Best of the Rest is a daily feature that collects some of the more noteworthy items from newspapers, magazines and journals we (or you) come across every day. It is not necessarily an endorsement of those items. The intention here is to present as varied a range of news, opinion and cultural perspectives as possible, and to do for you what your busy schedules may prevent you from doing for yourself–filter through the mass of material out there and come up with a decent daily digest of what you need or want to know. The following Q&A details this feature.
- Where do you get your links? I’ve bookmarked about 150 standard sites from Florida and beyond that I scan individually in two batches every morning, both to prepare the Best of the Rest list and to get a sense of what the state and the world were up to overnight. Those links can be jumping off points to other sources I often never knew existed, so the exercise also works to broaden the feature’s horizons: the list of standard links is constantly changing.
- Do you favor liberal sites? Not quite. I favor non-ideological, non-loony sites, which applies both to the right and the left, although I won’t and should not ignore either side’s major web sites no matter how loony they may get. For example I’ll always look at both the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, The Nation and National Review. I have limits. I won’t scan Sarah Palin’s Facebook page unless you really, really want me to. Speaking of which…
- Will you take suggestions for additional sites to scan? Absolutely. But it’s no guarantee material from those sites will be linked.
- Why are there no links to the Daytona Beach News-Journal? I’d love to link to the News-Journal. Just because it fired me doesn’t mean I don’t still respect the hell out of its reporters and editors, who have nothing to do with the pinheads now running the show. However, the News-Journal, almost alone among Florida newspapers, kills its web links after two weeks–it puts them behind a firewall where they can only be accessed for pay. In the god-love-you logic of the organization, it’s a way for the News-Journal to make a few thousand dollars a month–and lose a few tens of thousands of readers a month. I can’t have my News-Journal links going dead day after day: it’d be too time consuming to eliminate them, and dead links are a killer on search engines. I’m hoping the paper will come to its senses, at which time it’ll be links galore. Meanwhile, I’ll link only when absolutely essential. The paucity or fluffy nature of the News-Journal’s local coverage is such that I don’t foresee that need too often.