What would you recommend for a single, minimal, "overview-of-the-world" news source?
I'm getting ready to try a long-term media fast, at least a month or two. That means no Social, no general forum talk (I have a couple of task-specific groups I have to stick with), no general Internet browsing, and minimal news.
But I don't want to completely divorce myself from the major news events of the world. In case Russia invades the EU, I want to know about it before Russian soldiers are knocking on my door. If a new global pandemic kicks off, or they fix global warming ... you know, Big Ticket items.
So that's the question. If you only get one news source, that provides objective (-ish) reporting focused on actual news (not sports, not pop culture, not click-bait-y diet-fads and vitamin recommendations) ... news of the state of the world (preferably including the world beyond the United States).
I realize there probably isn't a single source that hits all my bullets, but that's okay; I just need one that's close.
Danke, y gracias.
Edit: For now, my first pick is AP News' World News section ( https://apnews.com/world-news ). So, that's sort of my baseline; anything better than that available?
Edit #2: So, apparently, AP News has either handicapped or completely eliminated their RSS feed(s); I'm getting some results, but all old and suspiciously incomplete, and the 'Net is full of "here's how to cobble together the equivalent of a real AP News RSS feed" tips. So, unless I figure this out quickly, I'm just about to lose interest in AP News.
Anyone have any tips on this?
For a number of months the only news I have actively consumed is from a source called News Minimalist. They use an LLM to regularly "read" a set of new articles from a large range of different sources, and score them based on seven factors. Any that achieve a certain score and above are posted- and if none do, then there is simply no news. The RSS feed is a perfect implementation, because I can keep an eye on this minimal amount of news in whatever way I want (currently, I post to a Discord channel in my own personal server using a self-hosted Discord bot).
It really depends on the amount and type of news you wish to see. I find one advantage of this site is that a single event is rarely covered more than once. You don't end up with tens of articles, daily, consisting of only minute changes to a situation, which often feels much less like you're rubbernecking a car-crash than a typical news cycle.
(author of the project here) Thanks for recommendation!
There's also a website: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ where you can see and read all the news analyzed each day (sometimes I read the least significant news just for fun).
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas.
Oh wow, never expected to run into you on tildes
Thank you very much for putting your project together. I have used it for months now and it's been such a great way to stay current on world events, and the fact that you regularly and routinely assess and adjust the algorithm is super cool to see :)
A while back you were adding least significant news, (or maybe it was a totally random news?) but you should consider adding that back to the email newsletter at the bottom! I answered the survey, but also found it neat and interesting
Haha, yes, I remember that one :D
Three men occupy table without eating at busy food court
You're right, it's probably time to revisit this. I'll keep an eye on especially funny ones and add one sometime.
I like the title. I am leery of the use of ChatGPT, but he says it's not actually writing anything, just being used as a weighted filter. At a glance, the results look promising. Will review further.
thx
Man this is such a big plus for me. I have a few different daily news podcasts and newsletters I subscribe to and while I can appreciate the different viewpoints, it gets boring hearing about the same story over and over.
Oh wow, this is one feature that I’ve been hoping for in a news aggregator for ever!
I’ve long wanted a way to be given news the way people talk about news — if a big important event is happening, it will naturally come up in conversation, but if nothing is worth talking about then people won’t mention it.
It seems entirely counterproductive for a news source to have some days with nothing to say, so I had started assuming it would never be possible. This News Minimalist idea intrigues me, so I’ll definitely check it out!
Wikipedia has you covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Hmm ... I generally consider current events to be the exactly one thing that Wikipedia routinely screws up, thanks to a thousand different vested interests in there re-re-re-editing stuff, trying to spin things their way.
That said, I will check this out, because I rather like Wikipedia for everything else.
Maybe https://ground.news/. It’s an AI news aggregator that also grades the left / right wing biases of the sources and their truthfulness (though I’ve never looked into how that’s calculated). When I want that 5 minute snapshot of world affairs it’s my go to. Also fascinating to see which stories get traction where.
Downside is it wants a subscription for some of the more interesting features.
Looked at them quite recently ... if/when I come back to a more full-time focus on news, I might give them a chance, but for the immediate future, they are overkill.
Fair play
I second Ground News. They're great at dissecting articles and gives great insight into biases. They're probably the best if you want to enter a bubble wherein you only look at one website (and not also a social platform) for all your news needs rather than multiple websites.
How do you use it as an overview specifically? I've heard of it before and it seems great, but the web design really turns me off as it's super busy and I don't know where to look if that makes sense
Like Tildes you can narrow what you’re looking for using topics or tags (I usually read the main page, then search Australia then environment). What I like is if you see an interesting headline it’s usually quite descriptive, you click it and you can see how outlets have spun that headline, find an unbiased source and read the article. Sometimes just seeing several article summaries tells you what you want to know.
I also like seeing which articles don’t get coverage. E.g. new climate milestone, no right wing reporting. Left wing politician puts their foot in it, no left wing reporting. Very eye opening as to why morern news is so polarising and sometimes explains why my coworker (kiwi) is obsessed with AOC and not interested in ice sheets.
The interface is super busy, especially on mobile. I usually use it on my laptop.
I tried this script a couple days ago and it mostly works:
https://github.com/PythonOpenProjects/Zeitgeist/
It is very minimalist. Just a word cloud basically. But I think it is somewhat calming compared to information dense Associated Press.
It mostly uses https://news.un.org/ so probably a lot more slow-moving than AP--but you could probably swap out some of those RSS feeds if you like the general idea
If you are a fan of the shell, you could likely curl an RSS feed and pipe to
sort | uniq -c | sort -g. Actually I just tried this and it works too, and it is pretty much the same idea:What part of Europe are you in? You might consider subscribing to a newspaper. While Financial Times obviously skews a bit economically liberal, it seems broad enough to provide a decent overall coverage, and you may be able to get paper delivery.
I'm in Germany. Deutsche Welle is on my short list of regular news sources, although they probably won't be "the one" during this fast ... but, maybe, if I decide to do another concentrated push in studying German ... doing side-by-sides of the same article in both English and German seems like a useful exercise.
If you can swing it financially, get FT and a German paper. FT would be broader and global, the German one a bit more local/national. See what’s available to be delivered to you (whether it’s the Aachener Zeitung, or something else) or what you can get at a newsstand. Having two papers, you can do that side by side comparison. It also allows you to slowly digest news, and can keep you off the internet a bit.
@Eric_the_Cerise what you are asking for is unfortunately pretty difficult; well i think so. I myself have been looking for something similar to what you're looking for. Also I prefer the "text only" versions of news websites (since RSS has been killed off in too many places sadly). I tend to leverage the NPR "thin" version and the CNN "lite" version...however both are far from ideal because of course being either U.S.-centric and/or very left leaning. (I'm left-leaning, but i want to hear all sides of top news topics!) I have used both of these sources long enough to know how to filter out the left or right leaning stuff...but again neither are perfect.
I'd like to share the following webpage - which while not new, i only learned of it recently - is a bit of a list of text-only (or, at least slim sort of) news sources: https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/
Not sure how good it will be for more world news...but maybe review and see if any items help.
Also, please do share whatever source you end up using...Because as i noted i'm looking for something similar to you! :-) Cheers!
I quite like Morning Brew for exactly this purpose. It’s easy to throw away if I don’t care about reading the news today but I find I sometimes browse it and it’s sufficient.
I like to listen to the 1A podcast's Friday news roundup. They bring together a panel of reports split between national and international stories, and review the events of the week. It goes reasonably deep on the topics they choose while being a more zoomed out summary of what's been happening.
No audio or video. I don't have the patience to sit and wait for 10 minutes, while people chat their way around to eventually telling me what I can find in text in 5 seconds. For entertainment or deep-dives into obscure/interesting bits of info, they're great ... but news? Print media or nothing.
I know you said one source, but I find that the BBC homepage + the Al Jazeera homepage gives you a pretty good overview of the world while balancing out most of their biases.
Just a counter-point: have you considered that if something at that level of important happens, you'll hear about it organically from other people who do keep an eye on the news? Very little of what appears even in reputable global news homepages is actually relevant to your life vs interesting things happening.
More a strategy than a specific suggestion, but I've found stepping away from national-level news sources in my country has helped my well-being quite a bit. I found the news from these outlets was broadly negative, local enough to feel relevant to me, but too big for me to feel any empowerment over; it was causing me a lot of stress. The stories also generally weren't local enough (as in, my specific city) to be very relevant to my everyday activity.
These days, I'm more likely to go to an international source (relative to my location) like the BBC and scan the main international stories. Flip side, if I'm curious about my city, I seek local-focused news sources that tend not to cover national-level stories so much.
I agree with you. But sadly I don’t think local news is much better these days.
I was hospitalized recently and as a result had some time to scan the local TV news channels. The local news largely parroted the same national stories the cable networks were obsessed with, and the extent of the local coverage was either tragedies that I wasn’t any better for learning or useless fluff pieces.
I’ve also come to realize that breaking news in general is complete garbage. There is no need to worry about an event if you don’t have any context for it. It’s much better to wait a week later if it means actually understanding what happened and why it is important.
I feel that overall news is just focused on providing you stories that are scary or infuriating because that’s what makes them addictive. You read the news because you think you are being safe by informing yourself but it’s a self-reinforcing loop. It’s not good for you.
Not sure if it fits your criteria, but I like 68k.news and The Brutalist Report. I often visit them along with Wikipedia's Current Events section, which was already mentioned. 68k.news is a text only front end for Google News and TBR is an aggregator of popular news sources. It might look like the opposite of what you're looking for but you can tailor it to your needs (gets better when you pay for it).
Brutalist looks like another one I could get interested in, if/when I come back to more in-depth news reading; too much there for me, for this minimalist stretch ... also, includes a lot of stuff that it just shouldn't (The Onion?!?). I might go for their Summarizer version, except it smells very "ChatGPT" to me.
68k has a nice grouping/summarizing layout, I may just go with this one.
thx.
In response to your comment about Apnews RSS, I make use of this daily in my RSS reader and it works fine. Are you sure you have the current source?
Edit: Nevermind, I am using the rsshub link for it since Apnews did in fact mangle their official feed a few years back.
Edit2: No idea why I didn't share the feed URL: https://rsshub.app/apnews/topics/world-news
Thanks; imported it. Might use it during the media fast, might just save it for "after".
Reuters is great. The app gives you a smattering of what you're after, they're a wire service so the bias is limited and its updates regularly.
Check out this podcast: The 7 #the7
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/the-7/4146166 via @PodcastAddict
I read your op here and later that day heard an ad for this podcast on one of my others. Started listening to this on and have listened to about 4 so far (most recent ones) and it seems to be what you might be looking for, but is very US centric.