Where do you get your news?
Oct. 9th, 2008 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serenissimaHow do you learn about what goes on in your country and the world at large?
One of my teachers tried to explain credit default swaps to the class on Monday, and he suggested we listen to last Friday's episode of "This American Life," which gave a good explanation. I listened to it last night. It's an hour long, and it is the only explanation I've heard or seen of what all the fuss over the economy is about. We haven't talked much about The Current Financial Crisis in any of my classes, and I didn't understand what bearing crummy mortgages had on everyone else.
When I was in grade school, I watched the evening news on TV with my parents: one or two major networkbroadcasts, followed by what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They also subscribe to Time Magazine. We usually listened to public radio when my father drove my brother and me to school every morning.
My information sources shifted when I moved away to college. I had no television, and without a daily commute I didn't listen to the radio much. To this day I don't watch television, since my set receives little to nothing over the airwaves and even basic cable seems not worth the price. I don't get a news magazine, because I've seen how they pile up in the corner of the room. I sometimes catch bits of "All Things Considered" while I'm driving around in the afternoon, but mostly I get my news from the internet.
I have my Yahoo! home page set up to display headlines, and I look at them a few times a week: top stories, world news and US news from AP, top stories and world news from Reuters (and sometimes the wording of the headlines is interestingly different), top stories from the Christian Science Monitor. CSM tends to have longer, more detailed articles that hold my attention better than the news wires.
I admit that I check my Friends page on LiveJournal more frequently than my headlines, and during a given week I probably absorb as much information from there as from going through my headlines. Over the summer, it was a decent source of movie reviews; now, there's more political content. Regardless, my scattered sources yield a more limited and much more fractured picture of national and world events than what I got from listening to an entire radio or TV program.
One of my teachers tried to explain credit default swaps to the class on Monday, and he suggested we listen to last Friday's episode of "This American Life," which gave a good explanation. I listened to it last night. It's an hour long, and it is the only explanation I've heard or seen of what all the fuss over the economy is about. We haven't talked much about The Current Financial Crisis in any of my classes, and I didn't understand what bearing crummy mortgages had on everyone else.
When I was in grade school, I watched the evening news on TV with my parents: one or two major networkbroadcasts, followed by what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They also subscribe to Time Magazine. We usually listened to public radio when my father drove my brother and me to school every morning.
My information sources shifted when I moved away to college. I had no television, and without a daily commute I didn't listen to the radio much. To this day I don't watch television, since my set receives little to nothing over the airwaves and even basic cable seems not worth the price. I don't get a news magazine, because I've seen how they pile up in the corner of the room. I sometimes catch bits of "All Things Considered" while I'm driving around in the afternoon, but mostly I get my news from the internet.
I have my Yahoo! home page set up to display headlines, and I look at them a few times a week: top stories, world news and US news from AP, top stories and world news from Reuters (and sometimes the wording of the headlines is interestingly different), top stories from the Christian Science Monitor. CSM tends to have longer, more detailed articles that hold my attention better than the news wires.
I admit that I check my Friends page on LiveJournal more frequently than my headlines, and during a given week I probably absorb as much information from there as from going through my headlines. Over the summer, it was a decent source of movie reviews; now, there's more political content. Regardless, my scattered sources yield a more limited and much more fractured picture of national and world events than what I got from listening to an entire radio or TV program.
