For the past few years I've been trying to find better news sources with less clickbait. Engagement is the incentive that drives news now. It takes more effort to get relevant information out of the articles. Headlines feel designed to make me as angry or afraid as possible and once you follow up the story usually turns out not to be as inflammatory as it seems.
Up to recently I had been using Reuters, AP, and an aggregator called spectrym.news. These are fairly good but don't completely solve problem.
Over the last month or two I've almost completely switched over to the current events page on Wikipedia.
It's amazing! If any editors for that page are reading this, you're doing a great job! Thank you so much!
That page, and Wikipedia generally are not optimizing for engagement. So the headlines are informative rather than inflammatory. I can get the same amount of information that I used to get from other sources in an extremely small amount of time. Which is what I'm going for.
I want to be informed without investing a lot of time or feeling like I'm being socially engineered for ad revenue.
I had been checking that page and the following up on Reuters, AP, and Spectrym to make sure there weren't any big stories that I had missed. While there was occasionally something notable not on the Current Events page it was rare enough that I usually don't even feel compelled to check the other sites anymore.
It's also nice that it's organized by day so if I take a couple days off reading the news I can easily go back and see it chronologically.
None are good at anything. Some are good at some things. All really suck at most things.
Economics of "news" are in a bad shape, been spiraling out of control for about 15 years, there's no going back to "good one stop shop for news"
Instead see what the good parts of each source is and what good it will do to you. A lot of bullshit and marketing will still reach you.
But as long as you know what you want (need to be more specific than "news") you can mentally filter out more garbage and let in more useful, creative, thought provoking content.
My sources in 2020: HN's "new" page ( where i found this post) , subreddits of interest to me, people i look up to on twitter, very niche newsletters.
Can anyone tell me why subscribing to print-first institutions like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist isn't the best choice? (And hasn't been the best choice for the century plus history of these magazines.)
I feel that large institutions are ok, but only if you read from a variety of them (different parts of the political spectrum). This can help identify the different biases, positions, and sources, allowing you to make your own opinion.
For me, Financial Times is the best source for general news. I think it’s because they charge money and their audience values information over entertainment.
You come a long way by using a rss reader and a variety of news sites, preferably a cross-section of right-biased, centric and left leaning. Don't trust just a couple of sources.
Up to recently I had been using Reuters, AP, and an aggregator called spectrym.news. These are fairly good but don't completely solve problem.
Over the last month or two I've almost completely switched over to the current events page on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
It's amazing! If any editors for that page are reading this, you're doing a great job! Thank you so much!
That page, and Wikipedia generally are not optimizing for engagement. So the headlines are informative rather than inflammatory. I can get the same amount of information that I used to get from other sources in an extremely small amount of time. Which is what I'm going for.
I want to be informed without investing a lot of time or feeling like I'm being socially engineered for ad revenue.
I had been checking that page and the following up on Reuters, AP, and Spectrym to make sure there weren't any big stories that I had missed. While there was occasionally something notable not on the Current Events page it was rare enough that I usually don't even feel compelled to check the other sites anymore.
It's also nice that it's organized by day so if I take a couple days off reading the news I can easily go back and see it chronologically.