Yeshiva World News and Vos Iz Neias you decide:
Where do you get your frum Jewish news (loshon harah) online from?
I used to go to Yeshiva World News (YWN) until I discovered that Vos Iz Neias (VIN) was simply much better. You see YWN censors its news like all good right wing news outlets. Don’t get me wrong, all news is censored and rewritten to suit the needs of the audience- but YWN and VIN have the same audiences, which are the chassidish and yeshivish communities.
News stories that have anything to do with making frum people look bad are withheld from publication on Yeshiva World News, while stories that make Lubavitchers or the modern orthodox community look bad are published with glee. VIN simply publishes everything, incuding scandals and child molestation cases within the frum community – which make for some great commentary – mostly people gasping “oh it couldn’t be true” and why should we beleive the FBI over our instinct that no frum man can succumb to the evilness of child molestation.
Although the Yeshiva World News site is not nearly as attractive as Vos Iz Neias’s site, I will hand it to YWN for allowing people to vent all day long about all the problems of the frum community. Take a visit to the coffee room which should really be called “we don’t want to wait for a whole week to read the readers respond section of the Yated” so that we can complain about how untznius everyone is, how off the derech kids are enjoying false happiness and how the shidduch crisis is getting worse because people demand pictures on the shidduch resumes.
Another overlooked but great way to censor news and make money at the same time is by only allowing registered users to comment. YWN does this, thus allowing them to sell your name to companies seeking to send email blasts out to clients. VIN, however does not censor its commenters, and allows for dissenting commenters and “liberal” or “frei” commenters to state their opnions. There is even one thread in the YWN coffee room entitled “should pro-freikeit commenters be allowed to comment?” that is just plain old scary.
I have decided that YWN caters to non-working stay at home moms of one in Lakewood and Monsey that have nothing better to do then vent in a “kosher” environment- to me its not too kosher- but who am I. If you really want to see the hate and problems within the frum community just visit “out of the mailbag” and you can read what people in the “heimishe circles” really think.
So if you want to read about the newest “crisis” in the frum community or what the wives in Lakewood think of shidduch back round checks head over to yeshiva world news, and if you want to read a more professional account of the days news with more interesting articles head over to vos iz Neias.
By the way if I wasn’t a blogger I would probably just stick to tattered copies of the Economist and Atlantic Monthly for my news as well as Google.