Ask HN: How do you read the news efficiently? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you read the news efficiently?

10 pointsekpyrotic10 comments

Consuming news presents a problem of reconciliation: (1) news wastes vital time that should be spent elsewhere, and yet (2) news is important for us as informed, intelligent citizens. Then: we should consume news more efficiently.

Two sources of inefficiency:

(1) It's difficult to find all important/interesting news in a single place. As a result 50% of my news-reading time is spent consuming information that I needn't have read.

(2) I frequently read the same news story multiple times (at different sources) and often the slants aren't distinguishable enough to make the re-reading worthy of my time.

So, how do you read the news? And, have you solved problems (1) and/or (2)?

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I really don't read the (general) news. As bad as it sounds, I still manage to stay relatively informed. I think there's three reasons for this:

1. If it's big enough news, I'll hear about it from my friends/co-workers/etc.

2. If it's big enough news, it will usually pop up on a site that I do frequent (like HN.) For example, the abundance of stories about Egyptians using technology informed me of what was going on RE the revolution.

3. Most of the news out there is completely irrelevant. "Don't miss" on CNN.com: Groundhog predicts early spring, Charlie Sheen, How to Avoid Salt, and something about Bush's daughter.

Agreed. In addition I tend to frequent blogs/sites specializing in things I care about (HN for startup and tech, calculatedriskblog.com for economic indicators, edhat.com for local news etc).

I read the paper editions of The Economist and Macleans and I read CBC news online and listen to the hourly news on the radio.

I've chosen a couple sources that I enjoy. I don't worry too much about missing much or whether I'm getting the whole story; I assume that what I miss will either become important enough to crop up in one of my sources or it won't and that the whole story is impossible to get.

I think the reason the slants are not very different between sources is the fundamental laziness of journalists who rely heavily on material provided by government and corporate press releases.

From what I gather writing yet another news aggregator is al laughable endeavor -- I think I read some piece on HN that said, basically, "give up, you're not the first person to try this."

I've been working on a personal news aggregator for over a year now, trying everything and anything new and different with an open mind, and yet I've still yet to find a good news experience to beat what I've come up with.

All of this is to say "be patient." Based on what I've been working on, I think with new technologies like IndexedDB and Web Workers people are going to blow away what's out there today.

Well, I have a few topics that I watch closely. I've set up Google Alerts for relevant keywords and then send those to an RSS reader. There's quite a bit of overlap, so I've been paring my words down. Now I've got a limited number of keywords that provide the most relevant results from Google Alerts. That's how I get news on topics specifically important to me.

For general news I usually just stumble around on Reddit, Hacker News, and Fark. That, and I still frequently buy various science and business magazines.

I mainly use my phone(currently Evo). As for sources, I have Twitter setup with list based on business,tech,science,news and general. So I can easily scan headlines based on subject. I also like the app Pulse, set up with the newsfeeds that I visit the most. I like how it gives me a summary of the article. Although sometimes it does force closes on me. Eventually I'll get a nook for this purpose.

A lot of articles do blend together, but I just read the ones that seem interesting/important to me.

I suggest using morning digests like Politico's Playbook by Mike Allen. I subscribe to that, Morning Money (Politico), Breaking News (Politico), and Financial Times updates (for the more international piece). All of this is delivered to my inbox before I am up in the morning and compliments my first cup of coffee nicely. As well as saves a bundle of time.

First, if it's important, then by definition it's not a waste of time.

Second, most of my news comes from listening to Public Radio on the drive to work so it overlaps my commute.

Point one is invalid. You are conflating 'reading important news' and 'reading all news (def. = important and unimportant news)'.

My argument was meant to read as follows,

(1) reading 'important news' is important. (tautology)

(2) reading 'all news' is not important. (tautology -- using def. of 'all news')

(3) Usually doing an unimportant activity is a waste of time iff you have something important to do.

(4) Therefore, usually reading 'all news' is a waste of time iff you have something important to do. (from 2 and 3)

I thought this was clear, even if I wasn't explicit.

techmeme is great about grouping the stories and solving the problem of reading the same news story multiple times.

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