Where News Is to Be Found Today

      Here are three not particularly surprising lessons from a book I wrote long ago entitled, A History of News:

1.     News focuses on the extraordinary not the ordinary, on change not stasis, on clashes not agreement.

2.     Interest in news and in the same basic types of news can be found in most human societies. (I went all the way back to preliterate societies.)

3.     The methods by which humans exchange news change profoundly.

      So I have not been surprised by the disproportionate attention devoted to crime and conflict in the news after that book was published in 1988. These things always make news.

      And I have not been surprised by the absurdly disproportionate attention paid to the very strong or fast or powerful, the very lovely, the very depraved, the very evil, after it. was published.

      I was certainly shocked and despondent over the results of the presidential elections of 2016 and 2024. But I have not been surprised by the fact that such an outrageous, rule-defying, malevolent character as Donald Trump has succeeded in hijacking the news.

      The truth is, however, that I was indeed caught off-guard by many of the changes journalism has undergone after I wrote it. While none of those transformations in journalism have been as profound as the switch from word of mouth to newspapers half a millennium ago or the magic of the telegraph a century and a half ago or the miracle of moving images beginning to enter living rooms just about when we were being born, they have come fast in my three quarters of a century of being alive.

      And I must admit that I have also been surprised by their profundity and political consequences.

      These transformations have included:

•       The enfeebling of so many newspapers across the United States and the resultant decline in coverage of local news.

•       The proliferation of news networks on cable television and their tendency to find a niche through rabid partisanship.  

•       The rise and fall of online magazines and the migration of news online to less professional, often hyper-partisan, often farfetched posts on social networks.

      And despite all the changes in journalism I have seen in my historical research and encountered in my lifetime I am being surprised once again by how journalism is being transformed right now, in front of our eyes.  

We are now being forced to navigate our way through yet another new news world. And my relationship to journalism is changing once again.

Yes, my first news stop in the morning remains the New York Times—as it has been since my parents were required to buy me a (discounted) subscription in sixth grade.

But I now choose to encounter The Times exclusively on the magic phone I carry in my pocket. Even the newyorktimes.com website now seems a bit hoary, old-fashioned. And, on the rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of the actual emaciated remnants of The Times’ old incarnation as a stack of newsprint, it is usually at the house of someone even older than I, and it seems an artifact of days gone by—like a Roman coin or a 1960s Buick.

       The Times’—if it is still possible to imagine it as a single entity—continues to perform its highwire balancing act: dutifully recording the rampant stupidly, antediluvian perspectives and blatant corruption of the Trump administration without entirely surrendering the paper’s devotion to old-fashioned, both-sides-now “objectivity.” That act can, at times, be a bit nauseous-making.

      But as long as it continues to report the heck out of the world, The Times remains a good place to commence a morning’s news hunt.

      Then, however, I’m ready for more ideas and insights than The Times regularly manages. And I proceed to, of all places, my email.

      Now looking for news in the mail is hardly a new thing in human history: there is a reason so many newspapers have “post” in their name. But Substack, an eight-year-old online distributor of essays, each heralded on email, does feel like something quite new. And it already seems to be churning out more interesting ideas and perspectives on current goings on than can be found in whatever desiccated newspapers are still left in the United States.

      And, thanks to Substack, I often find waiting there in my Gmail, Heather Cox Richardson—a history professor, who crafts historically informed assessments of current events. Here’s a non-historical example:

      Administration loyalists tried to claim the No Kings protests would be “hate America” rallies of “the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people.” Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas National Guard ahead of the No Kings Day protests, warning that “[v]iolence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas.”

      In fact, protesters turned out waving American flags and wearing frog and unicorn and banana costumes and carrying homemade signs that demanded the release of the Epstein files and defended Lady Liberty. They laughed and danced and took selfies and sang.

      About once a week we have run on this website an excerpt from a particularly interesting article first published elsewhere, usually Substack, by, for example, Jerry Lanson, Anne Lamott, Brian Klaas, Nate Silver, Ted Gioia, Noah Smith, Robert Reich, Don Moynihan—all of whom now have their own Substacks. We would have run more posts by Heather Cox Richardson if we didn’t think most our readers would already have seen them.

       Until his views on Trump themselves became newsworthy, we did not publish excerpts from Paul Krugman for that the same reason. Since he left the New York Times Krugman has not only produced much more but been freer to criticize our current president—which itself points to some of the limitations of getting most of your news from The Times.

       And, oh yeah, I ought to mention that there remain a couple of good old-fashioned magazines out there, too: The New Yorker and The Atlantic, both of which can now be accessed online. But you know that.

      Podcasts are another quite new form of journalism that has become important to me, to others close to me and quite likely to you—in part because they fill the need once filled mostly by radio: you can listen while you drive or do the dishes.

      Here are my current podcast favorites (I’m curious what are yours):

•       Slate’s Political Gabfest: for smart talk on the week’s major news;  

•       The Bill Simmon Podcast: for intelligent talk on sports (and gambling on sports)—upon which Simmons has built a network and, apparently, a fortune.

•       Hard Fork: a New York Times podcast, out of Silicon Valley, reporting on artificial intelligence and other tech news.

•       And, of course, another hugely successful Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, is worth keeping up with because it is interesting and because many others keep up with it.  

•       I am also addicted to the Dwarkish Podcast, hosted by a young tech wiz, who also has an interest in history and other academic fields. Sometimes the tech talk gets pretty technical, but Dwarkesh Patel has succeeded in taking tech-challenged me nearer the cutting edge of computer science than anyone else.

      It seems safe to assume that journalism will soon be experiencing more big changes—probably while employing artificial intelligences, perhaps under the direction of artificial intelligences.

      And it seems inevitable that we will find those changes disorienting if not disturbing. One thing that likely will not change is journalism’s tendency to annoy.