IMO you’re doing it the right way.

If there’s a single indicator to pay attention to, it’s the source of funding. Where does the media outlet get its money from?

Next is professional ethics: does it employ real journalists? Journalism is like medicine, it’s a profession with a code of conduct. In this case, a commitment to factual accuracy, a good-faith search for the truth, fairness in choices about what to cover, transparency about sources, etc.

And if you feel the journalists are doing a bad job, then go back to point 1 and ask: Who is paying them? Are you? The reason for today’s crisis in journalism is not that journalists are lazy or evil, it’s that the internet cratered their business model. More of us need to step up and pay. It’s that simple.

I have a couple of paid subscriptions. If that’s the cost of living in a properly informed society, it’s a great deal.

That’s easy! None of them.

I read them all. I treat them like a prosecutor would treat witness testimony.

I use ground.news and only read from the sources marked High Factuality

You can reliably quickly tell if a news source is credible depending on how many appeals to emotion and superfluous adjectives/descriptors are found in their articles.

A lot of it is about parsing multiple sources, and extrapolating the data from the spin.

Seems like a lot of news stories quote AP news so I just read from the source.

How do you decide on which news sources to read?

If a news outlet has indicated to me that they care more about ad revenue than reporting news, I avoid them.
If the only way an outlet feels they can get readership is with use of clickbait headlines, I avoid them.
If the headline is something like “you’ll never guess why ___ hates this” or “the reason you can’t blahblahblah” or some other salacious bullshit or they have a super cringe thumbnail on their YT video, I avoid them.
If a writer misconstrues the words of a celebrity or political leader for their own narrative, I avoid them.
If their bias prevents them from reporting the facts of an event, I avoid them.
“Avoid” does not mean never visit. It means I try not to and if I do I proceed with caution and skepticism with the intent to get another source.

If I’m searching for a news story, it’s probably because I came across it on social media (Lemmy) or a blog and want to get credible information. Or because someone here is quoting a story and I have a hunch they’re misinformed. I use DuckDuckGo and generally get decent reputable results at the top. At its face, I will never trust Google for fact checking. If I end up at a wiki page, I often check their sources.

I have an extensive list of reputable and/or diverse outlets in my RSS reader. The only “mainstream” American sources are NYT, AP, NPR, and Reuters. I’ve been using BigNews as my RSS reader for a year or so now. I really like its simple interface and ability to subscribe to newsletters. Newsletters are sometimes the best way to get a blurb off the news without subscribing to something like NYT. If I’m compelled enough, I’ll run a paywalled article through archive.is.

I don’t feel that people publishing on substack or medium, etc are reputable outlets for general news. That’s great for specific topics, opinions, and focused reporting.

The only news I pay for is my local newspaper. In addition to local reporting, they curate AP articles.

Mostly Reuters as I feel news wires are inherently more likely to report just the facts as their main customers are other news outlets. This provides an incentive towards accuracy in a way that I find the current news landscape does not have. Beyond that I have a handful of podcasts and other more niche publications I love like Ars Technica.

I posted this in a different thread a while back. Here are some primary news sources:

• New York Times (NYT)
• Reuters
• Associated Press (AP)
• BBC News
• The Guardian
• Al Jazeera
• Bloomberg
• The Washington Post
• CNN
• Deutsche Welle (DW)

AP is basically where the news gets its news, so I go there if I’m not looking for commentary or discussion.

Some comedy news programs have developed a level of journalistic integrity that frequently surpasses actual news outlets. John Oliver, the Daily Show, and Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show podcast are really solid, not to mention much less hostile to sanity.

NPR has historically been king for getting me to feel like I actually understand an issue. I’ve been wary of them ever since whatever record-scratching both-sidesing it was they pulled during the 2016-2020 Trump American Soulrape Era that made me think nazi cock might have npr spit on it. I might look back into them again. They were good for a long time before that, it’s been awhile, and I haven’t heard about it continuing.

RSS feeder pulling articles from sources of my choosing, mostly primary sources like AP and Reuters.

I subscribe to podcasts for opinion and commentary on that news, and just find stuff that mostly aligns with my values and philosophies.

I can tell a lot about a source’s bias by the question(s) they state and the answer they claim to have.

Does the answer they give match the question?

Does the question even have a relevant/importantly relevant answer, or is it unknowable to the point of lacking usefullness?

Some people would be shocked to realize just how much crap gets caught by those two things, for me at least. Obviously Fox [or really insert your least favorite source] isnt publishing 100% truths, but sources that myself and those with similar ideals seem to more frequently trust, publish crap articles pretty frequently too.

Never just one source, ever. For specific resources, newswires can be more or less good. I’ll often also use some sort of news aggregators like news.google.com as well as forums like Mbin and Lemmy to initially hear about things - if I want to go digging them I start checking out different resources.

If I don’t see it on Lemmy, my parents usually let me know.

No don’t worry they are progressives so it’s almost always NPR or local.

Lemmy, imgur, Telegram (mostly for Ukrainian updates), then some news outlets on YouTube (Reuters, AP, NHK).