We live in interesting times for skepticism. There is a large amount of skeptic-relevant news happening constantly. But it can be difficult to keep up. The news stories of relevance to skepticism are often spread across many different newspapers or magazines. Who has time to read them all?
For years skeptic blogs like this one have been a major filter for news relevant to skeptics. But there is a limit to how many items any single blog can post without overwhelming its readers. And so many blogs specialize their topics. For instance Science-Based Medicine covers alternative medicine, Bad UFOs covers our alleged flying visitors, and so on.There remains the chicken-and-egg problem: how do the bloggers themselves discover stories to cover? For several years a main answer to that has been Google Alerts. This is an adjunct to Google’s search engine which can email or otherwise alert you when new web pages are found that match your chosen criteria. This can be an excellent way to track follow-ups on particular stories or topics, or even to find out when people mention your name online.
It does require some work to get it configured. For example, to gather news stories of potential use on my site What’s The Harm, I have over 70 separate searches configured to cover all the topics. And in order to find news stories that are truly relevant, I must use complex Google search terms such as “psychic (died OR sued OR lawsuit) -obituary -obituaries” to carefully add and eliminate certain keywords.
In the last few years the phenomenon of social media has emerged as a more dynamic (but less systematic) way to get similar results. A large amount of what skeptics post on social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are links to relevant news stories (or other web sites) they wish to discuss. By connecting with skeptics who share your interests on these services, you can then rely on each other to relay news as it happens. The key is finding the right people and accounts to subscribe.
Recently several skeptics on Twitter have independently come up with the idea of aggregating a feed of strictly skeptic news in one place. If you are interested in being up-to-date with the latest skeptic-relevant news on Twitter, you might consider following these accounts:
@DoubtfulNews is run by SWIFT contributor Sharon Hill and collects several news stories a day. The stories are also available in a blog format as well as on Twitter.
@Skeptic_News is across the pond in the UK, and also aggregates the news stories in blog form at The 21st Floor website.
@skepticalscoop is another aggregator set up by Christof Jans, and like the other two it also supplies the stories in blog form if you prefer.
There are others which focus down more tightly on particular subject areas, such as @PsychicNewsAu which posts both pro- and skeptic stories about psychics from Australia.
These are just the news aggegators I’ve found recently, and no endorsement is implied. Of course, you can also follow many other skeptics on Twitter such as myself, the Skeptics’ Guide podcast crew, and of course JREF itself in order to collect even more news stories that the aggregators might miss.
Please suggest other key Twitter follows for skeptic news in the comments.
Tim Farley is a JREF Research Fellow in electronic media. He is the creator of the website What's the Harm and also blogs at Skeptical Software Tools. He researched the information in JREF's Today in Skeptic History iPhone app and has given presentations at TAM 6, 7 and 9. You can follow him on Twitter here.