The Daily Scan

My daily scan of Internet sites has changed over the past year or so, since the election and Inauguration. I had a list of news and political gossip sites I hit one after the other obsessively during the campaign. I know I wasn't alone in that because the habit was satirized in Doonesbury.

But some sites were slow to make the transition between political gossip and news applicable to governing, which I thought was the point of winning the election. Without the frenzied need for every scrap of electoral info, no matter how dubious, I could afford to dump other sites that always had a questionable political pov, and as I watched the identity of other sites either come clearer or change (notably the Huffington Post), I eliminated them as well.

So off my list entirely are: Politico, Huffington Post, Firedog Lake, the Field and some others I don't even remember. I consult the NY Times and Time Magazine blogs much less frequently, the Boston Globe's and Sf Chronicle's hardly at all, Andrew Sullivan every few days, 538 maybe once a week. I have gone back to NBC's First Read recently, hungry for something a bit more than squibs.

I still start with Political Wire, and the only one I consult more often than I used to is TPM. I check in with Kos, and if I still have an appetite, I check Think Progress. Climate Progress is also in my daily scan, and I've got a start page of selected headline links, with a number of enviro sites on it, which I go to according to the story. I have another list of non-political sites I visit pretty much everyday as well, which includes Bruce Sterling's blog at Wired, but also the Post Gazette Steelers page, and the LA Times Lakers.

I've included one special site on my start page list of headlines, just to keep something of a reality check. Because the news is often so outrageous that these headlines fit in...almost. For example:

Obama's Embarrassing Ska Album Resurfaces
Tiger Woods Announces Return to Sex

These gotchas are from The Onion, and are hilarious once you realize that they aren't real after all. I don't think.