It scrapes headlines from Wikipedia once per day at 8p PST. It's encrypted. There's no ads. It loads fast, as-in one request. Your activity isn't logged.
I built this because I got tired of all the shitty tricks news websites play: obnoxious ads, "breaking news", auto-play videos, pumping megabytes of crap into your browser, lack of privacy, and lack of citations.
Legible news is boring. It's non-addictive. If you click on a link you might accidentally learn something about the historic context of a news story. I don't log anything because I don't care. Daily headlines delivered in one HTTP request (look at it in an inspector) over a CDN. It's fast. I hope you like it, but if you don't no worries, I built it for myself.
I've thought a lot about this use case. My vision is that a few KB of text is delivered once per day to whatever-device at a desired time. No more. No less.
What language and locale would you be interested in?
The sample looks like https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/briefing/north-korea-cnn-...
It is exactly what it sounds like—a quick daily briefing of the most important things that have happened over night—kinda as if you're the President.
There is a URL that you don't need to update each day to hit, but for the life of me I can't remember it at the moment.
I don't use feeds or notifications but manual bookmarks so I can choose the time of reading.
I read this everyday via mobile. It's pretty easy to get to, just nytimes.com and then the briefing is the first link provided I'm not up too early or it's Saturday or Sunday.
You have to apply for beta access, but it didn’t take long for me to be accepted in. It’s probably more of a marketing beta program, to feel exclusive.
Curation is a valuable service. It's worth paying for.
If I am interested in something specific/real time, I will open up google news, reddit news, twitter, local news, web search, popular newspaper sites(nytimes, washington post etc.) and/or other relevant places.
I'm working on an alternative to Google News that shows the same event from multiple news outlets/perspectives so that you can draw your own conclusions. Let me know what you think!
when i thought of this idea - in my head it was a heat-map, in a rectangular grid pattern. Political affiliation was just 1 gauge u could select. u could navigate the grid by clicking left and right on a page and u would be presented with an article. down the matrix would goto other sections of the news.
News needs to be disrupted, and politics isnt going to be the thing that does it. Think of it this way, if i go out, i dont go and hang with politicans. I hang out with ppl i like. I hang out with ppl with similiar interests.
If i like sports, why cant i read an entire newspaper, with my likes represented? Why can i only read a "sports magazine" or "the sports section"? ppl who like sports, are interested with things that effect sports. it could be the weather, it could be a policy change, it could be beers being on special on saturdays when i hang out and watch it with my friends.
My idea starts by presenting the user with binary options, the choices they make will lead into other choices and finally a curated "newspaper" is presented. each article they are presented with, they can rank in a binary way, which further curates their experience.
hit me up on captainjonoo [at] gmail if any of u are keen explore these ideas.
Apps and mobile is cool and all, but high density or high volume data consumption is not the use case for those platforms.
I roll my own sources including: 1. A variety of newsfeeds through a desktop reader. (Can be improved by writing your own rating system.) 2. A list of news sources on a web page, this evolves. (Would also benefit from code that throws out the things I'll never read.) 3. Blendle. 4. People I correspond with (they dig out good stuff, I reciprocate). 5. Less obvious (to some) news sources like HN... are on that web page list. ...
Google used to do custom feeds defined by an arbitrary search string, that had some power.
There are tools out there that help identify material worth reading (DNN's etc.).
I find likes and dislikes are often valueless even if you "assume the opposite".
Your most important weapon may be the realisation that most journalists are under extreme pressure and don't do their job at even a basic level. Makes it easier to quickly ignore the garbage..
- Payday loan spam (two spams on the front page)
- No way to customize your interests
- Duplicated stories with near identical headlines appear from multiple sources. This isn't usually an issue with Google.
Then I check only the top news from some subreddits[3] and hackernews[4], and I usually hide what I read to avoid seeing them again.
And if I need more I can get the headlines of major news websites[5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/2017_Jul...
[2] https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=wikipedia
[3] https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=reddit+science+environment+tim...
Happy to answer any questions.
It's a short digest of articles from a number of sources. It's not specifically hard news but it covers important stories of the day and interesting reads from across the web.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/ is another good site. good analysis and helps me understand what is really going on. They link to source documents. Very useful.
I wrote this as a daily briefing, also for myself. It scrapes around 45 sites that I have handpicked. Links are ranked based on shares across social platforms: the usual suspects.
I curate each issue based on what looks good each morning and send it out at around 7am AEST.
I wrote more about it here: https://www.kripy.com/alt-all-in/.
Ignore news and focus on things that are more important, like family, health and work.
It's probably overall beneficial to have a rough idea what is going on in your city, your nation and the world - in that order - but try to do it on a larger timescale, rather than be a squirrel chasing the "news cycle" - which is what sites like Google News are geared towards.
Personally, I subscribe to one newspaper, watch one cable news network and browse HackerNews and Reddit (HN trending upward vs. Reddit in recent months) and listen to a few podcasts and I'm able to keep up with the world on a wide range of topics.
http://www.f3nws.com/mobile?amp - is the fast mobile/AMP version of the same site.
http://www.f3nws.com/feed - RSS Feed
Only sheep passively consume news as its fed to them.
What exactly would people want to see different to Google News?
I've been mucking around with various things in this area for over 15 years now, but I'm just not sure what is useful to others?
Please tell me, because I'd like to build it. Reply here or email or Twitter.
I'm not the OP but there's clearly some pretty widespread dissatisfaction with the current news production and consumption landscape. I think there's a huge appetite for bias identification and noise identification and filtering. Given that the idea of a "fact" is something the two main political parties cannot agree on, it seems that's there a huge opportunity for someone/something to come in and disrupt that.
I don't think anyone wants bias detection.. or maybe they do so that they can only read things that they agree with?
I think the moments format is really good for dispensing information quickly and easily linking to more detailed information when needed.
Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder.
Edit: http://contentgems.com
Think you may have a typo, and intended to direct OP to http://contentgems.com
People put a lot of the blame on FB, but I think Google is as much to blame for the epidemic of fake/crap news as anyone. I have been appalled at the shitty quality of stuff showing up in my google news feed and treated as being on a par with other sources over the last year or two. It's obvious taht google only cares about this as a market rather than anyone there being invested in News as an end in itself.
Continuous stream of socially curated news, formatted for mobile.
Federalnewsradio.com
Bloomberg.com
Now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure if I find it decent because I'm sub-consciously comparing it to the rest of Buzzfeed vs. all other news in general.
You can also add preferred sources now, which helps a lot (when they don't delete it). I found adding WSJ, Deutsche Welle, FT, Bloomberg, Financial Review & similar sources improved things for me. I wish I could add blogs I follow there too.
I'd love to see a Google News alternative that used a customisable whitelist of sources, and mute filters to block topics I'm just not interested in.
I don't really like any news organization very much, so instead anytime a political/current events piece pops up here and I like it, I check to see if the author has a Twitter account, and follow them on there. Then, via their RTs and posts, I discover new journalists. If they consistently put out good stuff, I follow them too.
As an example, someone here once put out a piece about Silicon Valley and politics by Emmett Rensin, which I thought was spot-on. Rensin showcased Nathan Robinson, then Abi Wilkinson. And so on and so on.
If you keep a sufficiently varied crowd of followers, geographically and topically, you always see RTs of pertinent news events from eg: BBC, Reuters, AP, or what have you.
In essence, what some of these services do algorithmically, I rely on humans for. As a result I seem to be aware of just about any current event topic that comes up, so it's working for me.
Don't use Twitter like Twitter itself suggests, e.g: "Follow Lebron! Follow Donald Trump! Follow CNN!". Add people very very judiciously, so that your feed looks like the news aggregator you wish to see.
It seems there is a trend of those on the left referring to anything on the right as fascist. IMO this is dangerous because it dilutes the actual meaning of fascism. I'm not saying fascist ideology isn't out there btw.
Can you point out an example?