Philosophy and Disclaimer

One of the intentions of this site is to merge sources from academia, Think Tanks, and journalists. In my estimation this is where OSINT is lacking. Typically I think of as OSINT as more for the cybersecurity nerd worried about exploitations of zero days and cyber ops. Much of that is done via Twitter analytics by looking at various topics and motioring their web traffic. That’s all well and good if you like that stuff but I believe this provides a skewed understanding of a topic.

I feel like I should be more transparent in how I source the daily rundown (which is now more of a weekly rundown) and where I gather my news. Unfortunately, I do not have a consistent workflow or news conglomorator which I am satisifed with. Currently I have specific RSS feeds I monitor, Twitter accounts and Think Tanks I pay attention to.

All sources I do share via Twitter or from my written works have by read by myself and vetted to some degree. Often times I’ve read a few articles by different publications and have settled on one entity to source.

For a specific topic in general like focusing on JCPOA I do not have designated sources for information aside from periodically checking IAEA reports and looking at global headlines.

I am sharing an opml file for some of my RSS feeds I look at. Again this is far from perfect because other sources I look at don’t have RSS feeds built in and sometimes my sources change.

Methodology

Global

So for starters where do I find my global news? I have two resrouces for this and agree that it is less than ideal. Again time also becomes a factor so this needs factored in as well.

1. I use Bing.com and its scrolling headlines (only available on a US IP address) on its main page to see the daily headlines. I prefer this approach because you can see multiple sources on the same topic right away. Its quick and easy to scroll through. You do have to ignore the entertainment news but for global news the main topics are normally there. I prefer this to a news aggregator because whatever filtered list I signup for I feel like I am missing something. A particular newspaper could be used for this approach and sometimes I check soemthing like the NYTimes or FT, WSJ, Gaurdian’s front page.

2. So the retired US gov officials from the CIA, DOS, DoD and others have been running a newsish cite called The Cipher Brief. They have an open source daily newsletter which is passable in my opinion for gathering daily global news. I do have a few problems with it.

   1. Its links are tracked for their analytics on what you have read. In order to recieve it you have to provide an email address and it comes to your inbox every day throughout the week.

   2. I find its sourcing too limited to provdide a comprehensive picture of global affiars, almost all sources are US based publications. I fix this issue by taking the headline and looking elsewhere for different reporting on the same topic. They do have DW, Al Jazeera, and France 24 but thats about it.

   3. Also there’s an inherrent bias in this resource which is what the intention of The Cipher Brief as an entity. I’ve been paying attention to this site since 2017 and still am unaware what the target audience is for their site. It seems like its aimed at US global corporations but still I’m not certain. It is a good way for retired US officials to voice their opinions and provides a viewable platform for that.

   4. The premium subscription service they have I have never tried so I cannot provide any opinion on that other than I don’t like paywalls.

3. *Sometimes I use Reddit for global news and I do currate specific topics to my interests. One that I sometimes find useful is https://www.reddit.com/r/NewsWithoutNewsMedia/

Again this approach isn’t perfect but how I’ve been doing things for awhile.

Region Specific

I’ve picked the Middle East as the region I specifically look at and this is where I use Feedly to conglomerate some of these sources. Again these are only English sources at the moment. If I had more time devoted to this I would incorporate Arabic sources and better country specific publications.

1. Instead I look at Al-Monitor, Middle East Eye, Jadaliyya, and sometimes the UAE site The National for general region news.
2. I use Twitter to look at various active Middle East academics because they typically share news stories and provide quick analysis on current events or highlight biased reporting. I think this is untapped potential for selectively currating a rounded news feed. I have created a Twitter List of various academcis and this is where I look for critisim of Western policies or problems not generally talked about in the media. Finding contrarian viewpoints is important and hard to do when currating news feeds and this is one of the checks I’ve tried to implement.
3. Middle East Think Tanks. My bread and butter is LSE, Chatham House, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Sana’a Center. There are others I monitor and talks I sometimes watch but I focus on those because I’m familar with them and understand that they are better than others (sometimes) and aware of their donors.
4. Also various podasts but this has fallen off as of late.

Topic Specific

For this area I mainly just google, use google scholar, and really dive into researching a topic. Sometimes I go down some rabbit hole and find something interesting; other times I just waste time.

Wrap Up

If anything changes to this workflow or I think I missed something I will provide an update. In an ideal world I would have a website that would curate all of these designated feeds but until then this is how I get news. I might create a Google Sheet so that all of my sources can be viewed and summarized with their pros and cons.