I always piortize the adfree/ tracking free and non-profit sources.

If you’re not paying money for it, you’re the product.

Even moreso if they aren’t supported by advertising - how are they paying their bills?

What’s considered the “worst” vs “best” news source will always be an opinion for any individual user. You can’t expect everyone else to share your same values.

Some users may value their privacy more than others.

Some users value news sources based on how much information their journalists are able to provide.

Some users hate clickbait titles and so they avoid those.

Some users prefer smaller news sources that most others haven’t heard of.

For some users, the first thing that comes back in a search result is the best source.

Some users take the time to compare the information on the various sources through something like ground news and they try to pick the one that captures an interesting bit of information.

Important to keep in mind that decent journalism does not fall from trees. The “greedy and trackers-filled” sites are often just ordinary newspapers and magazines that had their business model turned upside down by the internet. They only have so many options left when big tech has cornered the online ad market using spyware and when most people choose not to subscribe on grounds of “bias” or whatever - very often the same people who have no problem making regular payments to genuinely greedy corporations like Amazon or Netflix.

But I do agree that we should pay more attention how news sources are funded.

The profit-nonprofit metric is pretty good but not perfect. Firstly because journalism is de-facto always nonprofit. That’s why even good newspapers are often beholden to billionaires. Even thousands of subscribers can’t pay for a product of the quality of the Washington Post (though it’s getting close). There are zero evil capitalists skimming off the profits of journalism, because journalism is just not a profitable business.

Secondly because even audience-funded news sources can be biased, usually in line with their audience’s prejudices (Unherd and The Free Press spring to mind). Any NGO or cooperative can write an ostensibly fact-based article but that doesn’t make it a credible source. This is what journalistic ethics are supposed to cover, similar to academic ethics work if you’re writing, say, history.

I think the basic test should be: Does this news source have multiple lines of accountability?

• wholly owned by a single multinational corp? - avoid
• funded entirely by a non-profit foundation - check the owner’s mission
• a cooperative of accredited journalists (a few exist) - fine but beware individual biases
• has lots of subscribers and also ads - should be OK but check specifics
• state broadcaster - fine when accountable to independent board (BBC, CBC), else beware

I wasn’t even aware there are versions of articles without those things, so maybe you could post a guide on how to find them?

I imagine it’s because that is the source that the person saw the article on and/or they don’t notice the issue because of adblock/pi-hole.

I’ve done that a few times where I link a site that’s broken without adblockers, or it has a paywall that only shows up part of the time.

Gentle reminders help! It might be cool to have a bot that checks a resource like ground news and links to the same article on a few alternate sources

Sorry, should we switch to Fox News because there isn’t a pay wall?

But what I started to see here, is that people like to share the most greedy ad and trackers filled news sources.

Can you provide examples?