We’re trying to find out what the best left-of-center magazines are so we can do a better job with article recommendations on LeftTimes.

If you are just looking for good ideas for sources to follow, you can see all the results at the end. Of course, if you use LeftTimes, and a source is rated highly, you can expect us to try and find a way to support it if we don’t already.

Once the survey is done, we’ll analyze the data and share the results. I am particularly excited to see how people’s preferences for publications vary depending on whether they identify as socialist, anarchist, liberal, progressive, feminist etc.

It should be super interesting!

There has been a pretty interesting Media Bias Chart floating around over the past 6 months that, while useful, has some pretty serious issues with it – so we decided to do our own.

What we felt needed correction is the assumptions that:
– it is possible to be unbiased when reporting the news
– that ‘lack of bias’ equals ‘quality’
– that being centrist means you aren’t biased
– and the implicit horseshoe theory that both the left and right are essentially the same and completely unreasonable

Here is the original:

You will notice in ours that we believe that all political groups are ideologically biased, that ideology has a loose correlation to quality – but a very different kind, and that the left and the right are very different in the quality of their media landscape.

There are of course over-simplifications made here, and we regret not being able to fit more publications in – but at some point broad ideas and aesthetics are more important than detailed accuracy. So please forgive us.

The bubble on the top left, ‘nuanced left analysis’, is where LeftTimes aggregates from. We want to make it easier for people to discover and follow good left-wing sources. In particular, we want to offer a good mobile news reading experience which is currently completely absent on the far-left.

Check us out at http://www.lefttimes.org
Download our app at:
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-left-times/id1339947991?ls=1&mt=8
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.doneleft.doneleft

I’m so excited to announce the launch of a website and app I’ve been working on for the past year: The Left Times! It’s a news feed of nuanced, rigorous and revolutionary thought, spanning a variety of perspectives across the left from feminists, to socialists, to anti-racists, to environmentalists and more…

Check out the website or download the iOS or Android app!

It took me years of hunting around the internet, reading authors and publications from all over the place, to build a high quality news feed on Facebook – and then Facebook decided to change its algorithms, de-ranking articles, and they turned my news feed into a meme feed.

I want to make it easier for people to discover all of these great people, without having to spend years looking around – nevermind finding a way to compile all these writings into a synthesized feed. Even when my Facebook feed was halfway decent, I still found that the algorithms would get hyper-reactive to whatever posts I happened to be liking or commenting on… immediately funneling me into some bubble.

This news feed is the beginnings of the the reflection of how I would like to consume information: a balance across issue areas (politics, race, gender, economy, environment and global news), with content from a wide-variety of publications.

Today we are mostly pulling in from far-left publications, but this will probably change over time. The hope is that someday we will have the perfect mix where one can scan the headlines of the right/center, while getting a good set of the top news from the main media sources, and then getting (what we have now) a great feed of high-quality reporting/analysis.

I hope you will check it out and join me on my journey!