News *Homes* Right Now Do The Following: Calm, Synthesize, Fertilize and Lift
I'm now a Maddow convert even though we don't get MSNBC in this apartment. I'd resisted her for years, yet last week she finally penetrated my thick boundaries through the fragmented media scrum, and kept my attention long enough to hook me. Now I seek out her show's fragments via youtube. Also earning my browser's **news home** designations lately are Om Malik, The Daily Beast, and the L.A. Times. These are sites I reach for as I try to wean from twitter. I'm also really loving the podcast Gaslit Nation, whose hosts take punk rock angle at synthesizing news of worlwide corruption.
My microsoft edge browser's default homepage is set to thedailybeast.com. The Beast presents today's horrifying news in a way that synthesizes it, and informs me of reality while lifting my hopes and spirits with variegated stories on life outside of, well alongside, the horror. To wit: a reporter whose name I don't recognize reviewed a random new little-known show on Netflix about birds fucking. A travel reporter I'd never read before brought to readers a Parisian cabaret that is an oasis of experience amidst an ocean of image-obsessed AirBnB selfie-stick wielding zombies. I'm addicted to entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon's columns, which blend a new TV or movie release with where we are in the culture, the latter of which he does without the reader noticing.
Om Malik at om.co is a blogger/investor/ex-publisher, and one who shared my sensibility a few years ago about Facebook being a threat separate from the other big techs. He has no idea who I am, but I hopped into his twitter mentions at the time and encouraged him to trust his judgement. I was pleased to see he continued to do so, and appeared on Emily Chang's show Bloomberg 1.0 to reinforce the conveyance of his very strong hunch: that Zuckerberg-owed companies cannot be trusted. Malik also is a careful reader of the news. You can tell he even reads to the end of his chosen articles. I'd like to think he copied my habit of listing under "Further Reading" a set of sources at the bottom of my posts. And he's a dedicated, patient, wonderful photographer. He captures very few people in his shots, but so much shifting color and light. Malik captures the antithesis of the waxy (Zuckerberg-owned) Instagram aesthetic: his images capture life. I finally mention Malik now because he threw some link love to a regional paper which he dismissed in the past, he actually linked to the S.F. Chronicle. Now that I'm writing this up, I can't find his recommended reading posts, which are always good.
Finally the bright light of journalism that is the Los Angeles Times at latimes.com. So much of the media, the news media, is run not just on the east coast but in New York City proper. This skews us, and the L.A. Times is a re-burgeoning counterbalance from the Pacific. First, just hearing 18 months ago that it was under new ownership that valued journalism and was not micro-bottom-line-managing it re-pointed my eyes, if temporarily, to its homepage. Once or twice. This was reinforced when I saw a few well-positioned journalists were relocating from their east coast jobs to rejuvenate the institution, and asked native Californians for book recommendations to orient themselves to the non-concrete landscape. (I recommended "The Wilderness World of John Muir". The dead author Muir is good company, a blast of uneducated intellectual energy. Just an overall great hang.)
And the L.A. Times, like California Sunday magazine, is expanding its beat beyond state boundaries to Pacific Northwest, South America and Japan, and is delivering more environmental news than those New York nincompoops will ever be able to process.
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Further Reading:
This Is the Moment Rachel Maddow Has Been Waiting For: by Amanda Hess for nytimes.com
The billionaire who bought the L.A.Times: 'Hipsters will want paper soon' theguardian.com
"Soon-Shiong said he intends to invest in and bring stability to a newsroom that has been led by three editors in nine months and five publishers in four years." latimes.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
My microsoft edge browser's default homepage is set to thedailybeast.com. The Beast presents today's horrifying news in a way that synthesizes it, and informs me of reality while lifting my hopes and spirits with variegated stories on life outside of, well alongside, the horror. To wit: a reporter whose name I don't recognize reviewed a random new little-known show on Netflix about birds fucking. A travel reporter I'd never read before brought to readers a Parisian cabaret that is an oasis of experience amidst an ocean of image-obsessed AirBnB selfie-stick wielding zombies. I'm addicted to entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon's columns, which blend a new TV or movie release with where we are in the culture, the latter of which he does without the reader noticing.
Om Malik at om.co is a blogger/investor/ex-publisher, and one who shared my sensibility a few years ago about Facebook being a threat separate from the other big techs. He has no idea who I am, but I hopped into his twitter mentions at the time and encouraged him to trust his judgement. I was pleased to see he continued to do so, and appeared on Emily Chang's show Bloomberg 1.0 to reinforce the conveyance of his very strong hunch: that Zuckerberg-owed companies cannot be trusted. Malik also is a careful reader of the news. You can tell he even reads to the end of his chosen articles. I'd like to think he copied my habit of listing under "Further Reading" a set of sources at the bottom of my posts. And he's a dedicated, patient, wonderful photographer. He captures very few people in his shots, but so much shifting color and light. Malik captures the antithesis of the waxy (Zuckerberg-owned) Instagram aesthetic: his images capture life. I finally mention Malik now because he threw some link love to a regional paper which he dismissed in the past, he actually linked to the S.F. Chronicle. Now that I'm writing this up, I can't find his recommended reading posts, which are always good.
Finally the bright light of journalism that is the Los Angeles Times at latimes.com. So much of the media, the news media, is run not just on the east coast but in New York City proper. This skews us, and the L.A. Times is a re-burgeoning counterbalance from the Pacific. First, just hearing 18 months ago that it was under new ownership that valued journalism and was not micro-bottom-line-managing it re-pointed my eyes, if temporarily, to its homepage. Once or twice. This was reinforced when I saw a few well-positioned journalists were relocating from their east coast jobs to rejuvenate the institution, and asked native Californians for book recommendations to orient themselves to the non-concrete landscape. (I recommended "The Wilderness World of John Muir". The dead author Muir is good company, a blast of uneducated intellectual energy. Just an overall great hang.)
And the L.A. Times, like California Sunday magazine, is expanding its beat beyond state boundaries to Pacific Northwest, South America and Japan, and is delivering more environmental news than those New York nincompoops will ever be able to process.
-----------------------------
Further Reading:
This Is the Moment Rachel Maddow Has Been Waiting For: by Amanda Hess for nytimes.com
The billionaire who bought the L.A.Times: 'Hipsters will want paper soon' theguardian.com
"Soon-Shiong said he intends to invest in and bring stability to a newsroom that has been led by three editors in nine months and five publishers in four years." latimes.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
