--Get Your News from Multiple Sources--

http://news.google.com
The above website is an auto-magic amalgamator of online news sites. Based on the frequency or "excitement" about a particular story determines how high up in the listing the story will display. It is very interesting to see over the course of a day how the stories generally start in India or Australia, and as the sun moves through the time zones, next England and then finally the US and Canada pick up and expand on stories. You can also customize the new feeds to include highlights from specific countries (for example, you can add the top eight stories from New Zealand). I use this in combination with the next website as my morning news pages.

http://www.myway.com
MyWay is a free advertisement-free fast-loading and pretty much all-encompassing news portal. Where news.google.com is overwhelmingly complete, MyWay can be customized to show you the specific daily pieces of information that are of interest to you (such as your horoscope, local moon rising times, weather for whatever cities you specify, sports scores for specified teams, movies playing near you, etc.). There is also a handy feature that allows you to add your own specified newspapers, so that you can have a one-stop-shop to peruse the Manila Times, the Newfoundland Downhomer, and the Crain's Chicago Business (yes, I read all of these and about fifteen others).

If you want to get extra tricky and also have a safer Internet experience, you can stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and switch to either Mozilla Firefox or Opera. Both of those programs are more resistant to spyware and other nasties of the online experience, AND (the reason I am mentioning them here) they have tabbed-browsing. What this allows you to do, is to set up a bookmark "folder" and ask the program to open all of the websites in that folder at the same time, each one in its own tab (think recipe cards).

Why in the world do you need all of these news websites? Simple: perspective. Every news source is going to have its own bias. By reading more than one or two sources about a story, you can get a better sense of what really is going on. (Or, if you are completely cynical, you can get a sense of the many different biases about that particular story...)

The evening news in the US is very focused on sports, local murders, local current events, quick summaries of national events, and the weather (in that order of importance and time allocated). Notice anything missing? How about international news? For that, you will have to start looking for reputable international sources. Use the Internet to help balance out what the US media feeds to you. Think about how many recent stories have been big news everywhere outside of the US but the US media has not covered them. Oh that's right - you probably don't know about them if you are in the US...