether and save myself the headache.
I might be the only person on the Internet who likes the Kinja commenting system. It's just so much easier to wade through comments I dislike/don't care about in order to read comments I'm interested in. Disqus is not good. Not good at all. Honestly, more news sites need to cultivate heavily-moderated, efficient, and organized comments sections. I like to read feedback on the article I've just finished, but I hate sifting through pages and pages of YouTube-esque comments to find a reasonable response.