News site that provides world updates only when relevant?
News site that provides world updates only when relevant?
I'm working on something that you might like - though it's not released yet.
It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.
For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.
The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:
- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change.
- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
- I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic.
Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. I am desperately searching for a (preferably lightweight) site that would offer important world news, limited updates on that story, and be willing to be quiet when nothing is going on. The site I linked is way better than most, but still is full of low-value updates, and it tends to miss stories of real significance. In the past I have used text.npr.org, but it is worse yet about missing stories and giving low-value updates.
Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small international section, where it takes the most important important, almost always long-form articles per day and translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and better than most English language publications (in curation, not sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/
I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person.
[0] https://slowernews.substack.com/
[1] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
Question: Why is this "Ask HN"? Shouldn't it be "Show HN"?
Looks like a decent site.
Is it normal for an Ask HN to be a link? It’s got a weird ad smell.
This one is pretty on the nose. It's from PRX/PRI. They have web and audio.
But "relevant" is not easily measured. It's obviously pretty personal.
I love the idea. It would be nice if events (Miss Universe, Tornado outbreak) would be put on a timeline, and there would be a separate section for ongoing things (Covid, russian troops).
I've briefly worked on an idea that was "pandora for news" when pandora was the hot music app. The app would learn from your votes and cater news/aggregations based on your preferences every day to your news dashboard. I was in love with the idea but never pursued it. Is there something like this now?
I subscribe to a weekly news magazine, it comes through the door on a Friday, and I read it on Saturday morning.
There's very little news that I need to change my approach to the day for.
It's not a "site" per se, but I have been thoroughly enjoying winno https://winno.app. It's news that you subscribe to based on very specific topics and/or categories.
Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.
Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the relationship between the material and the consumer. You would have to know something about me in order to provide me with relevant (to me) news.
Winno is an iOS app that I’ve been using and it’s amazing. They don’t have a web app, however that is in the pipeline. For now you can join their discord server and there is a bot that posts summaries. (Unfortunately the read-more urls are only available within the app)
The only downsides I’ve found is that the only way they make money is buymeacoffee. I haven’t looked into their privacy policy as well.
https://winno.app/
For "legible" news, I'd like to see the section headers more clearly defined.
Also... what does relevant mean? This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant.
BBC news is the closest to “just the facts, ma’am” to the extent that the app shows me (untouched, unbumped) months old news stories for categories that have had no recent updates. Their articles have a “news only with a narrative” main section and then any opinion is separated by an hr with the name of the person and their take on the news.
What global news would you consider relevant? Why not look them up when you're wondering about that thing?
IMHO we can do without almost all news coverage, except where it touches our work or social circle. Important bits like election dates, new regulations, significant opportunities etc seem to get to us in any case trough random conversations.
How do you decide what qualifies?
I'm trying to build something like that. Take hacker news and let the community curate it into a weekly newsletter of just the important posts.
It's a work in progress and I'm a little starved for feedback.
https://efficientdemocracy.com
I like the economist, for keeping up with the latest news especially the brief updates on the first 2-4 pages.
It’s not an Ask HN but a promotion for Legible News, which has a paid product and is apparently based off content written by Wikipedia’s contributors.
It doesn’t seem like Legible News uses any part of its profits to donate to Wikimedia or its contributors, or at least this isn’t stated anywhere on the website.
Depends on what you mean by "relevant". Personally I don't think Miss Universe is super relevant for the world. It's just some show that someone owns and monetizes.
Or that some kid detonated himself. Or something something about the NFL....
The most valuable/relevant news includes original sources.
As an example,, If there's a summary about court proceedings, link to the transcript.
Gone are the day we need someone to interpret the original event for us with their own bias.
I am thinking of building a simple comments per hour and total comments driven alert from HN. I missed the whole log4j news few days back. It will just ping me when something interesting comes up.
How much effort does it take to maintain? Are topic discovery and story updates automated?
It looks it could take a whole team to manually update every notable development in a timely manner.
The congressional research service produces comprehensive reports on most topical issues. Filled with facts, sourcing, and data.
In the spirit of several projects mentioned here, this is an NLP-based RSS feed generator I put up recently- it takes a news story as a search parameter and it creates a latest, related story feed from it.
add any url or search term to
https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=[url or search term]
Here is a good example using a Harpers story on disinformation:
https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archi...
It is a WiP (new filter parameters shortly), but you can also visit the root of that domain if you rather get email alerts or use a slack notification. The UI in particular is very alpha, so please feel free to send suggestions. [edit:learning about formatting]
Soo... essentially a clone of Reuters?
Failing to see why this is new.
I think the product you are looking for is a weekly or monthly email/magazine analysis of the news. There must be a large number of companies in the space, fwiw I get my weekly update from worldaffairsbrief.com.
the only lightweight news site i like is lite.cnn.com although with US focus i would love to see a more EU/UK/Worldwide focused one
Spicy take: none of it is relevant to you. All world news is outside your sphere of influce and sphere of concern. It’s a pure waste of your time and you don’t need to read anything about it. If a global event is about to affect you, I guarantee you will hear about it.
Someone will probably tell you if it's important enough to affect your life. Barring that, the best very low volume news Twitter, IMHO, is @disclosetv . They don't tweet more than about 20 or so times a day and anything really important always shows up there. They are definitely right wing, so if you can't stand that, you're out of luck.