2023, Media, News, Uncategorized

What’s In The News?

22 Comments

I have lived in my current town since 1987. It is a fairly small community in an isolated area, and over the 36 year we have lived here, I have come to know lots of people in town and in the communities in the surrounding region. I can tell where many people live or grew up just by knowing their last names. I also know the family histories of many people here through my work as a mental health professional at a regional human service center. There are scads of large, Roman Catholic families out here, and everyone seems to be related to or connected with everyone else.

One of the first thing I do every day when I get to work is check out the on-line jail roster at the regional correctional center in town. It is updated daily. Our town and the small towns around us have a multicounty facility where anyone in our region who gets arrested is incarcerated. This is partly nosiness as well as important information to have if anyone I am currently working with or a member of their family has got into a spot of trouble with the law. They even have the mugshots and information about the arrests and charges. The facility holds about 50 people. I have recognized as many as six people at one time on the roster.

The next thing I do is to check the websites of the two funeral homes in town to see who died. This is pure nosiness, but in a small community it is important information to know what families are grieving and/or if I have to go to a funeral soon. World affairs often take a back seat to local news in my day to day life. I am considering subscribing on-line to the New York Times just to broaden my news horizons. I already subscribe to their cooking app, so I think I get a discount on the news sections. We have the Rock County Star Herald (Luverne, MN’s paper) and the Bismarck Tribune delivered to the house.

Where do you go to for news? Subscribe to any news sources? Do you have a paper delivered to your house or apartment?

22 thoughts on “What’s In The News?”

  1. I use online sources and subscribe to the NYT on line. No paper delivery.
    Has your online purview of jailed subjects included a certain XXXpresident?

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  2. Like Wes, mostly online. No subscriptions though… if I see a headline on a subscription site, I can usually find information on some other site. I don’t have a habit of looking at the news however – I feel like I absorb it as my day goes along. My morning routine is all about language: Connections, Octordle, Quordle, Wordle and then Duolingo!

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  3. The big news here last night was being right on the edge of a severe thunderstorm that passed just north of town. The sky darkened, and low wind clouds races over us. There were huge clouds of dust that spread over us with 50 mph winds, but no rain. The neighbors took down their hanging flower pots and we stood outside our garages and watched the sky. Our garden wasn’t damaged. There was a tornado north of Bismarck, though, with lots of general wind damage to structures.

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  4. I subscribe to the local paper and the Sunday Strib. Both delivered to house (but local paper is mailed, so I get it in late afternoon).

    I browse headlines online each morning but rarely go further. I listen to MPR news when I drive, so I get some headlines and some in-depth pieces depending on the particular show I watch.

    My wife struggles to cut the ties to watching network nightly news, so I get bits and pieces of that when I’m cooking dinner.

    As the years go by, I try to focus more on local news than national/international because local has the potential to affect me far more than national or international.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  5. I subscribe to the digital editions of the Washington Post, NYT, and Pioneer Press. Gave up having an actual paper delivered to our home years ago, the delivery was unreliable. I also subscribe to several weekly online newsletters. I subscribe to Heather Cox-Richardson’s daily analysis of the daily news from a historical perspective. She’s a history professor, and has been an invaluable resource for me for years. Her daily newsletter lists all of her source material, and often leads to additional sources other than the one’s listed above.

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  6. We moved here in 1987 in the fall during a severe drought. That first November I looked out the front windows one night and thought we were having a snow storm because it was really windy and I couldn’t see veey well across the street. I realized after a few seconds that it was dust. I had never seen anything like it. Dust storms still creep me out.

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  7. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    I use my Apple News Feedmore than anything. Then I can get a wide variety of various kinds of news. I also subscribe to the StarTrib with Sunday delivery only because Lou likes it. Then there is MPR which I listen to in various amounts depending on what is going on in the world and what they get obsessed with. However, yesterday I enjoyed their covereage of 45’s indictment. I enjoy Ron Elving’s commentary. I do not like the new editors, Scott Detrow and Dominico Montenero. They are too dependent on the opinions ofothers and less sureof their own thougts and perceptons. I think they make mistakes oncoverage (and reporter obsessions) because of that. Eden Prairie now has online local news as a non-profit. I think that it the way to go with local news.

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  8. I really enjoy a weekly news digest, The Week. I hear MPR news when driving, and we occasionally watch the PBS News Hour, esp. Fridays with David Brooks/Jonathan Capehart. We get a local Winona Post delivered weekly (free)… I feel like we should support the Winona Daily News while it’s still in paper form, but it would just mostly sit unread.

    I love Big River magazine for news about the Mississippi from St. Paul down to Muscatine, IA…

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  9. Of course, there is the neighborhood news feed. Our neighbor down the block heard it from her son who lives kittycorner from us that the house right behind us was on the market for 10 minutes and has been purchased by a family withe seven children.

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  10. Our local town paper, the Post Bulletin, is really pitiful for a town of 100,000. It stopped being published locally a few years ago, and is not printed “printed” only Tuesdays and Saturday in a town 100 miles up the road. So it’s only current if your news happen yesterday.
    I do read the online version… that takes a subscription.
    We listen to MPR and NPR. I liked the Star Tribune, but I won’t pay for the subscription… We liked ‘The Week’, just ran out of time reading it. I got Newsweek subscriptions for a lot of years.

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  11. I still have a twice-a week paper delivery – Sunday and Thursday – from the Pioneer Press. I have digital access, so I wouldn’t really need the paper copy, but Something about having a paper delivered appeals to the part of me that loves tradition.

    I usually watch PBS Newshour and a local newcast to catch up on things. It’s been a long time since actual paper newspapers had really current news, but sometimes they still produce an in-depth story on something you’ve heard the basic outline of on the radio or TV.

    I worry about the decline of newspaper journalism – its role as a watchdog was something we took for granted may years ago. I don’t want to see the watchdogs go away.

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