The NY/DC duopoly on media is largely because they have the footprint to be everywhere and write with depth and accuracy. Read the NYT and Axios and you'll have all you need on politics and world news. The ascent of independent media (the substack/podcast crowd) has started to take a huge bite out of the opinion/analysis market. The damage is coming in the middle. All the local newspapers and evening news shows are approaching irrelevance and it's going to be a disaster.
Having lived in a neighborhood popular with mid/late career journalists and editorial writers for the NYT, I can say that half of what I read there was a parochial take on life in Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn dressed up as something about the US at large.
I'm a staunch support of the NY Times, but their Style section can be truly obnoxious. I appreciate they need to pay the bills and throwing a few bones to the white upper-middle class probably has pretty high ROI.
The whole of "Nice White Parents" was laser focused on the narrow obsessions of the French expat enclave in Cobble Hill[1] and their awkward interactions with the residents of the Gowanus Houses during a short period when the aforementioned French parents were pushing for a French immersion program in the neighborhood school. But the whole thing is presented as though it represents national problems and trends. It was ridiculous.
Axios falls into the media reporting on media reporting on media trope that I absolutely hate. Twitter is full of enough of that already.
The first thing I see when I land there today is "Scoop: How Trump's team egged him on during CNN town hall".
Honestly - who cares. How is it even a story? Water is wet.
I grew up reading a lot more business news because 1) a lot of time money is the tail that wags that dog and 2) it doesn't get caught up in these tropes as often.
Bloomberg differentiates a lot from the Borg collective in that regard.
Honestly the left probably needs a Murdoch style maniac to conglomerate left of center partisan media into one megacorp at this point before they all OEM themselves to death. Fox basically has the entire right of center mind share while the left of center battle for the same viewers by providing stunningly similar content.
I used to read WSJ more often but their Op-Ed page has really gone off the deep end into Trump cheerleading which is not what I expected. My primaries are probably NY Times and NPR really, but I like Axios and am watching Semafor with interest. Otherwise, I have a slate of indies I check in on (Marcy Wheeler and Claudia Sahm are always interesting), but I've genuinely lost some of that when I quit twitter. I like the CNN homepage just because it's so broad. Like I'll never seek out celebrity news, but it's good to see whatever has bubbled up to the top of the national consciousness.
I don't think the left can really support a true maniac on par with Tucker Carlson. They tried Air America with Al Franken years ago and it was not bad, but didn't resonate. I remember a host trying to say the 2004 election was stolen by Republicans and I just turned it off. Don't remember who it was, but she didn't get any traction reading from the right-wing play book.
I don't mean the left needs a demagogue, I mean they need a business conglomerate to consolidate & compete.
Another good alternative to WSJ is FT.
FT & Bloomberg subscriptions cost about 10x what WSJ does though.
For me I am happier paying for one (or both of them) + NYT, than 15 different NYT-alikes.
