Ask HN: What newspaper are you paying for these days?
I have been wondering with the total slop that is social media where to get well written and interesting news from. I am not only interested in tech or politics but other topics as well. What are your suggestions?
Right now, I only have subscriptions to the NYTimes (US) and FT (international). But mostly I find out interesting stuff from https://marginalrevolution.com/ (which usually have links to FT, Bloomberg, WP, WSJ, etc.)
I was once a New Yorker subscriber, but I no longer have patience for long form writing.
I also once had subscriptions to the Montreal Gazette and Globe and Mail, which were pretty good for local and domestic news respectively (but only if you're Canadian). I also once subscribed to the Walrus when Jonathan Kay was editor, but it was too boring (it's Canadian, I'm Canadian, but I don't relate to anything they write about -- but I think they've gotten more interesting since).
The Economist -- I'm torn. A lot of the writing sounds smart, but many of the articles are written by young Oxbridge PPE grads who can turn a phrase but don't have a lot of real world experience. The Economist seems to be read by people who want to seem smart, who want to hold an elite-certified opinion, but don't seem to want to to do the work to actually go deep on topics and would rather outsource their opinion formation to the Economist.
I also once had a subscription to Foreign Affairs. Excellent long-form articles that I no longer have any patience for. You do get the occasional long form article that is so relevant and engaging that you're forced to read it to the end, but these are few and far between.
I've gone back to reading books.
I did find the economist sounding more rational when they were analyzing all the crazy news of the last few months.
Like for example when Trump was talking about Greenland, most of the news was talking about how ridiculous or belligerent or imperialistic it was.
But my question was “why is ANYONE, including Trump, even talking about Greenland? It seems totally random” and they had an interesting explanation about Greenland’s strategic value and why there’s even an argument about it.
I pay for my local news. I need the news local and close to be to stay around. I read it once in a while, but I think it's ridiculous when one can't even get local news.
Same for me (it covers a region about half a county.) They also publish a paper for the neighbouring region. It's a daily paper with not too many ads. Even if not paying, it comes once a week. There's another regional paper with an annoying number of ads, so we picked this one.
There's a sports and globals section that is shared with the neighbouring region's paper, and perhaps shared even further.
I like having somewhere people can complain about local politicians, so I'm happy to support it. They're not going to uncover a Watergate, but have plenty of room for the things I take issue with.
Curious, but how local? State? City? Residential community? Asking because I feel everyone makes their own paper and I've done a few since school, but we've always worried the readership isn't that big.
city and residential community.
Agreed! If people move to a area and don't feel like they're part of the community, reading the local paper is a great way to figure out what's going on.
Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/
Sell us on Jacobin.
Reading news about my country I see it has the same coverage than the left media there.
I'm terrible at selling stuff, in fact I quite hate it. But this request is so unexpected that I feel I can at least give it a try.
A. The design for the print editions (https://jacobin.com/issue/speculation).
It's distinctive, carefully laid-out content with smartly used negative space, uses fresh and modern colour palettes, bold typography, moving away from the “Courier New typeface”. (For font nerds, Courier was designed in the mid-50s as a typewriter face for IBM [0] and has been adopted by many publishers because it was considered cool and was in the public domain.)
For visuals, Reimecke Forbes' fresh style and creative direction is clearly a winner: the editorial illustrations are beautiful and artistic, as are the rich and playful infographics and data visualisations, many created via freelance art commissions. In fact, the magazine owes much of its success to the design of its print editions; as this article states, "It’s the single most gorgeous and visually clever magazine currently being published in print" [1]. It's argued that creating a beautiful object is essential to the magazine's business model, which centrally relies on a small base of premium subscribers [2] and because the majority of its content is available for free [3].
I quite like website as well. It's making full use of the space, the choice of colours is to my taste (bar the intense red in the footer navigation menu), and the content is smartly structured on the page for the various site sections, such as the author [4] and taxonomy pages [5].
B. The magazine's social and political analyses
Whilst US readers are their main audience, they do look at global events and often address political and social issues and challenges on a country basis. Depending on where you're based, there's a good chance that you'll find something of (political) interest.
One may not necessarily share the left perspectives for whatever reasons, but the quality of the writing is rather good and they don't mess around with their analyses: for the most part they are rigorous, historically grounded critiques of neoliberalism [6] and current events, little to no populist fluff or shallow takes, and employing clarity of language. They write a lot about democracy and its processes, wealth inequality, the power of mass protest, environmentalism, healthcare, collective action/unions, economics, politics, the BS of philanthropy [7], and building societies that work for all, not just for the rich.
The magazine is considered to be the most relevant and important publication of the American political left today – "timely, globally oriented, and topically eclectic" [1]. Described by the Nieman Journalism Lab as a journal of "democratic socialist thought" [2], the magazine is involved with projects beyond publishing analytical essays, for example coordinating a nonfiction series via Verso Books. The shared commitment of the founder and the co-editors to advancing a critique of liberalism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks” also matters [8].
People like Chomsky recommend it ("a bright light in dark times") [9] and professor Corey Robin says [1] in Vox Mag that "it’s completely in-your-face in its style and tone; it has this name, Jacobin, that just seems designed to push people’s buttons.” The article goes on to say that "Jacobin isn’t a traditional journalistic outfit, and purposely so. Seth Ackerman, one of the magazine’s earliest contributors, says he and Sunkara (the founder) wanted to explicitly avoid what the latter called 'rosy reports from the front'." Sunkara's approach is "put your ideas out there, write as clearly as possible, and let it be challenged," which I quite like.
The editorial standards are commendable, in my opinion: there's no clickbait, no "both sides" nonsense when holding power to account.
One can certainly disagree with many of the things written in it, but it would be hard to deny that its content is intellectually stimulating and informative, often providing a fresh view over the political situation in the US, Europe, and Latin America, as well as plenty of historical context that helps the general public understand how we got here and perhaps offer some lessons from the past.
[Message continues, as there's a limit imposed by HN]
D. Readership
Jacobin is genuinely independent, as all quality mags should be – primarily funded by readers and subscriptions. They understand the demand for journalism and long-form content for a left (and beyond) audience, and constantly deliver on that.
According to their site [10], the magazine has around 75k subscribers (and 3M online visitors), which I think I read in one of the sources quoteed below that it outperforms nearly all explicitly left-wing print publications (think Dissent, The Nation, and The Baffler), and whilst not exactly mass-market, they qualify for top-tier among political journals. It should be said that it's uncommon for explicitly left media to reach this scale without corporate ads or institutional backing.
I argue that it punches above its weight in terms of digital reach, syndication, and influence in academia and activist circles, but I don't yet have the data to back this conclusion up (mainly because it would take time to obtain it and I'm lazy). It may be small in absolute terms, but that in terms of influence per capita it's likely rather significant. If you spend a bit of time digging through its content (assuming your interests are aligned with theirs), it becomes obvious why. It's also surprisingly well-connected with policymakers around the world [1], and count among their clients the New Left Review and university presses like Duke and Stanford.
E. Popularity and whatnot
A few major media platforms have mentioned them in their shows, articles, news, and bulletins. MSNBC [12], NYT [8], the conservative National Review [14], Politico [15], Tablet Magazine [16], New Left Review [17], The Guardian [18], The New Yorker [19], CJR [3], and more.
In addition to their staff, it's likely that some or most important left thinkers alive who can write in English and are active have contributed to the magazine. Notable contributors include Nathan J. Robinson (of Current Affairs), Cory Doctorow, Hilary Wainwright (of Red Pepper mag), Sohrab Ahmari (of Compact Magazine), Slavoj Žižek, normative political theorist Bernard Harcourt, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bernie Sanders, the former vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, the French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux, the West Papuan independence leader, Benny Wenda, the co-founder of the independent publisher OR Books, Colin Robinson, the former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, and a host of authors, journalists, researchers, sociologists, historians, political scientists, economists, philosophers, lecturers, union leaders, organisers, workers, and more. It is really a pleasure to read many of these, everything considered [20].
To me, and many like me who want to see a more equitable and fair world - one that we should exert more democratic political control over - Jacobin is a much-needed source of information and investigation that holds power to account and translates boring but important social, economic, and political research into plain English. A just and sustainable reality of our own making should not just include the views of the left; it should encourage it to participate meaningfully in politics and help temper the right-wing extremism [21] that has been taking over the US, Europe, and much of the world over the last 40 years. In the end, what we need is a society that addresses the needs of individuals, communities, and the environment - not just market outcomes or abstract freedoms, which are merely instruments or limited goals within a larger context. Whether the magazine will maintain its ethos remains to be seen; I'm prepared for disappointment, but I also recognise that it's just a medium at the end of the day. What matters to me is what's being said there, and I try not to become too attached to the magazine itself.
To those quick to demonise or reflexively dismiss the left's approach to politics, philosophy, social issues, and everything else, I would say there are strong arguments not to do that, especially if you value democracy. Most scholars, policymakers, organisers, economists, and researchers on the left advocate solutions that expand wellbeing across lines of class, geography, and identity. That should not just be acceptable, it should be taken seriously, pondered, and investigated. Otherwise, I'm afraid we're running out of options as a society. If the peaceful, honest, solution-focused approach is rejected, what the masses are left with is violence.
Apologies for the long text.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_(typeface) [1] https://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11265092/jacobin-bhaskar-sunka... [2] https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/jacobin-a-marxist-rag-run-... [3] https://www.cjr.org/the_delacorte_lectures/jacobin-socialist... [4] https://imgbox.com/tvy2OOeM [5] https://imgbox.com/cFJv83va [6] https://jacobin.com/2025/06/wealth-tax-canada-inequality-aus... [7] https://jacobin.com/2020/01/george-soros-defense-of-open-soc... [8] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/books/bhaskar-sunkara-edi... [9] https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ssl/2017/11/23/new-politics-... [11] https://jacobin.com/about [12] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/un... [14] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-agenda/provocative-essay-... [15] https://www.politico.com/story/2011/10/new-target-for-ows-cr... [16] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/young-intel... [17] https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii90/articles/bhaskar-sunka... [18] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/19/jacobin-magazi... [19] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-editor-of-jacobin... [20] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fjacob... [21] https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/ctc/news/secretary-genera...
> Apologies for the long text.
I appreciate the thorough response. I'm more interested to give the magazine a chance now.
Glad to read that.
(I've noticed a ton of mistakes in my text, please excuse them: I rushed between my work tasks.)
I appreciate the long text, especially the citations! I'm definitely checking this out with a curious eye now.
Articles from The Atlantic tend to leave me feeling it was time well spent. I ended up subscribing after realizing that and haven't regretted it.
I also subscribe to WSJ and The New Yorker, though I go back and forth frequently on whether they’re worth keeping.
I live in Aotearoa New Zealand and have only one subscription: to the Otago Daily Times https://odt.co.nz. It comes a close second in annual "most trusted media" surveys, after Radio New Zealand https://www.rnz.co.nz/ which I also read daily but is free.
The New York Times is good.
I get most of my news from NPR or BBC. I don't subscribe to either but I used to subscribe to Economist. It's still good but the writing style and tone is cloying.
I've been considering Financial Times to replace it.
I would like to plug for npr. If you listen to them, set up recurring donations to your local affiliate. They really do need your support. Local stations are at risk.
Open question to all - I see a lot of ads recently for the Ground News app, it supposedly pulls different articles with different political leaning, label then accordingly and calculates news bias.
Is it a good app in actual use? Any better than leading some moderately reputable newspaper?
I use ground news. It’s fine and gets the job done. Maybe I’ve gotten used to it.
I have liked the blindspot feature though. It was very useful during the US election when one sided reporting was especially bad. But I personally still find it more useful to watch YouTube videos from diverse sources.
I’d love for them to curate YouTube videos for current events, rating channels by bias. That would be even more useful for me personally.
But I’ve also found the Washington Post or Economist to be more desirably “boring” in their reporting, rather than NYT that seems to just not care anymore.
I have a "free" subscription to the FT, and it's worth every penny. I would be tempted to pay for it if I didn't get it free, because it's my go-to news source as it is generally neutral on politics, therefore providing more accurate coverage.
I’ve heard very good things about FT being boring and fact based. I haven’t read it myself though.
I have been using Particle app for all my news now. My Problems with newspapers or any published media is that they push opinion as news and to me news is news(without any lean towards anything)
Does anyone subscribe to The Free Press? Worth paying for?
It’s more long form rather than daily but I’m curious. I have liked their podcasts. Are they as heterodox behind the curtain as they claim?
what about The Economist? Is anybody subscribing it? I’m considering buying the paper subscription.
It’s good but I personally find it gets stale after a few months. They have a very pronounced editorial voice.
I do. It’s great that it comes both in a written and an audio version.
I wonder how easy it is today to unsubscribe from Economist? Do I need to call an expensive international number to do that, or do they allow easy unsubscribe in some digital form?
Unfortunately, I usually find out about things that directly affect my employer (government) on local subreddits before I find it through any other source. I will read CBC/Radio-Canada and TVO (public broadcasters for Canada and Ontario)
None.
We pay for the local paper in my small rural town. Also the paper in the next town over that is slightly more regional to the small rural towns in our area.
The Information for technical news. https://www.theinformation.com/about
I don’t think I would. I’ve been gelman amnesia’d so many times I don’t trust them.
The Guardian for good US news coverage (I’m in the US).
I sub to Apple News+. Give a good mix of papers and magazines, and a lot of long form articles are broken out and highlighted in their own features.
Substacks. I pay for Matt yglesias, Noah Smith, nate silver, basically with a good record of analysis and accuracy in economic and political topics.
How much do you pay per month for substacks?
none, but have donated to the guardian a few times
About a year ago I still had a few newspapers that I trusted. Reuters, National Post, CTV, financial times, etc.
Today, each one of those have fell. They each provided examples of bias exceeding my threshold. There was a shocking slip of quality in the last 2 years at all of these.
I trust none of them anymore. Journalism has fallen to their own BS.
Yes. None can be trusted.
Top tip - use the web browser translation function to read news websites that are non-english from countries around the world. That way you get some balance.
> There was a shocking slip of quality in the last 2 years at all of these.
The timeline seems to be coinciding with a certain event that happened in 2023
my problem is that I often find some of the articles from big newspapers interesting but never enough to shill out 50 bucks or so a month for their subscription. And subscribing to multiple just is not an option for me currently
> Reuters
Not a newspaper.
New York Times and Washington Post.
The Onion has been doing physical newspapers this year and they are entertaining potty reads.
I pay the broadcast tax in Germany. The state-sponsored media covers my humble needs.
The Colorado Sun. It's left biased, but the right doesn't make it easy.
None specifically. I pay for the local library to have access to most national newspapers in electronic form. Most (big) international ones, I could theoretically access through work - but that requires VPN and sometimes other authentications, so I honestly mostly rely on the "Bypass Paywalls Clean" Firefox extension.
Philadelphia Inquirer, it's owned by a foundation, not a billionaire. I mostly use it for access to daily comic strips.
Colorado Sun, it's a non-profit. I think it was started by refugees from the Rocky Mountain News, after that failed. Mostly general Colorado news, so it's fairly local in scope for these modern times.
It's all bad. The only things even remotely reliable in my experience are SEC filings and market data. Everything else is mostly made up or lies.
How edge.
As a human construct, prices are also entirely made up. Treating them as a positivist 'given' akin to 'facts' from natural sciences misses the wood for the trees.
None of the general news sources are worth paying for. "Gell-Mann Amnesia" applies broadly. They depict a perpetual drama. Each focuses from a different perspective, at the same dramatis personae. It's set up this way so viewers can follow, and be entertained. They know the plot threads, the characters, themes, the possible twists to watch for. This is similar to any TV series or cinematic universe. (e.g. Superheros, Tolkien-style fantasy etc)
The themes change over time, but in a gradual, controlled manner. And (nearly) all perspectives point at the latest.
Specialist news sources are sometimes high quality. For example: Quanta magazine, which articles we see frequently here. Ground news is an aggregator that tries to balance out the Left/Right bias of news outlets, but I think this misses the point.
thecity.nyc
Local non-profit journalism. It’s free, but I have a recurring donation.
WSJ, NYT, and Apple News+
I get Harpers, the Economist, and the London and New York Reviews of Books delivered. At a news stand I'll usually grab The Atlantic, WSJ, FT, and/or the MIT Tech Review depending on what looks interesting. I also need to go give Axios some money, I've been using their local reporting and keep meaning to do the yearly membership thing.
None.
FT and, as a right-of-centre person, the Guardian (Guardian is "lefty").
It's a trick a friend recommended to me once. Reading a paper that aligns with what you believe anyway doesn't challenge you and merely reinforces your biases. I might roll my eyes on some stuff in the Guardian but that's better than just feeding myself whatever I think already.
Plus, in the UK, the default conservative paper, The Telegraph, seems to be tabloidising and click-bait-ising itself at breakneck pace. Whenever I see a link to it, it's all about how foreign immigrants steal our jobs, overwhelm public services and give us cancer, while Communist Labour is introducing gulags, where salt of the earth Brits are forced to put pronouns in email signatures.
FT has a clear finance/econ bias but is a damn good newspaper apart from that. I find it staying far from directional biases but delivering insightful information.
The Guardian really can't be considered left of centre these days, they're basically just the PR wing of "Blue Labour", and even the not "blue" part of Labour is free-market right of centre. If you really want to know what us lefties are thinking, try The Canary (which happens to be one of the newspapers I pay for too). https://www.thecanary.co
None. I find the quality and mostly left wing bias in the current state unacceptable. Too little neutral reporting and way too much subtle opinion making on the current thing.
Without irony, I actually find the South China Morning Post probably the most unbiased, straight on US news.
It also acts as a filter for important US events since they aren't motivated to put out 24/7 bullshit like US based news.
Major US news organizations, be it right or left leaning are just complete trash. Not much higher standards than the National Enquirer at the grocery check out line.
I can't blame the news organizations though since news/politics have become a type of dominate team sport for entertainment in the US in the last decade. Really only second in popularity to the NFL.
Having lived in Hong Kong for a significant portion of my life, I have a soft spot for the SCMP. However it is owned by Alibaba now, so effectively an arm of the CCP.
Use it wisely to bias western propaganda with eastern.
If everything leans left, then perhaps left is the neutral point? Globally, I feel like the USA lies to the far right of everyone else.
Bait used to be believable.
> I find the quality and mostly left wing bias in the current state unacceptable
Except when it comes to current geopolitics that is, now we're talking delusionally right wing bias. wink wink
Current line-up for paid is WSJ, WashPo, and The Economist.
WSJ has been excellent. Coverage and analysis are absolutely top notch. The editorials are … right wing trash, but usually well written. The Economist is slower news which is a good alternative; inserts its editorial stance into the actual news, but as a classical liberal I’m fine with that.
I’ll probably let WashPo lapse; not sure it’s providing anything more than WSJ is at the moment for me.
Others I’ve subscribed to: FT — it was good, slightly slower news than WSJ but faster than The Economist. Spectator — right wing trash but exceptionally well-written — if you want to know what the mean-spirited right are feeling on any issue, this will tell you. Foreign Policy — great analysis but honestly felt like news that was too slow.