Real News
The Times is not the only paper in town, and often not the best. Here's where to read journalism that respects you.
The most common response I hear to “Stop reading The New York Times” is that there is no better alternative. Internet advertising, private equity vultures, and vanity billionaire owners have wrecked the media landscape. The New York Times is the last paper standing thanks to its reputation and the funding streams of lifestyle content like games and cooking. Most of the news remaining is shoddily done or outright propaganda.
We get the news we pay for, and the truth is that people are mostly not willing to pay for news. The advertising-supported halcyon days of the mid-20th century are not coming back. I don’t have a lot of faith in change happening one person at a time, but take a look at your media budget broadly and think about supporting people doing real work. Here is an incomplete list of publications I think deserve more attention.
Institutions
The New Yorker: Alongside the arch theater criticism, this old stalwart manages killer exposés on a regular basis. Villains keep sitting down with Isaac Chotiner and expecting their interview will go differently and I’m grateful for their lack of pattern recognition.
ProPublica: ProPublica has a laser-sharp focus on investigative journalism that runs the gamut from national issues to local corruption. You can read about a $535 million defense plant that produces nothing and how Indigenous women are murdered and forgotten in Alaska. The only problem is that they can’t be everywhere at once.
Wired: Once Silicon Valley’s favorite techno-optimist magazine, Wired has taken a more critical stance in the past few years on how big tech actually works and the consequences of a world increasingly bending to the whims of absolutely cringe billionaires. Strong investigations alongside the gadget reviews.
Mother Jones: Your hippie aunt’s publication, this leftist classic keeps receipts on exactly how bad things are. Named for the labor organizer who told workers to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, the reader-funded nonprofit has spent decades on the dark-money trail and the campaign-finance muck. James West’s four months undercover as a guard in a private prison is what got me to subscribe, because no one else would commit to a story like that.
Your local alternative press is fighting the good fight, wherever that is.
Individuals
The original newspapers were often one-man shows, with a single harried person writing stories, setting type, managing subscriptions, and delivering the news. Technology has made some of these tasks easier, but the drumbeat of daily content is still a harsh master. These people have delivered.
The Handbasket: Marisa Kabas has been leading from the front for years, most notably revealing Senate candidate Graham Platner as an abusive piece of shit for the people who somehow missed that a Blackwater mercenary with a Nazi tattoo shouldn’t be in politics.
Public Notice: If you’ve seen a video clip of some Trumpworld figure admitting something horrific in stupidity and evil, it’s because Rupar watched the whole damn interview and clipped the important part. Somehow, despite all this exposure to intellectual toxic sludge, he has not gone completely berserk.
Max Read: I am Extremely Online (TM) and Max Read is my canary in the coal mine for internet culture before it breaks containment. And given that the administration is composed entirely of 19-year-old groypers, that’s important. If you don’t know what a groyper is, you definitely need to Read Max. Max also maintains impeccable lists of movies and books if you’re searching for something to soak up some time.
The Rip Current: Jacob Ward’s close focus on tech misdeeds, especially day-by-day legal analysis of Meta and Google’s lawsuits, is the kind of specific work worth supporting.
BIG by Matt Stoller: Stoller has ongoing accounts of how monopoly businesses are wrecking America, from Big Tech to Big Ag to Big News to Big Funeral Home (yes, a single chain owns most funeral parlors). He has his flaws—antitrust is important but not the only lens by which to understand the world—and Trump-the-antitrust-Candidate was clearly a mirage, but overall BIG is a perspective on corporate power that you’ll never see in any newspaper business section.
Read as much as you can, and please pay for some of it. Subscriptions keep reporting alive.
Let me know about anyone else I’ve left off the list.