"Everyone has the right to ... seek, receive and impart information and ideas ... regardless of frontiers." - Article 19, UN Declaration of Human Rights
This is our 200th recommendation, so to celebrate we thought we'd do something a little different - cover the news.
Not specific news stories. We don't do that: we do models, tools and ideas, not disasters, scandals and happenings. But we do follow the news, and so we thought we'd share what news outlets we find useful for keeping up with what's going on around the planet.
One of the great joys of living in the 21st Century is that almost all major English-language news outfits have websites. Some of our favorites: the World Press Review is a great resource, reprinting stories from around the world; the British press (especially the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC) consistantly does a better job than the American press of covering global news; for news from the Arab world, it's hard to beat Al Jazeera and Al Ahram Weekly; for science, click New Scientist or EurekAlert!; while the Globalist often has a variety of stories missed elsewhere.
But commercial news outlets are only one part of the story. For one thing, news resources, like every other kind of resource on our planet, are not evenly-distributed. News from the developing world gets short shrift. (Want to see exactly how short a shrift? Check out these Global Attention Profiles, which map media coverage by country.) For another, news coming out of the developing world's indigenous commercial media is often heavily-censored.
But the Net is opening up new possibilities in journalism. There are the collaborative newssites (Slashdot and OhMyNews being the most famous), but there's also distributed newsgathering going on in the form of blogs (which is probably the best way to find out about what's really going on in Africa or India). Then too, non-commercial citizens' media are popping up all over the place, like AlterNet or the increasingly interesting OneWorld.
One recent new innovation is the RSS reader -- an application which collects feeds from multiple sites and displays the headlines (and, usually, excerpts) in a single browser window. Most blogs and many news services have RSS feeds (you can find ours on the front page), allowing you to, in effect, build your own newsservice.
But cool as blogs, collaborative sites, citizens' media and RSS feeds are, it's clear that new models which combine them are still germinating, and those new models will in turn trigger new approaches to covering the news. We'll cover 'em as they happen. Don't touch that dial.
In the meantime, please share with us and other readers what global news sources you follow by clicking on the comments link below.
