The Best Online-Only Publications According to Socialists

We’ve got 108 responses to our survey of online-only left-wing publications, and the results are intriguing!

This is the 2nd of a series of surveys by LeftTimes to help improve our news feed; the 3rd will cover left podcasts and the 1st covered left magazines. But stay tuned for an update! The left-magazine survey has another 200+ respondents since our blog post and the results have changed quite a bit!

Thank you to all our respondents. We hope you are having fun!

First, a few qualifiers:

  • Please note this survey is not random. It was distributed to our target audience, and respondents were self selecting. 78% identified as socialist and 76% identified as Marxist (with about 80% overlap between the two).
  • This survey included 66 online-only publications. It did not include online publications with print magazines as those were covered in our previous left-magazine survey.
  • 19 of the publications in this survey didn’t receive more than 15 ratings so we aren’t including them in the results. We are leaving all the surveys open so we can publish updates later.
  • Even with that 15-rating cutoff, interpreting the results is tricky due to some publications getting more ratings than others. In general, the less known a publication is, the more overly-positive the average rating appears to be.

Who’s “winning”? – Labor Notes & The Intercept

There were 6 publications that clearly were a cut above the rest, ranging from 4.2 to 3.8 stars on average. In order, they were:

  1. Labor Notes
  2. The Intercept
  3. People’s Policy Project
  4. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
  5. ProPublica
  6. It’s Going Down

This is a similar ballpark that our top 10 from the magazine survey came in. Rounding out the top 10 in the 3.6-3.7 star rating range, we have:

Other Noteworthy Performers

Coming in around 3.35 to 3.55 stars:

Who’s “losing”? – Daily Kos

The 8 lowest-rated publications, ending with the lowest, were:

  1. Canary
  2. Slate
  3. Salon
  4. Buzzfeed
  5. Huffpost
  6. Quillette
  7. Everyday Feminism
  8. Daily Kos

These ranged from 1.6 stars to 2.2 stars, which is particularly low given that the lowest in the magazine survey range from 2.1 to 2.5 stars (they’ve dropped half a star since we published that post… more about this in the next update).

Daily Kos received a scathing 1.62 stars from 79 respondents. This can be interpreted in two ways: both in terms of the low quality of work produced by DailyKos, as well as, socialists not taking kindly to the positions Daily Kos took on the 2016 primaries.

Anarchist Anomalies

In the first blog post, we discussed the Marxism divide among socialists and the variance in ratings that appeared to be producing. Here, we noticed some interesting patterns with people who self-identified as anarchists.

Overall, anarchists rated a publications much lower than everybody else. There were only two publications where anarchists rated them higher than others, and those were the two anarchist publications: It’s Going Down and CrimethInc. The noteworthy differences:

Publication

Anarchist Rating

Non-Anarchist Rating
It’s Going Down

4.08

3.49
CrimethInc

3.48

2.94
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

3.75

4.11
People’s Policy Project

3.73

4.19
Atlas Obscura

3.33

3.94
Aeon

3.33

3.81
Real News Network

3.24

3.59
Economic Policy Institute

3.08

3.76
Outline

2.92

3.43
Truthdig

2.62

3.12
Institute for New Economic Thinking

2.73

3.46

Ideologies and their Identity Politics

Anarchists in this survey really made a statement in this survey with 89% identifying as anti-racist.

This surprised us so much that we went back to our first survey to see what happened there (especially with all the new responses we received). It turns out that anarchists (and progressives!) have been a bit more likely to identify as anti-racist:

Ideological affiliation

 % also picked anti-racism

Anarchism

76%

Progressivism

76%

Communism

70%

Marxism

67%

Liberalism

65%

Socialism

65%

And while ideological affiliations that have to do with racial, gender, and sexual identities show more solidarity for each other, notice the disparity in reciprocity.

Ideological affiliation

% also picked anti-racism

 % also picked feminism

% also picked pro-LGBTQ+
Anti-racism

59%

65%
Feminism

84%

71%
Pro-LGBTQ+

83%

69%

For context, of all survey respondents, 61% identified as anti-racist, 46% as feminist, 47% as pro-LGBTQ+. Be careful reading into this though, because the ideological affiliations were listed alphabetically and anti-racism appeared 3rd.

Next up: Podcasts

If you enjoyed this blog post, then please take our next survey on left podcasts, or, add your voice to the left magazine and online-only publication surveys. We’ll be publishing updates to all of these surveys.  

We have already updated the LeftTimes algorithms as well, adding several new publications as a result of this survey. But don’t worry: we won’t let these dictate everything, but we want to know what our readers are thinking!

And if you haven’t yet checked us out, bookmark LeftTimes, or download our iOS or Android app.

Special thanks to William Dawley for helping with this survey and analysis.