My Top 5 News Sources

     As a person who does not usually read or watch a lot of news, the sources I do use are somewhat random and exist on different platforms. But to get the best view of something, I gather news from those different sources and put them together to create my own opinion of the situation. 

    The source I get most of my information from is my friends and family. My father watches mainstream news like Fox News and will often share with me whatever major story is happening that day, or whatever story he feels most passionate about. This type of news usually involves how the stock market is doing, global news, major crises, and issues of national safety. 

    I also get a lot of news from my friends through conversations with them. My friends are all of a younger generation and are a diverse group of people, so the news I get from them is a bit of everything. They will often talk about pop culture news, movies and TV news, scandals with celebrities, and anything else that closely impacts our generation. But sometimes they do mention things of major importance such as how our state handles COVID-19 or what new laws the government might have made that would affect us. 

    The source I get most of my local news and weather from is Spectrum News. Almost every day when I was in high school, I would check the news in the morning before school to see what the weather was like so I would know how to dress for the day. And since my cable service at home was Spectrum, every time you turned on the TV, it would start out on the Spectrum News channel. Sometimes I would catch stories they were covering at the time and listen in for a while. I would recommend this mainly for local or weather news because it is specific to the area you live in.

    The next source I get a majority of my news from is Google News. Because my phone is an Android, it automatically comes with a bunch of Google apps downloaded. Google News is one of those automatically installed apps that are on my phone. If I just swipe all the way to the left, I can scroll through different news articles that I am interested in. Based on what I click on, Google then decides what my interests are and will show me more topics based on those things.  

    Because of the app, I also get "breaking news" notifications that appear across the top of my screen with the title of an article. These are supposed to be the most important new updates for stories I follow, but because I do not click on a lot of articles, they tend to be more random. If I actually read through articles instead of skimming the little blurbs that were provided under them, I am sure my feed would be more personalized and interesting, but because I don't I often see stuff I don't care about. But I do get to see at least two or three news alerts every day, which at least gives me an idea of what is going on in the world that day. I would recommend this if want to be constantly up to date on your topics of interest.

    The next place I occasionally get news from is YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts are similar to TikTok where it is a collection of short videos on any topic. From time to time I will see a video about something newsworthy that has happened that people are either reacting to or trying to make the public aware of whatever is happening. But the videos you see are based on the topics you are interested in (the algorithm records what videos you click on or watch all the way through) so I usually only see news about topics I follow closely such as pop culture news. I would recommend this if you are a more casual news watcher/reader because it has a more laid-back feel than reading through a full article. 

    The last place I go to for news is the Microsoft Edge homepage. Every time I open a new tab, the homepage is full of news articles, ads, and even a weather report for the day. I don't usually spend time here because I only open a tab to go search for something or type in a website, but sometimes the title of an article or the cover picture will catch my eye. I will then click on whatever it is and take a look, but I only do this very rarely. So, I would not really recommend this as a good way to get your news unless you spend a lot of time on the homepage. But the one benefit of it would be that there are a variety of topics presented on the homepage, which would give you a wide variety to choose from and read over.