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Al Jazeera English Live for iOS You can safely ignore all U.S. media and just flick on this live Al Jazeera stream, anytime, day or night. It is a remarkably good 24 hour news channel, with the cool professionalism and seriousness of maybe CNN International a decade ago, or BBC World Service in the late 1980s/early 1990s. But the news readers are even better, the production values are elegant and useful (hey, the crawl has actual information, and it’s literate!), and the reporters everywhere are phenomenal in that they’re not just on the ground, but they’re in twenty different neighborhoods. Al Jazeera English is just an incredibly solid, serious news operation. Why don’t we have American multi-billionaires funding such things in America? (Oh, right.) Is there anything like this, in English, from Hong Kong or China or Singapore? When I have to work at night, I’ll listen to Bloomberg or CNBC when it’s all from Asia, and it’s okay (so much better than the U.S. versions) but still limited to business coverage. Those animated news parodies from NMA.tv were fun and all, but there must be something else? I know this was supposed to be the week of The Daily, but flipping through that $30-million-dollar Yahoo slide show today just reminded me again why I cannot stomach American (Australian) media. It’s just banal, glossy shit with dingbat punny headlines. The one nice thing about The Daily is the way big color photos are used. And honestly, a talented editor with a taste for real news and an understanding of the iPad readership could probably do much better with a wire feed (Reuters, AFP, etc.) and a photo news wire. What I sure don’t need is a hundred pages per day of three-graf rewrites with dumb block headlines and dozens of paparazzi shots of pop stars or sports celebrities and the typical idiotic Larry Kudlow-NY Post faux-patriotic horseshit op-eds. God, all of you, shut up forever.

Al Jazeera English Live for iOS

You can safely ignore all U.S. media and just flick on this live Al Jazeera stream, anytime, day or night. It is a remarkably good 24 hour news channel, with the cool professionalism and seriousness of maybe CNN International a decade ago, or BBC World Service in the late 1980s/early 1990s. But the news readers are even better, the production values are elegant and useful (hey, the crawl has actual information, and it’s literate!), and the reporters everywhere are phenomenal in that they’re not just on the ground, but they’re in twenty different neighborhoods.

Al Jazeera English is just an incredibly solid, serious news operation. Why don’t we have American multi-billionaires funding such things in America? (Oh, right.)

Is there anything like this, in English, from Hong Kong or China or Singapore? When I have to work at night, I’ll listen to Bloomberg or CNBC when it’s all from Asia, and it’s okay (so much better than the U.S. versions) but still limited to business coverage. Those animated news parodies from NMA.tv were fun and all, but there must be something else?

I know this was supposed to be the week of The Daily, but flipping through that $30-million-dollar Yahoo slide show today just reminded me again why I cannot stomach American (Australian) media. It’s just banal, glossy shit with dingbat punny headlines.

The one nice thing about The Daily is the way big color photos are used. And honestly, a talented editor with a taste for real news and an understanding of the iPad readership could probably do much better with a wire feed (Reuters, AFP, etc.) and a photo news wire.

What I sure don’t need is a hundred pages per day of three-graf rewrites with dumb block headlines and dozens of paparazzi shots of pop stars or sports celebrities and the typical idiotic Larry Kudlow-NY Post faux-patriotic horseshit op-eds. God, all of you, shut up forever.

1 year ago

  1. paulmdavis reblogged this from kenlayne and added:
    Best take so far...how Al Jazeera makes US media look like
  2. haruspectator reblogged this from kenlayne
  3. kenlayne posted this

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