One of the things I love most about this job is the reading and listening (to radio).

Compulsive consumption of news, current affairs and analysis is part of my day job again. I don’t have to sneak a few articles in between meetings, or hide the New Yorker inside piles of briefing papers to read on the plane.

In my first newspaper job, as a junior reporter at The Canberra Times in the early 1990s, you were expected to have read all the broadsheets and tabloids before you arrived in the office. If you hadn’t, there was hell to pay. And, supplemented with the ABC and SBS , it was a pretty solid information diet. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

As we all know, with impoverished mainstream media, and a world in which anyone can be a writer and a publisher, working out how to get that solid information diet can be a huge and bewildering task.

That’s where Pearls and Irritations comes in.

As a small, independent media and analysis outlet we cannot cover all issues, so we focus on areas that are calling out for better news coverage and analysis. The war in Palestine, our often warped perceptions of China, Australia’s security alliances in an era of geopolitical tumult, and the existential challenge of climate change are a few we look at regularly.

When commissioning and selecting articles for publication, we apply a range of criteria. First, we seek out authoritative authors, and we are blessed to have a growing group willing to share their hard-won knowledge with readers.

Next we ask a number of questions:

• Did I learn something new?
• Did the author help me understand something better?
• Were my views challenged, intelligently ?
• Did I enjoy reading the piece?

It is very rare that any one piece satisfies all those criteria, but we do our best to hit as many as we can.

We are not alone. In many places around the globe, independent media sources are cropping up to fill yawning gaps in mainstream media. We have developed good partnerships with independent news outlets in our region, the US, the Middle East and beyond, to allow us to bring you carefully curated global news and views from reliable, informed reporters and experts.

They, like us, are bucking the trend of clickbait, infotainment and misinformation.

They, like us, live on the kindness of donors. We don’t ask for donations often, but we are asking now so we can continue our work.

This week Jack Waterford addresses the problem major parties have with the whole community, not just women or particular groups, and the Australia in our regions series heats up with two pieces: Duncan Graham, reporting from Indonesia, says the world America made for us is passing away, and Julian Cribb says Australia’s climate record sets us against our own region.

Until next week.