How do you keep up with the latest news and current affairs?

Peter, in the UK, the Sunday market is declining even faster than the weekday market. I think that these days only the Mail on Sunday, The Sun on Sunday and (possibly) the Sunday Telegraph and the Star on Sunday actually make a profit.

The rot set in when Murdoch appointed John Witherow as editor of The Sunday Times back in 1994. He completed the process that Andrew Neil started, which was to make the paper fatter, more shrill, more shallow and more conservative (note small "c").

To quote Clive James: "Neil and Witherow turned the Sunday Thunderer into the non-thinking man's Innovations catalogue".

I buy a Sunday Mirror or occasionally a Sunday Sun because I like the football coverage (the late unlamented News of The World also had fantastic footy coverage) and they're cheaper than the broadies.

All media are subjective! Therefore, one always has to keep a wary eye on everything written and said.

And it's far more difficult to interrogate the validity of a piece if the person who wrote it is not named. Many hacks I know have the same opinion as me about The Economist. It is time the magazine ended this archaic practice.

This may be of interest...

A smartphone app which provides summaries of news stories soared to number nine in Apple's app store just two hours after its release in the US.

The app, called Summly, was designed by 17-year-old Londoner Nick D'Aloisio, and has received more than $1m in funding from investors.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20181537 

I think you are spot-on here Peter. If I had more time I would enjoy a newspaper.

Many years ago, when the kids were youngsters, we used to spend a couple of weeks holiday on a beach. I would get into a routine of buying a couple of newspapers, one for Mrs D and one for me. We would swap papers after lunch. Otherwise I would enjoy lying in the sun, between surfboard sessions and swimming with the kids, just carefully absorbing the contents of my paper. Incredibly relaxing.

It was also eye-opening to note the way the same story was presesented in different papers.

Cheers

Don

Don,

Yes indeed. At its most extreme almost like reading about different events entirely! Makes one aware of the "spin" that newspapers put on reports.

Peter

I am also not a "TV-watcher" ans spend my free time on music, friends and my son. Given limited time and my personal requirement for a comfortable-to-use medium to read news, I opted for the combination of iPad and the FlipBoard app. This is an app that allows you to "construct" your own newspaper with exactly the type and sources that you prefer. It reads like a small book and it would take you 5 minutes to, for example, construct 1 newspaper with the headlines of all sites mentioned in this thread.

of course, it requires a tablet and/or Internet connection.

Cheers,

Iver

Mainly Auntie Beeb, gawd bless her - via the web-shite or the telly.

That said; C4 News is excellent. Its in-depth style is what the BBC used to do.

John.

Good title for the thread. I do watch the evening news, and also pick up details from the web, but must admit that mostly the news is doom and gloom, coupled to poor reporting standards these days.

That being said, one of my guilty pleasures is to read the Saturday and Sunday papers over a few hours, while listening o lovely music and drinking fresh ground coffee.

Bit of a "me time" at weekends 

I've occasionally been "at the scene" and subsequently wondered whether the reporter was in the same country, nevermind the same parish !

Cheers

Don

Bloody hell Peter, just how cheap do you want your newspaper to be?!

As someone who works for a paper, I recommended one which is 20p on weekdays, I mean have you ever even tried it or are you just going to dismiss it?

You give the impression of someone who likes papers for news (hence I tailored my response to you and recommended i) but seem to want to opt for the BBC site instead. I say as well as paper.

I'm not even gonna bother giving an opinion on the Sundays because it looks like you pre-judged them. You're quite right, I'm hacked off. This websites-is-everything approach is bollox when they can be considered a good addition to a profitable and enjoyable newspapers.

Chris

Al Jazeera dot com

The Phoenix (ireland) or the onion ( on web)

Chris,

I am grateful for your recommendation even though I may have appeared to ignore it (which I didn't) by not responding specifically to your post.

Yes I do prefer a newspaper - you are quite right. I have treid the "i" paper  - and this unfortunately may only serve to disgruntle you even more I'm afraid, but I found it didn't really give me what I used to enjoy from a paper, ie. not just the news, but a whole pleasurable reading experience. Websites suffice for just obtaining the daily news.

As for the Sunday newspapers I haven't pre-judged them - I was just speaking from (I admit very limited) recent experiences and more distant ones.

No need to be angry. I would very much value your opinion on the Sunday newspapers as indeed I did for your recommendation for a weekday paper even though it is one I had tried and found that it did not really work for me. Had this not been the case then I would definitely be buying one for the next week or so to try out.

Cheers,

Peter

The problem is that in the developed world, news is now a commodity. You can get it anywhere, anytime, from any source.

What counts now is how it is packaged. This is why news mags like The Week (which is basically a digest) and The Economist (which provides analysis, albeit one highly biased towards a neo-liberal/Hayekian-Friedmanite worldview) do so well.

And of course there is The Daily Mail, the most complex - and in many ways, the best edited newspaper in the UK, if not the world - and surprising newspaper out there. It is hugely profitable because it presents the news in a way that its readers want to buy. Personally I mostly disagree with the wretched rag 90% of the time and generally find it objectionable but I can't help admiring its brilliance, even if it occasionally does descend into spiteful shrillness and often comes across as a parody of itself.

Somewhere down the line, it'll be the last newspaper still printed in the UK.

Great post Kevin.

Although I hate to admit, I completely agree with your stance on the Daily Mail. Like it or not,  it represents a sizeable chunk of the british middle class political and social conformism and cannot be ignored as such. I  did subcribe to The Economist for a couple of  months and lost the will to live after reading what looked like "student essays" instead of serious analysis of  current affairs,  and I have met a couple of  LSE students.

KR

Tony

NPR, in the morning, and RT.com online.

Thanks Peter for your kind words. I'm delighted you've tried i, even if you found it not to be to your taste.

I reflected on my own, possibly harsh, words. One thought was that I don't really read a newspaper for the news. I read them for the comment about the news. We can get the news so much quicker elsewhere, in my experience often radio.

Which kind of leads me to thoughts about the Sundays, where IMO there's generally more comment and less news, and as well as an awful lot of guff about some willowy actress with a new play or film to plug.

So I don't see print as being 'over' and all of interest is on the web. I see it more as a mutual coexistence between print and the web, not Keats or Dylan but Keats and Dylan. One area though where I've found the web experience to be weak is that it doesn't throw up the happy serendipity of two fascinating articles on, say, luxury hotels in Milan and field hospitals used by the Taliban that papers can, on adjacent pages.

Possibly more than anything, I'd say it's important to get both news and comment from more than one source. And only you can find the news organisations that appeal to you.

Best, Chris