A  story on the Atlantic Monthly’s website states that the Washington Post was outted yesterday for trying to sell access to Obama administration officials and the Washington Post’s own writers to lobbyists for $25,000 per seat.  I was glad to hear that my suspicions about the impaired impartiality of modern newspapers were right on target, and overall feel this affirms my several-years-old decision to let go of reading traditional newspapers and go to online sources.

I have always been one who likes to read the news, instead of watching it. But at some point in the past five years, we stopped taking the paper. It cost a lot of money, and I wasn’t sure it was really impartial. The only short-term cost was I was kept out out of knowing much about fires, explosions and car accidents in the local community. But as time went on, my life changed very little from stopping the paper feed. Except every once in a while a big story would blow in and I would left out.  I knew this “see no evil” approach to the news was not a lifetime solution.

I have instead adapted a new system of getting the news effectively, relatively impartially, and for free. It is foolproof? No. but I’m not sure I’m less well informed than I was years ago. My three step method to news aquisition is:

1. I read my twitter feed for about 15 minutes a day. If there’s anything really important going on I’ll hear about it. Meanwhile, I also pick up an ecclectic mix of blog articles from links on twitter and hear some outside voices that I wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for the internet.

2. I read the top story on Yahoo news. If something interests me, I search for it there. I spend about 5 minutes a day reading Yahoo news, on average. I find it to be very well suited to my needs — decently researched and respectably written. The bias I had become used to in newspaper journalism seems to be absent. I’m hoping, anyway.

3. My mother and daughter send me articles from the New York Times. I spend about 10 minutes a week reading these stories. This insures that I get some exposure to top-ranked modern journalism, and since Mom and Daughter are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, I feel I am getting a balanced ledger of news from various viewpoints.

In this way I stay informed about various trends in the country and in the community. Actually, I have to say I think I’m better informed than I was from reading one paper, and certainly more than I would be from watching TV news.