Jim Trageser's Newsstand

The Newsstand

News
For finding any news source online, I've found Assignment Editor.com to be the absolute best starting point. There are links to just about everything news-wise here, from papers and TV stations to weather, maps and foreign language translators. (Note: As of late 2000, they've gone to a subscription service. Probably still good, but do you really want to pay for this?)

Editor & Publisher is the trade journal of print journalism, and has links to most newspapers' online sites, as well as breaking news about newspapers – a lot of stuff you won't find in the papers themselves.

CNN is now, hands-down, the best way to make sure I don't miss any breaking national or world news. Being a TV operation, CNN has video clips for most big stories – something the competition doesn't.

The BBC isn't quite as dry, nor as objective, as in years past, but it's still a very solid online news site – and always interesting to get the Brit perspective on things.

Okay, Dan Rather is possibly the worst example of a modern TV network newscaster (speaking to a political convention? C'mon, Danny ...), but the CBS News site is outstanding.

For the latest sports scores and news, there are a couple of good resources online. ESPN.com is obviously the site with the best name recognition – and their product is very good. But the Sports Network is also very good, and sometimes more up to date than ESPN.

My name is Jim Trageser, if you arrived here directly and not from one of my other pages. I'm a writer – theater, book and CD reviews, with some essays, short fiction and bad poetry tossed in.

My latest project is Turbula.net – an online magazine exploring most of my interests, which run from music to technology to theater. We've been lucky enough to get some truly talented folks to contribute – I encourage you to drop by and give it a look.

Amazon Honor System

If you've been on the Web long, you've discovered that finding news online presents no problem. Seemingly every newspaper and TV station on earth now has a Web site. Instead, sorting the news is the problem. That and finding good writing (and if you've been to Salon or Slate, you know what I mean about bad writing on the Web).

To the left, I've listed some of the news sites I've found most useful. If you have any others, e-mail me and I'll add them.

I've begun building a personal archive of my writing – book and music reviews, and commentary. I also have put my old On-Line San Diego columns from ComputorEdge Magazine online. I currently write the successor to that column, Hot On the Web, and for two and a half years I wrote a similar column for SignOn San Diego and the Copley News Service, Lost in Cyberspace.

On the (supposedly) humorous side, I've found some of my old Top 10 lists I submitted to the New York Times News Service when David Letterman was on hiatus between networks (back in '93). They published three of them, turning down only my Top 10 Reasons Marge Schott Should Sell the Reds (which they found a little too edgy, I think – but if I find a copy of it, I'll post). Anyway, you can check out my Top 10 Ways Things Would Be Different if Pat Robertson Were President, Top 10 Reasons Tom Werner Should Sell the Padres (can you believe they let that cheap SOB buy the Red Sox? Good luck, Boston ...)and Top 10 Reasons California Should Secede From the Union.

Also, the news desk at SignOn San Diego (where I worked until June 2000) compiled a list of News Leads From Hell – newspaper or television reports you just know are going downhill after only a few words: "A Philippines ferry crowded with holiday revelers ..." That sort of thing. (Can you tell that working in the news gives one a gallows humor?) We also created a list of News Stories We Don't Ever Want to Read or Hear. It often surprises me that these stories haven't happened yet.

Finally, when we were at work reading the national and international news on the wire, seeing all the depressing stories from around the world, we started other lists as well just to anesthesize ourselves from the horrors we have to edit. For instance, we noticed that some datelines (the city from which the reporter filed the story) seemed to portend disaster more than others. Oklahoma City, for instance – so we started a Datelines From Hell list. On the text feed of news stories from the various syndicates (Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times News Service), each story has what's known as a "slug," which is a one- or two-word title that allows you to do searches, sort stories, etc. Being short, they have to be creative to be descriptive. So we also did a Sluglines From Hell list as well.

Sometimes what you want is not the news. Let's face it – the news is mostly depressing. Plane crashes and school shootings and pompous politicians lying to us; who needs it? One of the funniest sites on the Web is a parody of the news, The Onion. They get to write the stories the rest of us in this news gig only wish we could write.

The hippest – absolute hippest – site on the entire 'Net at one point had to belong to Ken Layne – former ComputorEdge editor, one-time lead singer for The Outriders (here's a RealAudio file of The Outriders' "Death Valley Junction") and creator of the Raccoon Stories (a disturbing little comic strip) and all other kinds of weirdness. In its heyday from about '97 through most of '98, Tabloid was a ... hmm, how to put this ... shall we say different take on the news. Tabloid is dead and buried, but Layne now has KenLayne.com where he posts his news on his latest band, The Corvids. (He also has a stash of vinyl Outriders LPs for sale there if you liked the above clip.)

If you crave good writing and come away from Salon and Slate feeling, well, used, check out Brenda Fine's site. College student up somewhere in Canada, Fine is a gifted writer with an iconoclastic streak a mile wide. She's delightfully disagreeable, will argue just about any point, and her site is a bit of a throwback to when our colleges still taught how to think, rather than what to think. You might not agree with all she writes (lord knows I don't), but if you appreciate clear arguments presented with passion and a little pizzazz, check out her site.

One of my favorite sites of all is the The Nearby C@fe. A.D. Coleman, a well-regarded critic of the photographic arts, runs this online coffee shop and writing salon.

An artist friend from my college days at San Diego State, Joe Shoulak, actually turned out (unlike the rest of our clique) to have some talent, as his home page shows (i.e., it's unlike mine in that it's interesting). Part of his business is designing Web page art – and the icon to the left is a sample of his work.

Bart Cheever is another San Diego State alum who turned out to have more talent than the rest of us – I worked with him at KCR radio in college. Bart's now doing online movie presentations and development at the Digital Film Festival – D.FILM for short.