Reflection…
This blog was made with the purpose of familiarizing myself with different forms of online journalism. Essentially, I learned a couple of things:
1) Neither blogs reported news in a well-rounded manner.
I found the trend with these blogs was to either exaggerate certain points or completely leave out information that was not useful to either side’s argument. While Politico tends to exaggerate information by narrowing their sourcing, using sources nonessential to the report, or making overly opinionated claims under the guise of “journalism”, Talkingpointsmemo would simply leave news out if it wasn’t important to their side. I often found myself unable to write on a certain issue because Talkingpointsmemo would not have a decently substantial article on the subject.
2) Reading The New York Times or The Washington Post is the best way to get your news.
Both the papers did a very good job on giving a well-rounded report on issues. The papers would even go further and provide stories that spun off the original news, which was both thoughtful and creative.
3) Reading literary sources like The New Yorker or The Atlantic were supplemental, but enriching.
These sources write based on the fact that you’re already literate with the current news of the time. But the kind of insights that they provided were well beyond the scope or power of a first-day news story. This was a difficult type of reporting to analyze in the scope of my project, because any news event that occurred wouldn’t be reported on (usually) in these texts for about a week. But overall, I think that reading sources like these make the distinction between simply digesting news and going the step further to reflect.
