This feels dumb to ask, but how do you get your news?
I’m embarrassed to admit that after the whole Reddit shutdown, I’m at a loss on how to get news. The past 10+ years my internet routine has been browse Something Awful for discussions, and use Reddit as a glorified RSS. I would open up Reddit, browse World News, Politics, Technology, Games, Apple, and Electric Vehicles for any interesting articles for the day. Then go to SA for more granular discussions, which I’m now using Tildes to supplement since I love the community here.
I have tried downloading Inoreader and adding some of their default feeds but it feels super cluttered, not like the quick concise headlines I’m used to casually browsing. I’ll admit I’m guilty of just glancing at headlines and not actually reading news, but it was nice to just have an inkling of what’s going on in the world
So the question I ask is how (mostly on the internet) do you get your news? RSS? Dedicated news app? Read a site?
In general no news for me. If there’s something important I’ll probably hear it from friends, family or coworkers. I think Aaron Swartz nailed it on the head with his blog post “I Hate the News”.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
That being said, no judgement for wanting to stay informed.
An interesting post and certainly a view point I can empathise with.
However one glaring omission that isn’t mentioned is that to be able to take this attitude of it doesn’t effect me I don’t care is to be in a position of privilege, there are plenty of people who can’t afford to be ignorant of the news when it’s covering the active erosion of their rights or attacks on their existence. They need to be aware in order to stay safe but also push back against it.
I was nearly convinced by comments on this post that news is a waste of time, but something just didn’t sit right and it took me a few days to put my finger on it: There’s a lack of curiosity to all these arguments. Don’t people just like to know what’s happening in the world? Yes, you’ve got to filter out the clickbait but that’s a problem with all media.
Taking it a bit further, can’t you apply a similar argument to dismiss any media? X is totally unnecessary to my life, plus it has the following downsides…
E: One more pattern I’ve seen is that when people say X sucks, it’s almost always the case that X is meant for some other demographic.
I stopped reading the news for completely the opposite reasons.
It's not that I don't care, it's that I care enough that consuming frequently has a really negative impact on my mental health. So much I worry about a lot and I feel helpless to affect it in a real way.
That's really the crux of it, IMO. News is so unbalanced towards the negative that it's hard to "stay informed" without feeling frustrated, discouraged or helpless. I think part of it IS that things are broken and there're way more negative things happening than should be, but it's also partly that people inherently care more about broken things so news outlets focus on it.
The world absolutely has issues. Most people are pretty apathetic, even with things they care about. That allows greed to become way more dominant than it should be. There's not that much "pure evil" in the world, ie people doing bad things just for the sake of hurting others. It's all about convincing yourself that hurting others for your benefit is ok.
But, the news still skews that. They show any "pure evil" they can, with big headlines, and "pure good" goes unnoticed or at least a small title you have to scroll down to see, which plays havoc with people's inability to properly understand scope and probability, and inability for an individual to do anything productive about it.
Seconding not reading the news!
"Stop Reading The News" is a book by Rolf Dobelli and he makes pretty convincing arguments for not following news(at least some types of it).
For a quick summary of the book https://youtu.be/zKa5HatRQKA can be watched.
I get what he's saying, and I appreciate the distinctions he made about the different kinds of news. I've known plenty who've turned off the news. Even the older people I talk to refer to news as just noise. Nonetheless, for many others like myself, it really pays to be informed about what's going on in the world. There are many who tune in to podcast-type news nowadays as well. I do particularly like the idea of only tuning in to general news one or twice a week, on a schedule, and on topics you follow; and then leave only breaking news to a special feed through an RSS feed or some API. Few people have the technical know-how for this unfortunately.
How does it pay? I don't really follow news a lot myself, but definitely feel the pressure that I should know more.
Line of work unfortunately...
Wonderful, all corrupt politicians simultaneously had an orgasm, yay 🎉
You've got to be kidding
Alright, panic Mode Off 😅
The thing is that reading about corrupt politicians as the news happen doesn’t change anything. You can just research them and their policies before voting. You don’t need to follow the news all year round, and let it affect your mood and time when you can’t do anything about it.
Yep, that was exactly the problem for me on the occasions where I voluntarily stopped reading news in the past. Friends, family or coworkers would discuss some major recent event I heard absolutely nothing about, and had to either fake knowledge or appear completely clueless and unconcerned with the state of the world. Not an image of me that I like to project to others.
I agree with some of his points, but I feel his take on being an informed voter hasn't aged well:
If you're just reading the prepared statements about the issues, you might not learn as much about the candidate's character. Maybe it's just me, but candidates seem much more willing to boldly lie in recent years, and observing their behavior over time may help compensate for that.
(If you are truly apolitical, though, I don't fault you for staying out of politics!)
Try https://ground.news/
Or
https://www.newsminimalist.com/
Or
https://www.boringreport.org/app
Thank you for the linked article, I've felt something similar and always thought that, as you say, if something is important enough and if it will affect me I would know about it regardless of me following the news. I still do occasionally read some news, but it's more like following a topic or finding more information about something that I already know about.
First time I read this article, been doing that all my life.
I do get news as a virtue of being on Tildes and Reddit, but I care more about a sense of community or curiosity than seeking news for its own sake.
Similar, but I make two exceptions:
Example: pandemic while (I deem it) ongoing. I was the person informing family and friends because I wanted to know for myself what I should (not) be doing anyway.
Example: tech news. I work in tech.
Example: Ukraine war. Truth is the first casualty in war, or so I've heard and it seems, so since I'm in Europe, it seems useful to know the real motivation and evaluate whether it might spread, whether we might jump in and aid them, that sort of thing.
I'll open whatever news source makes sense here: COVID was a lot of Wikipedia reading and occasionally editing, as well as statistics and variants trackers; for Ukraine it's more about general news sites (they're not as politically biased/polarised here as in, eh, some places) and doing some critical thinking whether the messaging makes sense and is consistent, or doing web searches on a specific topic.
On average this amounts to opening a news site once a month or so, but it's variable by nature. (Tech news I read daily but that stuff doesn't make me sad or angry anyway and this is useful for my day job.)
Definitely not like my parents who receive a daily newspaper and watch a news show daily. They and others are often surprised about "how in the world have you not even heard of this?!" but it's very often entirely irrelevant to me, and also to everyone in my region aside from perhaps a military intelligence department...
It's not that I don't want to be informed, it's that I want to hear things that actually matter and aren't filling thirty minutes of my day with frustrating information.
I largely agree, but news is obviously important sometimes. We certainly don't all need to be keenly aware of a bunch of people dying on a trip to the Titanic, but we should probably all be aware when Norfolk Southern dumps a few tons of toxic carcinogenic waste on a small town in Ohio. It may not affect me personally, but it's good that the people it does affect have quick access to the information.
... any idea who's keeping that website up and running? No complaint from me, I'm just surprised.
I skim apnews.com and reuters.com and call it a day.
I'll second Reuters, it's a lot more on point and journalistic rather than sensationalist.
For complete bullshit I also scroll The Sun and The Daily Fail (Mail) just for giggles and comparison.
The issue is, I don't get any local news but that appears in my Google News feed where I have it set to just local, science and tech.
When I used to live in El Paso, I would use the local ABC website as well as an independent website called El Paso Matters. I haven’t found out if Raleigh has anything similar.
Hey, a fellow Texas-to-Triangle transplant! I've been pretty happy with N&O and IndyWeek for local goings-on.
Similar for me, am a German and I skim Tagesschau once a day (or rather let Google Home read out the 100-seconds-hypercondensed daily update they put out) and that's it. I mean I don't need to know everything that is happening, and this clues me in on truly big things like bigger political developments or catastrophes or so.
And that's enough. Anything else would just distract me or cause me anxiety about things I cannot really influence anyways. While I have 0 evidence either way, it feels to me that the reason younger people nowadays often feel so everyday-depressed is that due to the prevalence of global news they can soak in the whole world of Bad Shit™️, instead of just whatever happens locally. Since we as humans tend to focus on bad things first (not a bad survival trait if I'm honest) this means we never get to hearing about the positive stuff, since we got an endless ocean of depressing and worrying topics to hear about.
I'd rather not hear about everything wrong with the world. Only about stuff I can do something about ideally.
RSS: Hacker News via HNRSS filtered to posts with 200+ score. Feed URL looks like: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=200 - I've had to adjust the threshold higher and higher over time as the quantity of posts has increased.
RSS: Slashdot - Really! They still write good summaries.
Newspaper email newsletters for subscribers.
Trying to get in the habit of using news summarizers like https://www.newsminimalist.com and https://www.boringreport.org but find a lot of the news is not so relevant to me.
Just checked https://www.newsminimalist.com/ looks pretty good summaries
That news minimalist site seems great. I’m glad they’ve already got a funding plan in place too, hopefully slows the enshittification. And like one of the quotes said, it’s great seeing AI being used to reduce the noise instead of adding to it.
It's so weird to live in a world where AI writes fluffed up news articles about an event that could be told in a single paragraph so they can have an excuse to cram the page with ads only for someone else to turn around and use AI to shrink everything back down again.
I saw a comic about that. Basically somebody types up a terse email, AI turns it into a polite fluffy email. Then the recipient uses AI to extract the key data from fluffy emails... It's full cycle.
That's infuriating how office culture might keep people from just saying what they need to say. I hate corporate etiquette so much.
This tip about hacker news is pretty clever. I go on there once in a while and sort by top for the day or week but this seems like something I would look at more.
News Minimalist and Boring Report sound very much up my alley, this will be a great start. Thank you!
For general world news, I always liked Associated Press. They’re non-profit and it’s where the news outlets get their news.
The iOS app will ping a notification if anything big is happening.
I tried paying for the NYT at one point, but I hated paying for access and still being fed ads.
Edit: spelling
Just installed AP News and gave it a read. Thank you for mentioning this! Seems to be the one I like best of the others I've downloaded. Even has dark more!
Cheers.
Hi Skreba good to see you on here.
Agreed NYT wasn’t worth the subscription. The only magazines / news I pay for is Apple News+ but they offer a lot of different news papers so it seemed worth the cost.
Ah shit, you found me. I tried Apple News too, but they still have ads even with the paid service. If I’m paying real monies, I don’t want to see ads.
Regardless of owning a subscription, an ad blocker like uBlock Origin fixes this.
AP is controlled by large wealthy Republican donors and often (always?) biases their news to favor the wealthy and favor the point of view of the wealthy.
This isn't something I've heard about AP news before (usually in media bias checks AP leans slightly left), so if you could provide a source to these claims, I'd love to read it.
I find a great source for what’s really happening around the world is Wikipedia’s Current Events Portal.
It's a really good way of getting just the news. I don't need 10 articles about how the latest SCOTUS decision is going to hurt millions of people, I know. I just need the news. It also prevents doomscrolling, you get the news once and that's it. And you avoid getting bombarded by articles, like if you get the Guardian rss feed. Here's the RSS feed, if anyone wants to check it out.
It's not a solution for local news, still finding my way around that.
I was just about to mention this. I typically got my headlines from reddit and went to the Current Events Portal for relatively unbiased details. Guess I'll be getting my headlines here now.
This seems extremely useful, I tend to rely on Wikipedia for quick summaries of knowledge anyways, so quick news aggregation from them would be perfect
A Tildes member recommended Feedly. I've liked it so far and it can provide the quick headlines you're looking for.
I used Feedly for awhile, but their interface has been getting so weird and buggy lately (and, frankly, a bit spammy/scammy), I quit a few months ago, in favor of a true, simple, FOSS RSS client. Feedly is basically just slightly more user-friendly RSS, so it's not hard to switch. In fact, you can even export your Feedly feed right over into an RSS reader, no fuss, no muss. Hardest part is picking an RSS client you like.
Did you pay for Feedly if you don't mind me asking?
I have a paid membership and while it's possible I never noticed it, nothing about my user experience is scam or spam-y.
What I like about Feedly and RSS in general is the ability to set rules and alerts. For example, I have an RSS alert that's says to give me an article when the words "1998 Honda Civic" and "how to" are in the same article. This will give a random blog post i nevet would have found otherwise by some random 1998 civic owner in Alabama or Phoenix that may be helpful to me when my civic runs into the same problem.
No, free.
May I ask what the FOSS RSS client are you using right now? I have paused my RSS activity for several years and am now just trying to re enter its environment. A nudge on a good direction would certainly be appreciated ü
Not the guy you replied to, but I use Feeder. It's the one recommended by Privacy Guides.
Thank you so much. I'll try it out.
I used Feeder for a while and really liked it, but currently I'm using Read You. Mainly because I prefer Read You's interface. It's more clear to me. But both apps are great and both have their pro's and cons, so I would recommend trying out both and see which one you like best :)
I am using Feeder at the moment -- but I just picked it because it was the most recently updated reader on F-Droid at the time. So far, I'm not overly impressed by it, and tentatively window-shopping for a replacement.
But, you know, it works, so it's as good a place to start as any.
I use NewsBlur. The website is pretty good and they have an iOS client that also works really well. They do have a limit for how many feeds you can subscribe to before you need to pay but it’s pretty high and I’ve never been able to actively read that many anyway. I’ve thought about paying just to support the guy honestly it’s that good
If you haven't yet, Give Feedly Classic a try. They made a change YEARS ago, and I hate the new one, but Classic is still a pretty good RSS Reader for me
... oh ... you're talking about the apps. I never even looked at any Feedly app, just ran it straight in my phone browser, kept a tab open all the time.
I use RSS heavily but for general news I don’t like it. It presents every single article with the same importance, in a huge list.
I’m giving this a try right now and I can’t seem to get it set up in a way I like. I only add feeds that I think I’ll be interested in, and the result is still an astoundingly low signal to noise ratio. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I’ve also been using Feedly lately. I’m the same as OP, I’ve used reddit as a news aggregator for a decade now and I’m struggling to fill the void. Feedly at least let’s me scroll through headlines they way I’m used to doing with reddit, the only problem is that if you hit a paywall there’s no comments section where you can find the text of the article.
THANK YOU. This is what I want in information-based websites. Don't track me, analyze me, whatnot, just give me the info and don't be a nuisance. I miss coming across weird HTML-focused websites in Ye Old Web hosted on Angelfire or Geocities. Thank you so much for putting this together and sharing it with us.
I also mostly used reddit for years. Recently, I've been listening to the up first podcast feed by NPR. It's a nice ritual I do when making myself lunch or doing the dishes. It's only 15 minutes and I get all the highlights. I still feel like I'm missing out on something without reddit but I'm not going to use their app so we'll see what happens.
2nd this, First Up is great! I used to listen to NYT's The Daily, and sometimes still do. But First Up is my go to now. Instead of covering a single story like The Daily, they have a decent round up of the top 3 most important stories that day, and it's less stressful/dramatic than the tone of The Daily tends to be.
Yeah I agree about the daily. If you do find yourself wanting something in depth like that though I really enjoy Vox's today explained. They do a format where they interview usually two people, usually subject matter experts or folks with relevant first hand experience. It very much has the vibe of an in depth NPR episode but the hosts do a good job keeping it light and grounded.
Plus I really like that it takes them time and there is a bit of delay. So they'll cover a topic a few days later in more detail than you get on like a daily headline show. It really helps me stay engaged with current events without getting sucked into the 24 hour news cycle. It also means the episodes age pretty well. So I can ignore it all week and then listen for 2 hours on Saturday while cleaning or whatever.
I recommend Axios personally. They have a great app too. The news is presented in sort of a bullet point format which makes it easy to digest.
For US politics I recommend Tangle. He keeps you in on the main stories with reactions from both sides. The daily newsletter can be skimmed in about 5 minutes.
Try to think about this positively; reading Reddit was making you less informed about the world, not more. That’s the result of highly astroturfed, rage bait and engagement oriented algorithms.
Seconded on Tangle. It’s a good way to not stay in your political bubble.
The newsletter is free, but Fridays are paywalled. Even without the extra edition, I would be more than happy to keep my paid subscription.
I’ve got an experimental ‘Smart’ RSS reader called YOShInOn which ingests around 2000 articles a day from about 80 feeds and picks 300 to show me, this includes The Guardian, the L.A. Times, scientific abstracts from arXiv, trade publications, blogs, etc. It trains a BERT-like classifier on my preferences, it gets 77% area under curve, I hear TikTok gets around 83% with probably 2000x the engineering inputs. It uses the same model to classify documents into 20 clusters and shows me the best scoring documents, otherwise I’d be getting nothing but articles about recommendation systems!
The main UI looks like TikTok I can vote up/vote down or “favorite” things, I just made a simple search for my favorites, it has a “share to mastodon” button.
It has a duplicate detector (don’t need to see 20 articles about the same topic in my feed, even though I might want them presented as a cluster) but it is not very aggressive and could use some tuning up.
I am thinking about an open source version, the main hang up is getting it modularzed properly and having the right data structures. I could make a much more precise classifier if i was classifying on some more definite topic (my preferences are fickle) and it is silly to put the arXiv papers in the same pot as sports, so having multiple classifications and routing documents through them would be a feature of the “pro” edition.
One reason you haven’t seen this kind of content-based recommendation is it needs a lot of data, I build models on the last 40 days of data (doesn’t really do better with more) but it takes 1000 judgements for the model to get good and my fear is that most people would expect it to lock on with 5 or 10 judgements.
Is this available for others to try out or is it a personal project for now?
Personal project, competing with two other side projects.
Lots of people are asking about it, if I could recruit some people to help out I could make a bigger commitment. No matter what there is a tension between making improvements that I want vs making improvements that other users would need to succeed with it. I'm gradually working on architectural changes that will make the data structures able to support various workflows and also local modifications. I don't want to subject people to my half-baked model that predicts the popularity of an article on Hacker News for instance and it ought to be easy to add and remove share buttons for whatever social media matters to you.
I'll do a live demo for anyone who contacts me at paul.houle@ontology2.com, a slide deck and a web page about where it is and where it could go is also on the agenda.
I've never tried to use RSS readers, but they sound useful. Would you mind summarizing how your app differs from something like Google News or Artifact?
It shows you one item at a time. Unlike western web sites (say YouTube) it is always presenting you with a clear up/down choice which gives the algorithm meaningful positive and negative examples. (YouTube has no idea if you liked or didn’t like any of the 20 distractors it showed you.)
The rule is “see something once, why see it again?”. (With the exception that you can save and search favorites.) There are no lists to wade through, no cognitive load of ignoring things you’ve already seen. It doesn’t show 30 cards for 30 different feeds, it doesn’t look like an email or USENET reader. There is no need to mark things as read, no need to ever “catch up”, even if you walk away from it for a week.
The assumption is that you are ingesting a lot more content than you could possibly read or even skim so it is only showing you “the best” content in a number of clusters…. It discovers meaningful clusters like “deep learning”, “ukraine war”, “sports”, “medicine”, etc.
My news intake was very similar to yours and the past month I have switched to RSS reader app.
I'm on NewsBlur RSS app for Android. I paid for premium to have multiple feeds by topic.
I am finding that it's hard to have the most newsworthy stuff become readily apparent with the current feeds I follow (it's quite a few major news outlets). I am generally aware of the news, but I have to do more reading to place how important stories are contextually.
I do read more articles and I find I am sending more links out to my friend groups because I am reading more niche stuff... Overall it's less rage inducing than reading the news headlines and comments on Reddit.
I’ve personally been enjoying ground.news for the past year or two. They compile all sources of a given news story into a single ‘article’ that allows you to dive into all of the individual sources (Reuters, AP, CNN, Fox, etc), categorizing them based on their bias. I usually just dive into Reuters/AP coverage but depending on the topic it can be fascinating to quickly check and see how more biased sites cover the same story. They also have mobile apps!
I second Ground News. I follow them on instagram as well, and they often do posts comparing extremely biased headlines from both sides!
Oh that sounds entertaining - I’ll have to follow them on Instagram as well!
hah, i just tried it and there's a real irony in their "combating bias" stance, but then having a quiz where you enter what news outlets you read most often etc, to test your bias.
except the three i read most often are not on the list, so their test methods are biased in a way that don't account for me
Not a dumb question at all, especially these days.
I use an RSS reader, subscribed to a dozen-ish news sources, mostly international big name (mostly-)reliable orgs, like The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, BBC, The Register, plus a few more local sources, and specialized sources of info that interests me.
I avoid visual or audio news sources in favor of text based. I think it's harder to appeal to emotional reactions with writing than audio-visual means.
A RSS reader is a great way to bring together individual sources, and select ones that are strongly fact-checked and relatively unbiased or have overt and moderate political bias.
Individual sources will cover events in a way that general sources don't. For example, STAT News on medicine, Task & Purpose and War on the Rocks on military affairs, SCOTUSblog on the US Supreme Court, and Electronic Frontier Foundation on technology privacy and surveillance/counter-surveillance.
I subscribe to a local newspaper, the NY Times, and Washington Post. I only occasionally read them, I mostly just have notifications and emails enabled so any major news headlines come to me that way. I’ll read the article and usually click on another one or two. Ever once in awhile I open them up just to browse around.
The main reason I subscribe to them is because I want to support journalism. I don’t want it to all be funded by only major corporations that buy ads/influence. So I try to do my part with those three.
And I still do also use Reddit for some news purposes. r/CredibleDefense will probably never be replaced, same with my city’s subreddit, and I like r/law for updates on all the Supreme Court shenanigans and Trump trial brouhaha; there’s still some contributors there that provide good analysis. Also, I like checking r/conservative to see what news is swirling around in their circles. Oh, and also the subreddit for an autoimmune disease that I have (r/psoriasis), but that’s more for support than news although occasionally there’s news.
I build my own RSS app because I wanted something specific to my tastes.
As for what sources, I typically browse my tech feed which contains:
and sometimes I’ll browse NYT or WSJ.
Ars and The Verge are my main sources of tech info as well. For the rest, there is The Economist.
I prefer its weekly issues to the usual endless stream of minor news elsewhere.
What is the name of your app? It looks nicely designed.
It’s called « DoraDora » (as in, let’s Explora the web 😂)
It’s not public though, maybe someday, but like most of my apps I build it for a customer base of one - me ! haha
Edit: On the main topic - ArsTechnica is one of those few entities left that still makes me believe in quality journalism 😄 Feels like so much other news is just sourced from Twitter with no extra journalism done.
My news sources of choice are:
www.smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald - I subscribe)
www.abc.net.au/news (Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Australia's public broadcaster)
I also use Tildes and Reddit as news aggregators, for news from specific niche interests that those mainstream news sites don't cover.
I use AllSides, I like having the biases laid out for me and simply seeing the headlines different news orgs use is handy to tell the narrative being pushed at a glance.
Artifact News app has been a game changer for me, but unfortunately does not have a desktop interface. It lets you pick the topics that you like (ex. if you don't like sports, you won't see sports stories), silence publishers (such as those who routinely post sensationalist, clickbait/ragebait, listicles, etc.), block keywords, etc. It also tries to prioritize news based on your interests. You can also report clickbait headlines, and GPT will instantly rewrite it for you. The interface is super minimalist and easy to use.
I am also a fan of News Minimalist which uses GPT to rank the most important stories and write informative headlines for them.
For domestic news in the United States, I like CNN Lite and NPR Text-Only. Another interesting service is Ground News, which tries to show how both "sides" present the news.
For more specialized news, like Tech, I like Hacker News, TechMeme and ArsTechnica.
For "in the weeds" or "wonky" politics and world news, I like Axios and Semafor; I also like FiveThirtyEight, but I'm not sure how that's going to hold up after they've cleaned house. For election polling and results, I like Decision Desk HQ.
That's a hard "nope" on Artifact News - no apps need access to everything that one wants. Contacts, photos, audio?
You don't have to give them those permissions. I don't.
You might also find Talking Points Memo informative.
Not my only source, but I recently started watching local news broadcasts. I'm probably the only person I know who still watches television, including my parents. The local news programs seem less biased than their national counterparts, and the low-budget local commercials during the ad breaks are a nice touch.
I found some old bunny ears at Goodwill, there's something cool about picking up a signal from hot local towers in my area. Seriously though, the World Wide Web is great and all, but I think it's important to have different options for mass communication and I'd hate to see OTA television go away.
I don't do a whole lot with it and find I tend to be better off. I generally browse the NYT to see if anything major is happening or the sky is falling and I'll pay attention to headlines I see here (or previously Reddit) but that's about it. That honestly provides me more than enough. I know how I'll vote and that's about the only thing I think it's terribly important to know. For topics I have more of an interest in I'll generally search out more specialized sources. For example, there are some podcasts I listen to and analysts I follow to get my fix on internal Russian politics, internal Chinese politics, and the war in Ukraine. Occasionally I'll go in for The Atlantic or The New Yorker or I might browse the BBC for a change of pace but I find my life tends to be happier if I don't try to take on all the misery of the world, and that's honestly what I find the news is most useful for. Taking on all that misery and staying up to date on everything going wrong everywhere. It's just too exhausting and degrades my ability to actively engage in areas that I can make a difference in.
What are those podcast for Russian and Chinese politics? I'd be interested in learning more about that.
My two favorites are In Moscow’s Shadows for Russia and Pekingology out of CSIS for China. Shoutout to The Naked Pravda by Meduza and the Sinica podcast as well. There are a few more but those are my favorites and the first two are consistently the best imo.
RSS filled with mostly cheerful things and reading the papers every once in a while. If you want a simple RSS app, Aggregator works great for Android, although it hasn't been updated in a while.
I try to avoid the breaking news sources as a source of "news", but admittedly check them out pretty regularly to keep awareness of what mainstream media is pumping into the national dialogue.
Aside from that, I subscribe to a few daily/weekly newsletters like the following:
...and quite a few newsletters from local organizations like the county government, state department of natural resources, my neighborhood's citizens association, the local "friends of the library" organization, and quite a few others.
Because they're in email, it's pretty low effort to ignore or delete them if nothing catches my eye. But because I've hand-curated all the subscriptions, I know I'm at least not getting entirely irrelevant "eye catching" news.
EDIT: I forgot an important one: the EFF newsletters are great for keeping up with news about "civil liberties in the digital world".
For newsletters, I use Stoop Inbox on Android to keep my proper daily e-mail inboxes separated from the potentially anxiety-provoking news cycle material. I can browse through the newsletters (like you, too many) at my leisure, and simply "mark all as read" when I get to my limits of time and compassion.
I don't know what country you live in, but as an American I've taken to trimming down my news consumption, and mostly just checking NPR. A few things I like about it:
Well, I used to get it from Reddit and Twitter, but now that they're dying I don't know anymore.
Until last week, I'd have said Twitter and Reddit (often via Apollo).
I think Twitter is entering the death spiral, where the network effect works in a negative direction - when there's lower readership/engagement, people are less likely to post interesting things, which leads to lower readership/engagement .. until one day it's all porn/disinformation bots spamming each other 24x7.
I don't like the "new" Reddit site design, and exclusively use old.reddit.com; but I used Apollo on my tablet/phone until Apollo shut down. I think Reddit is in a better posture with respect to management (not that I love their decisions, but they're not as mercurial or impulsive as Musk appears to be) and is less likely to disappear overnight. But I like it a lot less now.
I subscribe to the website versions of the NY Times and my local paper. The Times is flawed and frustrating, but it's the closest thing we have to a national paper, and it's helpful to know what other people are hearing/thinking about. I think the local paper is pretty bad from a quality point of view but it (and a local TV station) are really the only places I learn about what's happening locally.
Honestly, I feel a little lost right now. I'm going to look at resources other people have identified here. I am generally in agreement with the Aaron Schwartz post linked in another comment. I think that the level of impact I can have on national or state-level issues is somewhere between microscopic and zero. I'm not going to spend hours every day digesting information so that once every four years I can vote for the lesser of two evils. I think it's good to have some awareness of things that are happening elsewhere (e.g., there's a war on the Russian/Ukrainian border; Russia almost experienced a coup; France is having turmoil) but it's not important or helpful that I come up with an opinion about those things. My opinion means nothing, and I don't trust most of the information I get (or don't get) to reliably reach a conclusion about most issues. I've had the oft-discussed experience where a subject I understand well is covered in the media, and it's almost always poorly described or explained. And I must imagine the coverage is similarly poor for topics I don't know anything about, I'm just unable to notice.
All of this is sad to me. There have been times in my life when I subscribed to four daily newspapers, and read them (not every article on every page, of course.) I used to think it was very important that I have a moral or intellectual point of view about everything and be able to explain it and argue about it and so forth - but I just don't bother any more, because it means nothing. I don't like what's happening in Ukraine (it's clear that a lot of people are dying or having their homes/businesses destroyed, regardless of arguments about who's in the right) but I can't do anything about it, and my life doesn't improve if I get myself emotionally activated about something I can't directly perceive, experience, or influence.
I used Reddit for the same things, I miss the basically almost live-feed of ongoing world (but mainly USA) news.
I’ve subscribed to MorningBrew and the NYT morning newsletters, but while they’re pretty decent IMO they’re also just summaries of the previous few days - not something I can check for current news.
I like to use quick loading text only news sites like lite.cnn.com and the various npr and local equivalents. I also use Boring Report.
Woah, that’s really neat. Do you know of more sources that offer a light version?
https://tildes.net/~tech/17br/what_are_your_favourite_lightweight_websites :)
I highly recommend the 1440 newsletter. I've found it increasingly difficult to get news without partisan bias. 1440 is a newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning that really sums yesterday's news up well, without imparting spin.
Lemmy and Mastodon. Not fully satisfied yet, but at least I'm not doomscrolling anymore.
I subscribe to physical newspapers and try to stay away from the constant "breaking news" cycle the online media is running. Important stuff tends to surface anyway so I am not worried about missing anything important. A newspaper might be yesterdays news but that is not a bad thing in my opinion. It adds time for more perspective and removes the worst of the knee jerk speculation and conclusion we often get with the constant need for updates online.
Oh man, I realized I might be a bit of a freak after reading through all the normal/healthy responses in this thread.
I usually start by skimming the LA Times for the major local stories of the day, then follow up by doing the same thing with the NY Times for national news. On weekdays I get up and officially start my day by listening to Democracy Now! for all of the important stories that are often buried in the major outlets.
Later on when I start wrapping up at work and heading home, I'll tune in to a couple of hours of Hasan Piker for updates/analysis on the major stories of the day and all things relevant to the discourse, which includes the best and worst of twitter and a hefty dose of the crazy ass right-wing commentary of the day. I know "a few hours" sounds like a lot, but it's great background noise while I'm doing chores, exercising, or playing video games. Lastly, on the weekend I'll poke around a few magazine sites (mostly NY Mag and The Atlantic) for something that catches my eye and/or ask my partner for her recommendations for the week's issue of the New Yorker. And of course, there is always Tildes.
Like many of Americans, 2016 broke my brain and now my consumption of news is now
just as muchmore about content than it is about being informed.This topic has made me realize that I don't really have any reliable way of getting my news other than what's fed to me via other forums and reddit. There's no news website(s) that I visit to stay informed on current events. Instead I visit a specific gaming forum (which I don't want to mention for privacy reasons) which happens to have a "News" subforum and I treat it as a sort of news aggregate website. I don't think it's a particularly reliable or smart way of getting news, especially since those people will obviously only post news that they personally find interesting and/or fits their own ideological bias. Of course, if I actually did go out of my way to find news on my own, then exposing myself to others' views would be a great thing. But when I rely on these forum-goers to metaphorically spoon feed me (and keeping in mind that the news website will of course 'spoon feed' me what they want...) then it leaves me in a position where I feel uncomfortable and I don't really know how to climb out of this hole, especially given that I've been doing it this way for years.
Has anyone else tried Artifact? Seems to be more like what I was looking for. Essentially personalized news feeds that you can train likes and dislikes. Also has internal commenting framework on the stories. Pretty neat so far, but am worried about their plans for monetization.
Yea, I have tried this before and gave it another go. It's from the original devs (pre-sale to Meta) of Instagram. They are envisioning a TikTok for text-based content - naturally, an appeal to the average Tildes user.
As I mentioned above, the Artifact News app (at least on Android) requires a very intrusive list of permissions. Anything besides a phone or e-mail app that demands Contacts access is unacceptable - I can make choices about my own privacy, but I won't sell out my friends and associates.
Does Android not let you approve permissions independently? I just denied Contacts access on iOS. App still works great.
It doesn’t request photos/microphone on iOS either.
I use both Google News and Artifact for aggregating news stories. I'm thinking about resubbing to the NYT so I can enable those stories to be read through both apps. It is cool that you can integrate your existing subscriptions through these programs and view their content in a more intuitive way. I enjoy a curated news experience and understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. I understand people have privacy concerns and that these apps may not be for them. Live and let live, I suppose.
I really like the idea of Artifact. I actually wanted to build something similar myself (I have some of it, but the commenting/community part is the real hook IMO). But I’m a little worried by who’s behind it considering, well, look at Instagram in 2012 vs today 😅
Agreed. I was also considering building almost exactly this, and was kind of disappointed someone thought of it first and beat me to it.
These are the folks that left Instagram before it became what it is today, so perhaps there’s hope?
In my idealized version the app is the product, not the users. That’s definitely the biggest risk in Artifact.
A quick Swiss through The Guardian whilst the coffee brews in the morning to be honest!
I try very hard to avoid the 24-hour news cycle. It really isn't good for my mental health. For this reason, I try to avoid getting new from the Internet or cable news. Instead I subscribe to publications (either print or digital) that have a set amount of information per edition and that is what I consume.
The local weekly paper (digital) to know what's going on around the surrounding towns. Also their events section is great for finding things to do with my son.
The Boston Globe (digital edition) for knowing what's going on in Massachusetts (not a great source for anything outside Boston, but it's the best I've found).
The NYT (daily edition website) for the rest of the US and the world.
Edit: Formatting
I browse news.google.com during my lunch break.
Do you use the "For you" section or just read the headlines?
I close my eyes and absorb the information via osmosis
Sounds like a peaceful lunch break indeed.
I check in on www.fark.com, a link aggregator with comment threads, a couple times a day. There's usually a limited set of things tagged as NEWS on there, the rest of it is fark-user- submitted headlines making fun of "news," so it occasionally makes me chuckle and still provides a connection to actual news remotely close to when it happens.
Aside: my user name is spawned from it denying me so many of my usual default choices when I created an account there 328 years ago.
Honestly? New York Times subscription. It's like $4 a month and comes with crossword and cooking. Is it perfect? No. I do try to supplement with other sites, but overall I find NYT to be at least fairly centrist.
Like many people in this thread I use RSS apps to keep track of my news. I highly recommend NetNewsWire (iOS), Feeder (Android) and Akregator (Linux). There are some more news aggregators suggested on PrivacyGuides.org
I'd say for the most part I follow
Link aggregators like Reddit can be useful, the comments often have interesting opinions. But I often find that these subreddits can become echo chambers (more so than others) and the existence of downvotes in those threads doesn't function well, people down-vote what they disagree with rather than misinformation etc. If you still what to use subreddits to curate your news for you you can subscribe to RSS feeds which is detailed on Reddit's wiki or if you want to use a third party than Teddit also supports this.
I find that apps like Google News also have their own issues, and regardless I think they're going to be impacted by Bill C-18. I think there is much more value in user curated OR better yet curating yourself via RSS.
I hope this helped!
I got a lot of my news and events from Reddit, too, and Twitter. It’s been a rough few months!
I’ve been trying to diversify a bit and now I:
The suggestion I saw in these comments about the Wikipedia current events portal was neat. I’ve bookmarked that for checking in
My suggestion that I am adding to this thread is Popbitch. It’s only really relevant for British people I’d think but it’s a newsletter to your inbox with events around politicians (and other stuff): https://popbitch.com/
I get the majority of my news from these sources:
Philip DeFranco on YouTube. He is good for a general roundup of top stories very quickly. Usually ~4 shows a week. Can vary. I watch at 2x speed with captions on. This also tends to hit some pop culture / streamer / internet news stuff too.
In the same style as Philip DeFranco I also watch several TLDR channels on Nebula, but they exist on YouTube as well. They are: TLDR Business, TLDR News EU, TLDR News Global, and TLDR Daily. All links are for Nebula, but they have the same channels on YouTube. These shows tend to be EU/UK centric but with good coverage of global events. Also watch these at 2x with captions.
In the morning when I am getting ready for work I listen to NPR News Now on my phone.
Aside from those three it's mostly Tildes, Lemmy, & Mastodon. Used to include Reddit & Twitter - but I don't really interact with those platforms anymore.
It used to be RSS, and as that started dying, it was Twitter. Twitter was perfect, since I could follow all the news sources I wanted plus a handful of journals and magazines that I felt were relevant to me and nothing else.
Since they killed 3rd party apps, it's mostly been a mix of here and looking at Twitter from time to time on my computer. I still haven't found an alternative to Twitter that has all sources I want while letting me cut out anything else.
PBS News Hour on youtube!
I have a strange policy about news - I don't look for them.
If it's big, it will reach me by itself. If it's not big, I wouldn't probably care.
I have a subscription to one of my country's most respected newspaper (Le Soir, in Belgium). I receive a daily email with the frontpage titles, it's usually enough to know what's going on.
Second 1440 News. They do a great summary of news each morning.
For news sources, I’m always impressed by Reuters neutral language.
I recently got ground news. Its not bad and it gives you the bias of the various news sources. There are other features in the paid version but I feel like that's for serious users who might be researching topics.
Also internet today on YouTube is a great news source and is pretty funny which I appreciate since the news is generally negative these days.
I would say still the most up to date source of news information is Twitter.
On mobile I use Inshorts They also have a web page. Its gives news summaries mostly I just read headlines through the notification and click the interesting ones.
Some news Channel in Telegram which I follow.
I used to be a heavy daily Twitterrific user but without that app Twitter feels broken for me.
German here,
I usually check Die Zeit on desktop and Tagesschau on mobile. These are rather highly respected (except by the far ends of politics on both sides) news sources - they avoid extreme opinions and try to get their facts done (and will quickly adjust errors). Tagesschau is part of the ARD, so a state-funded thing, think about a German BBC. So as I have to pay taxes for it anyway I might as well use it, and in turn it won't annoy you with ads. Die Zeit is a center-left (Decades-long editor was former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a social democrat) leaning news source with many in-depth reports. By now it's almost completely behind a paywall, but it's just so much good stuff behind the paywall that it's worth it to me. They even got an article about Spez right.
Other than that I just skim google news from time to time to get an overwiew.
I am looking to improve my German, and I like the weekly format, so I will check out Die Zeit, thanks! Do you happen to know if the Auido-Abo has RSS feeds?
Sorry, no idea as I never listen to any audio regarding news, I even standard-mute all websites.
I pay for a Washington Post subscription and I really like using that as my primary source of news, but I also live in the DC area it's got the dual purpose of covering all the big national + global news, and also being my local paper. It used to be super cheap since I already had amazon prime, but it went up in price recently.
Youtube, here, family.
If it's important, I'll hear about it and then seek out definitive sources.
I don't really want to go to a news site first since most of them are biased, profit motivated, and just pushing an agenda.
I visit a few free online newspapers most mornings (SFGate, CNN, BBC). I pay for one subscription which is currently the Washington Post but I'm considering switching to the Boston Globe. A couple of times a week I check Politico and The Hill online for political news.
I stuffed my feedly with magazines and blogs.
The Boston Globe is an underrated news source. I subscribed a few months go and it's my most frequent read.
Hourly and Daily Updates: NPR and BBC news bulletins are updated on an hourly basis. Podcasts updated at least once daily include WSJ Minute Briefing, Marketplace Morning Report, NYT The Daily, WP Post Reports and the Daily Tech News Show. To stream the podcasts mentioned as they're updated, I rely on an iOS app called Hourly News. There are likely better and/or non-paid versions of this app, but it works for me.
Longform Reading: I find aggregators like Google News and Artifact apps incredibly helpful for finding interesting articles from across the political spectrum.
Updates on Ukraine War: I listen to the 'Ukraine: The Latest' podcast and keep track of the r/worldnews daily sticky thread on Reddit.
Newsletters: I'm subbed to several AI-centric newsletters, such as Superhuman AI, Artisana AI and No Longer a Nincompoop. For broader news, I read Tangle and The Flip Side. It'd be neat if there was a Newsletter aggregator of some sort.
If I were to try to round myself out a bit more i'd get into local news, but I have a mental block and can't seem to find any of it interesting in the slightest.
I use Feedbin right now as my news aggregator. Though I mostly curate mine with focus on Tech, music releases, and book reviews.
I subscribe to the local paper, Reason Magazine, The Economist, and The Atlantic. This gives me a decent spectrum of perspectives.
Ars Technica and The Guardian for "direct sources", but Mastodon has been great for helping me stay updated by people whose reporting I trust personally. Since it's more focused on the people you follow then Twitter is, it's like an RSS feed for news if you mostly follow people posting news.
But probably the biggest way I get news is honestly TikTok at this point. The algorithm is great at finding different accounts to show me content from so I get a mix of entertainment and news. And it's typically short form content anyway so I get to costume a lot of news updates in a relatively short amount of time.
I mostly get my news from my countrys public broadcaster news service. It have two "competing" news organisations, one for TV and one for radio, that have slightly different focus. I also often visit the 3-4 largest national newspapers sites to check their headlines.
And when there is a major news event then I just hit google and start looking for articles.
I use to be like you, using Reddit to get most of my news. But then Reddit changed algorithms or something, a few years ago, and I was no longer getting breaking news as it was happening live. So I began using a combo of Reddit and Twitter. Reddit for the top headlines of the day and Twitter for the live breaking news….but then Elon took over and Twitter went to shit.
And then the Reddit protest happened and I left. Now I’ve been using the app Artifact on iOS (it’s also available on the google play store) . I find it pretty good. It’s an AI driven news aggregation app. It has a lot of big News publication sites on there and you can tell the app what kind of news you wanna follow based on interests. I think you can block certain publications and mark articles as clickbait.
I like the fact that it’s sorta like Reddit / Twitter hybrid, because you can make an account on Artifact and make comments about the articles on the app. You can like articles and what artifact users are saying about said articles. You can save articles to read later. You can also follow other artifact users, as well. You earn reputation points when other artifact users like your comments. It also keeps track of your reading streak and how many articles you’ve read. It also offers insights about which categories you often read about and what topics you’ve been reading.
The coolest feature for me, is that there’s a button on the top right of the screen (star icon), when you press it, you get an AI generated summary of the article you’re reading. That saves me so much time. It helps me determine if I actually want to read the rest of the article or not.
Give it a try, you might like it. I know for me, it’s hard to go back to Twitter , Reddit , tildes, or lemmy/ kbin for my news needs.
I pretty much get it from reddit and WCPT Chicago.
I of course filter that with my brains bullshit filter
I just watch Philip DeFranco and call it a day.
I subscribe to NYT for world news and quality long form journalism, Houston Chronicle for local, and I love satirical news recaps from Seth Meyers and Weekend Update. I also enjoy The Beaverton.
I have my news sources well documented :D
https://jdsalaro.com/bookmarks/main/#news
No one’s really mentioned this, but I use this little app called Volv.
I’m mostly interested in the tech space, so I also learn of things through Mastodon and YouTube.
I usually go to France24's Livestream for world news, ask Google to read the news to me for US news, and NHK for concise news if I want something fresh. NHK tends to avoid more cynical news narratives which I find refreshing every once in a while. I know there's a lot of pain in the world right now but hearing it every day isn't good for my mental health.
I use Mastodon as a kind of RSS feed/link aggregator for the NYT, Reuters, and other news sources. But I like the email newsletters I subscribe to best - Mike Allen's AXIOS AM one, and various Wapo newsletters.
I also look at this Slashdot digest: https://alterslash.org/#article-22933752
On Inoreader, you can go to your "all articles" list and, on the top right, click the eye. That shows several display modes for the feed. I am partial to list-view, which I think gives you the quick line headlines you might be looking for!
As for news, I watch the local evening news at dinner, watch First Thought, and subscribe to a newsletter. Everything else either finds its way to me because friends liked it enough to share, or I come across it organically on other social media feeds. If a piece of news doesn't get to me this way then I probably don't care about it and it doesn't affect me.
This... makes me know way too much about USA news and politics.
I never thought about it until now, but I encounter most news through Twitter first. It isn't an intentional search, it just appears to me, which is kind of disturbing on a closer look. If I don't hear about it from Twitter, then a friend or family member will tell me about it. I've also had the local news station text me the news ever since I got my first smartphone in about 2016.
I read a newspaper every night after work. I can't live without newspaper tbh
Reuters, AP, The Conversation, Boring Report
I mostly stick to the top investigative journalism sources (at least the American ones as they often collaborate with the foreign ones):
NYT (with the puzzles and cooking)
AP
ProPublica
Bellingcat
And then I also have the Google News app for whatever other stuff.
Since leaving Reddit, I've been going to the National Public Radio site, and the BBC. Between them, I get most of what I need.
I usually use Yahoo News to scan daily headlines once a day or every other day (old habits die hard in my use of that site). I'll also use visit or listen to NPR if I want more in depth articles. I will use the local newspaper site or a regional site that our cable company has for more local events.
While I understand that ignorance is bliss, not keeping up with basic news is no better than only watching Fox news to me. I don't know how many times I've had to explain to my fiance how different policies that have been passed or are about to voted on will affect her and my daughter. I'm not saying she needs to doomscroll or anything but at least a passing knowlege of current events matters. And not every news event is relevant or important to every person but knowing what fuckery our Florida state legislature is up to should definately be important to Floridians, for example. It's also kind of annoying that she acts slightly outraged over things that are "old news" by the time she hears about it.
I use a combo of my google news feed on my phone, reddit, apnews.com, bbc.com, npr.org, and guardian.com. Used to do cnn because lazy, until they finally went too far.
https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/
Great site for a brief daily overview of American politic happenings.
https://ground.news/
Awesome aggregate of a bunch of news sources surrounding each news topic with an overall rating of left/right bias.
I like to get my news from news letters. I've subscribed to Morning Brew and the Reuters Daily Briefing and have been happy with both.