The vast majority of our posts here are very well researched and thought out, and virtually every current issue is covered.

So, where do you get your information? What are your daily reads? Where do you go to research topics?

I thought this might be a fun and educational topic for everyone.

Personally I generally read these sites daily:
- Metafilter
- San Francisco Chronicle
- CNN
- Wired

And of course Google for research.

I use Yahoo for searches and here are some of the publications I read regularly

Houston Chronicle
NYTimes
BBC News
Jerusalem Post
WRMEA
Fox News
CNN ( I watch Headline News too)
NYSE
HRW
MSNBC
Time
USAToday online and print
and FHM for fun.
I just reset my history so I know I'm forgetting something....

edited to add
ABCnews
Yahoo news
Telephony mag
and CSPAN when I work the night shift.


I know I'm a news junkie.

I make my living finding stuff on the web. I am locked into it for 11 hours every day. I have a certificate in Google search abilities although I find Alta Vista much more user friendly, and less limiting. (google limits you to 10 search terms.)

Additionally, I am National Certified Internet Researcher. I post a lot of crap without the links and facts, but that is due to being lazy.

One thing to remember, Google and Alta Vista search an index of documents on the web and their indexes are different. There are 15 billion pages out there and Google indexes only about 3-4 billion of these. Alta Vista's index is different than Google's, so if you can't find something using Google, run a few queries using Alta Vista, and notice the different results. There will be some overlap of course.

Meta search engines (Dog Pile) search multiple Indexed sites (Google, AV, etc.) but those search engines use different syntax, so your results will not be as precise.

Hey, I am currently looking for the phone number of a scientist with extensive experience within a large pharmaceutical firm developing animal models for the treatment of Asthma that lives on the east coast and graduated with a PhD out of Stanford, and is fluent in Mandrin.

Finding a quote from Mr. Bush regarding WMD's form last December is a piece of cake.

I read The Economist weekly, Jane's Intelligence Review monthly, I check Reuters, and try to watch the BBC, Deutsch Welle, Al-Jazeera, and the MacNeil News Hour daily - sometimes work interferes. Those are sources I keep up with more or less religiously - others come and go, or are reviewed for topic-specific information.

I use Google for web searches - like everyone else, it seems. But the web sites I regularly access to read reports and analysis when they update are The Center for Strategic and International Studies, The International Crisis Group, The International Relations and Security Network, and, of course, Rand. I like to keep up with what the Congressional Research Service is putting out, as well as the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College and Strategic Insights of the Naval Postgraduate School. There are plenty of others, but they get much more topic-specific, so I'll stop right now.

The sites I seem to go to often, besides Google, are:

Globalsecurity.org
C-SPAN.org
Reuters
Opensecrets.org
Strangely enough, DemocraticUnderground.com. Aside from hours of entertainment (though I feel dirty afterwards), those lefties really keep up on the news. It's like Drudge, only more.
And plenty of Army specific sites, for both work and interest.

Mainly The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, search engines, and The Best Page in The Universe. ;-)

I ran into the Center for Cooperative Research today and I'm very impressed with their timelines.