There was a lot of moaning and complaining on the local radio talk show this afternoon concerning Rupert Murdock taking over the Wall Street Journal. The hand-wringing seemed to center around the expectation that the Journal’s reputation for detailed, in-depth and balanced reporting will be the first aspect of the old regime to be sent flying out the door once Murdock has actual control.

I will tell you, I still subscribe to the local daily paper. I rarely read past the front page of each section, but I find it keeps me in touch with state and local issues better than anything else I’ve found. I don’t mind paying to help offset the costs of local newsgathering, either.

I also subscribe to numerous RSS feeds to get national and international news. I’ve spent much of the last 5 years outside the US in Thailand, 80 km from the Burma border. I subscribe to a daily news summary from the online Burma source news@irrawaddy.org, and have been willing to pay for that also. It is vital to my safety when I’m there, in Thailand, to keep tabs on what’s happening in the train-wreck we call Burma. But I’ve also learned I find value in getting news about the US from outside the US. This drives me to find a good portion of my news from these sources I’ve listed below. I welcome suggestions you may have, of feeds you find particularly useful.

I mention these changes in my newsgathering only because I feel strongly that if you want information you should bear some responsibility for the cost of gathering it. If that means subscribing, so be it. If you continue to rely on the free CNN feed, or Fox News feed, or Google News, you will continue to get a narrow, slanted viewpoint and your horizons will not expand. Don’t lock yourself into only reading sources you know you agree with. That only increases your alienation in the future, and limits your capacity to make good decisions, especially electoral decisions. The world is a much smaller place than it was 20 years ago, at the start of the internet revolution. Staying with only local news sources severely limits your capacity to deal with this reality. Be a responsible reader!

http://www.iht.com/rss/frontpage.xml

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/index.rdf

http://thailandnews.net/rss.php

http://www.iht.com/rss/opinion.xml

http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml#

http://www.tricycle.com/rss/dailydharma.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/foxsports/RSS/soccer

http://cr.unchy.com/atom/joe

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheNationEdPicks

http://blog.wired.com/defense/rss.xml

http://www.socialistworld.net/rss.xml

http://www.ft.com/rss/world/asiapacific/china/society