So I've tried a few times to skim through the homepage of those news agency, but I immediately felt overwhelmed as there were so many contents being listed out on the homepage.
What do you guys think? Do you guys have a habit of reading news daily or once in a while? How do you filter out the news to read? From which news sources?
Think of it like a sports game. If it's ongoing it sucks you in. If it's over, you hear the score and maybe a couple of stats, and you've sucked everything important. Watching the game might take a couple of hours but the recap might take 30 seconds. For sports there's benefit from watching the game, but for news you want the recap, not the game. You want to get your news from people selling you recaps rather than a play-by-play.
What you want is a good newsweekly. Most of the good ones are dead. The Economist is still going. They're biased but wear their biases proud and up front rather than pretending to be neutral like most everybody else does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is another great option. Blendle's daily email is one. Several others have been posted to HN from time to time.
The kind of news you want is that which remains relevant tomorrow.
Some news are designed to create cumulative knowledge and cumulative understanding. Search for those formats and make a habit of reading them regularly, but not necessarily daily.
A great example is the economist and in particular its weekly recap.
By the way, I'm not a fan of podcasts because you're not in control when listening. They want you to spend as much time as possible, but you want to skim and skip quickly. Text is vastly superior for that.
If something is really important, I can be sure other will let me know.
1- Get your news from as many sources as possible and from different countries.
2- Go from extreme left, to extreme right to have an idea about each source
3- Form your own opinion. Do not consume news only, but try to take a step back and think about the whole thing.
4- If you did 3 very well, you will see some dynamics and behind the scene influence from different people/ideologies..etc. I'm not talking about conspiracy theories or negative influence (which does exist). I'm talking about the line that each news source follows to get you the news.
5- If you did 4 very well, you understand the news and you are no longer required to follow them every day.
PS: you will find yourself drawn to specific sources because they match your beliefs. That's ok too, just be open about other sources as well.
The most important change for me, however I choose to consume news, is quitting social media. Not being exposed to the Twitter issue of the day, the hysterical overreaction and the hysterical counter-reaction, means that I no longer feel the need to be angry about something all the time. I'll still grumble about particular developments, but I don't feel the need to have a take. I'll contextualise things and move on, unless I think it'd be interesting to my wife or kids.
I don't think there is a massive benefit to skimming the news. I think the primary benefit is that I might see a topic that interests me and I can do a deep-dive on that and learn way more than I otherwise would. Recently, I've done "research" into Iran, the Yemen civil war, the history of taxes in the US, what kind of soil is under Florida and how continued climate change might affect it, flood insurance in the US, the history of Ukraine, Zelenskyy's politics and public support before the war, Merkel's politics towards Russia, Samsung's most popular phones in different parts of the world, chip manufacturing and node sizes, everything about the Surfside condo collapse, etc.
News is mostly clickbait and you won't learn much other than "this thing happened". What interests me most is "why did thing happen" or "what are the consequences" or "who does this affect and how", and that's when I really start to learn. Also interesting is to look into who supports what position and why.
The biggest danger, imo, is becoming jaded or depressed by reading too much negative news. That's when I know I need to take a temporary break from the daily news cycle.
Take a big list of possibilities, perhaps a Google search, whatever.
Cross off the corporate "video news release" basically its a TV commercial sources.
Cross off the government controlled / funded propaganda outlets. If I wanted the carefully censored and filtered opinion of the party in power, I'd read their website. "We're going to kiss up to everything our .gov says" is not "reporting" that's mere propaganda not worthy of viewing.
Cross off the attempts to violate election spending rules by producing an "independent" channels that coincidentally precisely mirrors and revolving door employs a political party. I don't want or need someone elses echo chamber, or even worse, my own echo chamber.
Cross off the gasping exclamation point clickbait sites.
Cross off anything participating in "celebrity news" (someone famous-ish in area A said something edgy about area B now post it for the rageclicks). Especially cross off sources focused on people who are famous for being famous but never did anything other than hire a PR firm, or people who have not been relevant in 10, 20, 30 years but are still in the news.
Cross off anything pandering to generational topics. I'm too young to be interested in major league baseball where the average fan is now over 70, and I don't want to be pandered to about video games or whatever "they" tell us "our" generation is supposed to be interested in.
What's left in 2022 after all that crossing out unacceptable sources? Nothing, I'm sad to say. Literally nothing left.
WRT better understanding the world you're probably better off reading history books.
If I’m feeling particularly chipper I can always listen to BBC America.
Afterwards, various podcasts and aggregation sites will put me into my silo.
Repeat
If I hear news it’s a five minute hourly update on Radio 1. Tech news is another beast, I quite enjoy things like HN.
I do listen to a twice weekly podcast that mostly sums up the stuff worth hearing about. In a world that is instant, and where content must be new to be of value, I think it is best to delay our news consumption by at least days if not weeks, and in some cases probably even months. News (I won't say "modern", I suspect it has always been this way) agencies make money off eyeballs, they do not make money by reporting accurately or with calm and reason. They make money with splashy headlines and inaccurate (if only because it is too new and breaking) ledes. You can fix the inaccuracies next week when the dust clears, but right now it is important to shout about the thing.
All this is create over informed and wrong readers who are anxious about everything. I am married with children, I have enough to be anxious about. I do not need to add to my list of worries, especially with things happening on the other side of the world in a country I have no intentions of ever visiting. I can still empathize with the problems of the world, but my empathy is just as useful to those people today as it is in three weeks when the sensationalist headlines have moved onto the new thing.
For international news and other takes, BBC, The Guardian, and Financial Times work for me.
For Norwegian news (since that's where I'm living), I stick with NRK since that's free - I'd like to subscribe to a local paper, but their prices are insane.
News is, on balance, very negative. Its designed to stoke your fears and worries. There is no benefit or money in feel-good news, which is why its typically relegated to the end of a news program on TV and almost never on the front page above the fold.
A lot of news masquerades as entertainment. Its fine to watch, just be aware its the junk food of content.
Omission of supporting facts and context in news is almost as bad as selectively picking facts that spin the story your way. This is probably the most insidious journalistic tactic as it typically helps reinforce outrage without providing the full picture.
The right balance to strike with the news is longer-form articles that deep dive into world topics and foster debate within the pages. I think Foreign Affairs serves some of that purpose. But also reading a variety of blogs helps: Astral Codex Ten, Marginal Revolution, etc... Granted, many of the popular ones tend to be left-leaning with progressive agendas. Just be aware.
For slow news, there are a few options. There's a quarterly Delayed Gratification magazine that's pretty good. I also personally enjoy Stratfor as a subscription service - understanding their marketing as "civilian intelligence agency" is way overstated, they do present essay-like articles that I find give me background, history, facts, and a bit of forecast that helps me contextualize news.
There's also a weekly Guardian magazine you can subscribe to in physical form which will have a combination of various sources. I've enjoyed it for a while.
For fast news, I like to use combination to give me various perspectives, so my favourites tend to be Axios, Guardian, Al Jazeera, and then a sprinkling of Washington Post, BBC, and my local national newspapers (Financial Post / Globe & Mail / Toronto Star in Canada). Axios in particular is good if you're just starting because you can basically Drill down/through on articles and get context which you'd struggle as you say with plain news agencies.
Note, I've heard good news about The Economist; I've subscribed and tried reading it but it was poor timing due to a new baby; their unsubscribe process was then so incredibly, atrociously, unbelievably, unspeakably user-hostile, that I have made it my mission in life not only to never ever ever subscribe to The Economist again, but to dissuade anybody else I possibly can, on the principle that humanity must prevail and evil overlords should fail. My 100 Croatian Lipa :)
The seed idea was reading this essay: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
It is not that I agree 100%, but it made clear to me that news is entertainment. Not more, not less. Watching a show on Netflix or watching fulfill the same role. And I prefer fiction.
The “understand better the world” part comes from other sources that are not, at all, about reporting the “news”. Books, articles, podcasts on topics that I am curious about.
Occasionally, I do go to the news. But that’s when I want to know something very specific. Like when I wanted to know the results of the elections in my country. I don’t go to the news to “check what’s going on”. I go only when I already know what I want to check. I’ll watch more news now during the World Cup, for example.
Stopping following the news didn’t make any negative difference in my understanding of the world, I believe.
I was thinking of doing a quick 10 minute YouTube video of me reading the news from different sources and commenting on them. One Twitch streamer has a lot of viewers with his political news streams, so I think that could work. After all many do the same and have huge ass businesses and many viewers/readers doing that.
But I can't deal with the bullshit on a daily basis. I hate it when I read obvious bullshit but they try to label it as the truth.
Edit: and HN as a meta news source
Subscribe everything there, classify and sort them as you wish, use the reader service to remove duplicates. If you want to read just the headlines, you can, or the full text articles with pictures, that too, or just based on the images, also possible.
Of course you can also directly share the articles, your full or partial subscription feeds and comment on them.
After Google Reader's demise was announced, Inoreader (.com) replaced and exceeded it very quickly and I'm still a happy paying Pro user of it. They have too many features to mention here, just take a look at https://www.inoreader.com/blog/ .
At night after kid goes down I then go into my RSS reader for another 30-45 minutes. That consists of daily headlines from HN, along with some economic and tech sites.
I miss the days of getting newspapers delivered and that was my only news. Something about reading a physical page and smelling the fresh newspaper. Been LONG time though.
If you want less of a time investment, my picks would be npr.org and/or Axios. They're more concise and linear. I'd also add in a local source, preferable a public one (I read Gothamist).
A lot of people do a daily podcast news digest like The Daily from NYT or The World by PRX. They're very good but I never go into them, I prefer to read. Occasionally I listen to long-form stuff on podcast (love On The Media).
Never watch TV news anymore. Occasionally look at a specific story on YouTube.
But I do read tech related news on a daily basis. So if a story is related to gaming or software engineering I probably would have heard about it, but if it's related to the goings on in Westminster or the White House? Not so much.
As for how I choose sources? Well usually it's based on me having found said source reliable in the past, and trusting them afterwards. If they then start posting falsehoods, I'll drop them and find someone else to get info from instead. I usually use a variety of sources for this, all of which I've had experience with for years or decades.
I donate to local and public media because the work is nevertheless important to support but I consume almost none of the product. Sucks.
That said, as a US-centered person, I recently found this factual email distillation, and do find it useful. Think there should be more of these, locally and regionally tailored.
I do not think it would be a good idea to just read the titles of articles. I would recommend reading several articles in full each day (it will only take 15 or so minutes). If you were to just read the titles you would be endlessly mislead - focus on the articles you actually read, and forget everything else. Read the articles critically. Think about what questions are not being asked. Think about what perspectives are not being mentioned. Etc.
It doesn't need to take much time. If it keeps you awake at night, then you must have had a very posh life where you made no mistakes. Make a family, and they will keep you up at night instead!
News is largely inconsequential moment-by-moment gossip, or unnecessary follow-up to stuff you've already heard about. You feel informed but not in any way that improves your life or your role in society.
I'll hear about the important things without seeking them out.
Online outlets are neverending, breathless and noisy and you will be too, if you follow them.
It is also important to know owners and editors of a particular publication as well as intended audience and circulation.
An interesting tactic is to read a publication from another country.
And majority of them are sad / annoying / drama-driven and only affect my mood
Reading news for me has no value.
If there's something really important then I will know about it anyway - e.g war, covid, etc.
I read news daily (tech and general) and it is a) unhealthy, b) not useful in the long run. As for the "creating a better worldview", well it's a good thing but the price is too high for too small benefit. Price is a wasted time and mental impact. And dropping binge reading is probably as hard as dropping smoking.
JUST DON'T.
I tend to stay away from US news as far as possible, unless they leak into common discussions like twitter recently.
It really takes only few minutes to go through headlines and read only what I am interested in, it's actually quite underwhelming since I am not really interested to read The Current Thing propaganda, for instance now I completely ignore news about Ukraine, Zelensky and Putin or homo agenda, though I followed COVID scaremongering in MSM since that was affecting my day to day life. Reading comments to news take me maybe more time than actual news.
I skim also through propaganda at r/Europe (not much to read there) and to stay in touch what's going on also in r/China (much more interesting content), I don't read subs for my home and current countries since those are full of NPCs always supporting The Current Thing they are told by MSM and there can be hardly any information I haven't read in MSM.
that way I can see the title/summary and if I feel its rubbish I just skip through to the next one. I get through about 400 articles a day in about 45 mins.
In the UK the other mainstream ones that aren't paywalled seem to be a mix of left-wing (eg. Guardian) and right-wing (eg. Daily Mail) outrage/misrepresentation/bias for argument-stoking and click-hoarding, or just local ad-ruined drivel.