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Consider the Source

Wondering why you should spend money on yet another Internet guidebook when most people these days know pretty much how to search the Web for what they want? Even as you try to decide, news and information Web sites on the Internet are proliferating like kudzu. Consider these numbers: a quick and dirty Google search for best news Web sites will produce, depending on how you spell your search terms, between twentythree and fifty-five million hits. Even savvy searchers who know to enter the phrase “best news web sites” will find over 5,000 hits of varying usefulness and political stripe. Meanwhile, All You Can Read (http://www. allyoucanread.com/, accessed April 21, 2008), a free Web site that claims to be the largest database of newspapers and magazines on the Internet, boasts links to 22,800 newspapers and magazines from 200 countries. Google’s specialty news site, Google News (http:// news.google.com/news, accessed April 21, 2008), searches over 4,500 continuously updated news sources. Who has the expertise and the time to cut through this dizzying variety of resources and select just the right tool for the pressing information need of the moment? Is it even reasonable to try assessing on the fly each site’s strengths and weaknesses as well as its ideological and political bias? Fortunately for all of us, professional journalists James Broderick and Darren Miller have applied their expertise to creating this handy guidebook that evaluates 100 prominent news and information sites. Once you sample their useful and entertaining work, you may wonder, as I did, how you did without it for so long! Author James F. Broderick worked as a reporter and newspaper editor until he joined the faculty of New Jersey City University, where he is now an associate professor of journalism. Co-author Darren W. Miller is an award-winning author and working reporter who specializes in investigative journalism. Broderick and Miller joined forces to present this eclectic mix, 100 Web sites selected from those that have “achieved a certain prominence or reputation” (p. xiii) and that also offers mostly free content. Their goal is to give us “a glimpse behind the screens of the most important news and information Web sites—from those connected to global news services to those connected only to the modems of independent journalists and idiosyncratic culture watchers” (p. xi). Each site selected receives a brief chapter that includes five sections: “Overview” (describes the site’s origins and development with a thumbnail assessment of its quality), “What You’ll Find There” (points out the site’s main features), “Why You Should Visit” (or occasionally, why you shouldn’t linger), “Keep This in Mind” (unique features, significance and/or ideological tendency), and a pithy “Off the Record” inside tip or little-known anecdote (e.g., “MoveOn.org came into being as a result of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky sex scandal” (p. 193)). The 100 chapters appear in alphabetical order by Web site titles. Each site gets a chapter of about four pages, just long enough to contain a pithy analysis of a site’s virtues and vices but short enough to permit a quick visual scan. At the end of each chapter, the featured Web site is also assigned an overall rating for “balance, thoroughness, compelling writing, and a sensible use of available technology” (p. xii), awarded via whole and half miniature newspaper icons, ranging from five newspapers for superior sites down to one newspaper (or even a half) for “disappointing, definitely look elsewhere.” Where else would you find People Magazine and The Poynter Institute nestled side by side? Rush Limbaugh and Salon? National Geographic and National Enquirer? Featured Web sites run the gamut from the predicable (e.g., People) to the iconoclastic (e.g., Mother Jones). Although familiar high profile newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks such as New York Times, National Geographic and CNN are represented here, so are more controversial online publications you might not have previously considered as information resources (e.g., Drudge Report, Michael Moore), advocacy organizations (e.g., American Civil Liberties Union, National Rifle Association), government Web sites (e.g., Library of Congress, Central Intelligence Agency), and consumer information sites (e.g., WebMD, Rotten Tomatoes). Not limited to sites that originate in the United States, Consider the Source also covers news and information sites from around the world; watch for chapters on Al Jazeera, Asia Times Online, British Broadcasting Corporation and Jerusalem Post, among many others. Should you wish to zero in immediately on the top-rated sites, go straight to the book’s appendix for a convenient list of all 100 Web sites grouped by number of newspaper icons they were awarded. All sites reviewed are in the English language, although a few offer alternate languages as appropriate (e.g., allAfrica offers French, Al Jazeera may be read in Arabic). doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.06.008 Malinowski / Serials Review 34 (2008) 235–238