general

This page looks at general interest publications that provide quality coverage of Web-related developments: economy, technology, culture, society. 

     online dailies

Wired news is a free daily news service with concise coverage web developments, including software, regulatory mechanisms, business models and takeovers. The editors frequently forget that the web exists outside the USA but the publication offers sprightly day by day news of what's happening.

The online New York Times (NYT) is essential reading, both for its coverage of developments in the northern hemisphere and for its perspective. Apart from the daily reporting of legal, technological and business news, the periodic features on the digital economy are of particular value. In contrast to much local writing they exhibit a healthy scepticism about commercial and techno hype.

Among other traditional media we turn to online and cellulose versions of the Financial Times (FT) and The Economist. 

Analysis in the Times of London, the LA Times (LAT), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and local newspapers - online and offline - such as the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald continues to be disappointing. Recycling media releases has a long and glorious history but we continue to hope for writers who will look behind the news.

     reviews and other magazines

From our perspective traditional market leaders such as Time and Newsweek, the Bulletin and the New Statesman have yet to come to grips with the net, despite the embarrassments of the mid-1990s when they gleefully promoted some of the sillier writing about online pornography and a new economic nirvana.

Rivals such as the Atlantic Monthly (AM) and the Nation have offered a more coherent and informed picture of particular issues such as copyright and the evolution of the 'new media'. We've pointed to selected literary and general interest journals in our print profile.

Among cyber journals Salon continues be uneven as it struggles to make money online. After a brave start it has failed to occupy the mind space enjoyed in the first half of this century by journals of influence such as the New Republic, Spectator and New Yorker. There's more substance in First Monday, an innovative online journal that mingles some truly silly articles with those of significance, and American Prospect (AP).

Alas, there's no Australian equivalent, following the collapse of The Eye, Zeitgeist Gazette and other independent journals. Our recent page count of Quadrant and similar magazines suggests that their authors (and their publishers) have yet to discover the web. 

Slate, the Microsoft magazine, is increasingly playing catch-up. It is reputedly still losing money, although US$20m a year is undetectable amid the revenue from Microsoft's US$16b investments.

As Wired morphs into ever more of a 'Californian Ideology' lifestyle magazine for the Silicon Alley cats (and wannabees) it's become less of an exercise in typographical excess but retains the breathless gee-whiz memorably described in Michael Wolff's Burn Rate and skewered by Paulina Borsook and others in the mordant Rewired. 

We recommend instead MIT's Technology Review or even the Scientific American (SciAm); not quite as exciting but more intelligent. The US State Department's online Global Issues: Internet Communities journal mixes bland uplift from Foggy Bottom with more substantial analysis.  

The Internet Society and INFO, two commercial publications, offers authoritative analysis of regulatory, economic and technological issues. Selections from ISOC's OnTheInternet (OTI) are online.

The Internet Scout Project, offering global coverage of 'humanities' sites, is more eclectic but of considerable value.

   newsfeeds and abstracting services.

We draw on a number of services that abstract information from online newspapers, magazines and other sources and offer hyperlinks to the source material. 

The ACM News Service from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and ACM special-interest bulletins are outstanding, although you'll need to become an ACM member.

Digital Beat is a communications policy alert service from the US Benton Foundation. Its focus is on US developments. Media News is produced by the Poynter Institute, an independent US journalism teaching and research body. It specialises in coverage of the print and electronic media, with an emphasis on US.

The UNESCO Observatory on the Information Society (OIS)  is an email service drawing on Wired News and other services. We rely more heavily on Newsbytes, a Washington Post email service that's strong on US technology and internet regulation developments, and the OECD Observer.

Moreover describes itself as the world's largest collection of web feeds. It's particularly strong on US online business journals and newspapers. Like all feeds there's little critical evaluation of information and no attempt to provide context, but it's invaluable if you want daily pointers to online writing about specific areas such as domain administration. The Ecommerce Times offers useful coverage of dot com developments, although marred by a readiness to take much of their source information at face value.

Arts & Letters Daily (ALD) is a model for digests of online politics and humanities publications (and a demonstration that a New Zealand product can gain global recognition prior to commercialisation in the US).

Edupage is an email service from the US-based Educause, an international body concerned with information technologies in the education sector


    next page  (law)