Ask HN: What news subscription is worth it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What news subscription is worth it?

102 pointslawgimenez250 comments

My NYTimes subscription is ending next month and I am looking for another news subscription. What news publication is it worthwhile to subscribe to? I’ve read horror stories about dark patterns in cancellation so that should also factor in.

I’m not sure if anyone noticed but NYTimes’ quality has gone downhill for the past 2-3 years and why is there no dark mode on the app? WSJ looks good but there are issues with cancellation.

Edit: I am from Southeast Asia and got lots of family and relatives in the USA, so the obvious interest in Western and EU culture and politics.

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I once subscribed to NYT. Canceling required a phone call, and the guy laughed out loud at me when I refused what amounted to a nearly free 6 month extension. Made me so mad, they'll never have me as a customer again.

I also decided I would never buy another subscription to a news site that also has advertising. In my perception, ads seem to be predictive of low quality journalism.

Most recently I've had an Economist subscription. I like them. They don't make canceling as easy as subscribing, and I do hold that against them, though they aren't as terrible as NYT.

But honestly, I let that subscription lapse and I don't buy any news right now. I actively avoid it, in fact. My sanity and happiness needed a break from the drip-drip-drip of negative stressful world events that I have exactly zero control over.

This is the way I'd go - subscribe to publications that don't have advertising, or have minimal, and subscribe to ones that are monthly if possible, weekly at worst.

The reality is you do NOT need the day-to-day news, anything that's important will still be talked about in a month.

I like the New York Times but I was infuriated by the unsubscribe process. I also turned down a super cheap extension.

I am now subscribed via the Google Play store, which means the NYT loses a big chunk of the money, all so I can be guaranteed an easy cancellation button.

I can easily cancel from the nytimes.com website by going to my account settings.

That must be new, maybe in response to some recent FTC opinions that every web site should have a cancelation option that was equivalently easy to the subscribe option. Used to be you could only cancel over the phone.

California address.

Or international address

Figures. I wonder what it would cost to buy myself a functional California address.

I just now unsubscribed from NYT, in response to this thread. I had to do an online chat, but at least it wasn’t an overly prolonged process. I am quite certain that I did not have an option to unsubscribe from account settings.

I also unsubscribed from The Washington Post. It did have a non-chat-based unsubscribe option, which I greatly appreciated.

I also unsubscribed from The Economist. It was the worst. They went through multiple but-here’s-an-even-better-deal stuff, then tried to subscribe me to email newsletters.

Thanks, HN, for the incentive to do this; I had meant to for some time.

I didn't have any trouble cancelling the NYT. My credit card number changed, and that was that :-)

That sounds like tremendous trouble if you have your card on any sites like Amazon.

It was indeed a nuisance, but when a fraudulent transaction appeared on my statement, it had to be done. I just found it convenient to not update the card on the NYT.

Virtual cards are great for this. My brother keeps recommending privacy.com, I need to look into it.

I used virtual cards for decades. PayPal had a Firefox extension that did this in the early aughts.

I used getfinal.com for several years too but they went bankrupt. I don't even try anymore

I had a newspaper send me to collections when I tried that; over a matter of about $18 for newspapers they never delivered because I hadn't paid.

The NYT cut me off when the old card got declined, so if they had sent it to a collection agency, I would have disputed it.

I will never subscribe to the NYT again. Unsubscribing was an infuriating process.

I love The Economist, and their podcasts. I've never had to unsubscribe because I just pre-pay for 1-year subscription offers that I find on Slickdeals.

I decided (other than this site) to actively avoid all news that has a comment section.

> My sanity and happiness needed a break from the drip-drip-drip of negative stressful world events that I have exactly zero control over.

I used to be engaged in politics (volunteering at elections, doing administrative parliamentary work, community boards, and having opinions about matters). Becoming apolitical has removed a burden in my life. I don't watch horror movies, and I don't watch the news. I don't subscribe to anxiety and violence, and I just accept and cherish that there is peace in my area of the world.

I followed the Ukraine war out of a sense of necessity; I have friends who went to the border to help refugees cross and prevent human trafficking. If you're not doing something like that, I'm not sure that the combined violence and pain in the world is something we, on average as individuals of our species, are well-equipped to handle.

I think the difficulty of following news with any sense of fluency, not to mention more in-depth technical issues like energy and ecology, makes me think that democracy is at its stressing point. Education alone cannot be the answer — unless we think we can educate people to the point of being general experts on such a broad but critical slate of issues like energy, geopolitical strategy, domestic healthcare, etc.

Perhaps the future of democracy is made of voters who subscribe to institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote (churches, policy groups) rather than a firehose of content where you make up your own mind on how to vote. It sounds more anti-intellectual than it is, but many people are already cognitively and emotionally maxed out.

Very little news needs to be followed to be a good citizen of a democracy. Local news, sure, on perhaps a weekly or monthly basis (i.e. you probably don't need to check in every day). National, state level (at least for states that aren't so tiny that state news is local news), and international, perhaps quarterly, but you don't really need much of that.

A better use of time for someone wanting to be a good citizen would be reading major books and papers in political philosophy, political science, international relations, public policy, economics, statistics, media studies, history, et c. Not the news.

Seems like in an ideal world political parties would be the "institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote". Of course, in the current United States that doesn't work because there is a practical limit of 2 major parties, and neither are really bastions of intellectual or moral credibility.

I'm not super well-versed in non-US politics, so I wonder if there is any democracy where parties actually work in that ideal way?

I don't think things are much different than they were, say, 100 years ago. Back then there was a dearth of information, so you needed representatives, or parties, to vote in your interest when you had to do other things.

Now we have a glut of information, but the problem is the same - there are so many topics, it's hard to prioritize and determine what is necessary or important.

Look at our government. We have committees, and experts brought to those committees to help them draft law. Instead of trying to be an expert in everything, we should focus on what we want to be experts in, moving forward in these areas and trusting those working in other areas to do what's best. There is no other realistic path.

It is hard to trust any expert/gonverment if main motivation is profit. Look what is happening right now. Poor are more poor and rich are getting rich even more. So, naturally, trust in expertise is relative if it cannot bring you food for survive.

> Perhaps the future of democracy is made of voters who subscribe to institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote

It already is this way, and has been this way for centuries. Be it religion, ethnic identity, economic class, geographic loyalty, or political ideologies. The average voter is not an independent minded participant.

Political parties. Community Organizations. The Political Machines of the Gilded Age and the Unions of the late industrial.

Human nature never changes. Democracy just gives us a chance to have a say in how society harnesses that nature, rather than a small group of people born into power because their ancestors were part of the inner circle of victors in the war that established their nation.

Edit: I’m big believer in democracy and republics, but a really cynical take on the whole system is “the peasants get a chance to choose who which aristocrat rules them…and occasional elevate one of their own.”

I had a similar ordeal cancelling The Economist subscription in 2020.

I had to call someone (offshore) who tried to retain me with months free, and then started trying to push emails (???) which I explicitly said no to... and then they turned them all on anyway when I cancelled. I don't have a way to turn them off so they go straight to spam now ("unsubscribe" doesn't work, and I don't care enough to escalate any further)

Never subscribing for news again - they're killing themselves at this point.

Yup, The Economist are terrible spammers. I tried many many times to get them to stop sending me all that garbage about their events and whatever, and they just don't do it. Fortunately I have an email address custom to them, so I just deleted it. Now when my subscription lapses I won't get the notifications.

Here's the thing about The Economist: everything they do that is not related to journalism is a complete shitshow. Subscriptions, phone app, spamming, just awful.

I can’t say I’ve had an issue with spam. I remember receiving a few emails that I unsubscribed from. The link at the bottom of the email worked.

Phone app - subjective, but it’s one of the few I allow on my phone.

Agree, but this isn't all bad: their broken Web platform gave me free online access for years, because I noticed the "temporary instant access" link from the original subscription confirmation email was both reusable, and had no apparent expiration date, so continued to yield "temporary instant access" on-demand for at least five years after my subscription lapsed, and only stopped working as an apparent side-effect of a site reorganization that included a new authentication flow that wasn't compatible with the old link.

As far as I know, it'd still work if I took the time to figure out how to enter promo codes into the new system, but, hey, it was a good run.

It's a little easier now. They have a chat interface. When I cancelled recently I included "I'm not interested in offers for reduced price subscriptions" in my first message. They didn't push it and my subscription was canceled 5 minutes or so.

I wonder if it is still possible to subscribe by mail. I originally subscribed that way awhile ago, but within the last couple of years let my subscription lapse and that was the end of it (other than the frequent letters trying to get me to re-subscribe).

For WSJ if you change your billing address to California you can cancel online. I dunno if that's true for every subscription, though.

Its a california law so most places accept it.

There's no incentive to ever make cancellation easy nor any incentive to make cancellers feel valued.

Of course there is. If you piss someone off while they're cancelling, it's less likely you'll get repeat business. People cancel and then renew subscriptions on all kinds of things all the time.

Aside from making it much less likely that customers will return, it'll also lead to threads (and word of mouth) like this which will deter some, and if you overdo it, it even risks attracting regulation.

That may not be enough of an incentive to overcome the immediate benefit, but it's not nothing.

I subscribe to a big paper in the city I live in (like, the actual sunday paper delivery). I tried to explain MULTIPLE times to their support people that I did not want all of the extra advertisement crap that came with the paper (pretty standard with any paper - not the small amount of ads/classifieds in the paper itself - all of the extra pamphlets they include)

Their support people could just not even comprehend WHAT I was even talking about - they kept circling back to "pop-up ads" and if I had tried a pop-up blocking extension. It was a never ending circle of confusion :-D

> I tried to explain MULTIPLE times to their support people that I did not want all of the extra advertisement crap that came with the paper

Is this even an option they offer or just one you wished existed?

No idea but I figured I might as well try. I would have been willing to pay a few bucks extra if it was - relatively cheap just for sunday delivery as it is. Mainly thought it was funny they were so confused

It's not like asking to leave pickles off your burger. I'm kind of amazed that anybody would make this request and think it reasonable but shoot your shot I guess.

Yes, as a former paperboy I can say newspapers (obviously!) don’t have some bespoke assembling process for each customer that would allow for this level of individualization.

Forcing you to talk to someone to unsub is a gross dark pattern, but fwiw, I used the live chat and it wasn’t that bad.

We started receiving the Sunday paper from one of the local papers around here. We all checked our accounts and none of us had been charged. We didn't get mail, email, or anything else from this paper. Originally I thought it must have been someone else's newspaper, so I just left it out there to see if anyone came asking and also asked a couple neighbors, but nothing. Figured whoever it was would call the paper and complain, but this went on for about 12 Sundays and ended up resolving itself somehow (maybe the subscription lapsed?). Just ended up throwing them in the recycling as a matter of course.

There was no way in hell I was going to bother with a call to the newspaper. They'd be confused for the first half of the conversation, then even if they figured it out, they'd spend the second half trying to sell me a subscription, like I wasn't already getting it for free.

In the mid 90s I bought some VHS tapes from Playboy. They put me on a subscription to the magazine. Never subscribed, was never charged for it. I had just gotten out of college and so was still living at my mother’s place. That was a little embarrassing. Once I made it clear I wasn’t actually interested in the magazine, her husband grabbed them as they came in. I forgot about it.

My mother eventually divorced him and one day I was visiting and she pointed out that Playboy was still being delivered and that she certainly didn’t have any interest in it. That was 8 years after they were first being sent. Got on the phone and thankfully the unsubscribe process was easy.

I've been through that twice but now I'm on a $1 a month subscription which is worth it even if I read nothing some months.

I've also had that experience at one point (cancelling NYT sub over the phone).

Then there was a big discount, I bought it again, wasn't reading it again, so cancelled it recently again...

and this time there was actually a button in the UI to do it in a few seconds. Might be related to me being in the EU though.

I always use cards I can freeze or PayPal and the like, so I don’t have to call anyone, I just freeze the card or stop recurring payments via PayPal.

I live in California, so all of this is online. I just go online and cancel. I remember before, though, when I had to call. Everyone was total shit: the Economist, the WSJ, the NYT.

But California baby. You can hate us. But we lead the USA into a better world.

News websites are so terrible about canceling that its actually a feature on a news site I built at https://legiblenews.com/upgrades/hassle-free-cancelation

It has to be one of the stupidest features I’ve ever written, but sadly it’s where we are today with the average news website.

Another really stupid feature is simply building a news website that doesn’t blast you in the face with 10Mb of ads. Legible News has a 100 score on Google Page Speed insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flegiblene.... It FULLY loads in about 1s on mobile and desktop.

Compare that to NYTimes that takes about 10s to fully load: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytim.... Pretty much any news website you plug in there will get a score of 25, take 10s to load, and hardcore spy on you. Thanks advertisements!

I wrote more about the many problems of traditional news websites at https://legiblenews.com/about.

Check it out at https://legiblenews.com/ — daily news is free, there’s no third party scripts or tracking, and if you like it the cost is $10/year at https://legiblenews.com/plus (I’m probably going to raise prices soon by a few bucks)

News services, like the NYT, is doing themselves a HUGE disservice by making cancelling so hard. I’ve subscribed to NYT twice, and in general I’ve been very impressed by the quality of their content. But the second time I had to go through all their BS to cancel, i swore I would never subscribe again.

If you want something very British, Private Eye is an absolute blast. It's only available in dead-tree form and has a lot of real, high quality investigative journalism sprinkled in amongst the cartoons and satire. You can get a fairly good idea if you'll like it from their website [1].

The podcast, Page 94, is also excellent [2] and is sparsely updated, but they do good things when it is. For an example of the "WTFBBQ" stories they cover, have a look at "The Snooty Fox" episode [3], which covers the rather horrid tale of a pub landlord who pissed off a council member by accidentally overcharging her, and ended up punitively investigated by the food standards people, bankrupted and quite literally imprisoned for several years. He finally secured justice after more than 20 years when the council authority ceased to exist (and its successor apologised hugely and unreservedly – his convictions were quashed and later counter-sued for £14m [4]).

One other thing – cancelling the subscription is trivial.

[1] https://www.private-eye.co.uk/ [2] https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast [3] https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/68 [4] https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1547675/pub-landlord-the-s...

Another vote for the eye. It's amazing the number of stories that first appear there before being picked up by larger outlets years later. The post office scandal is a prime example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

LRB perhaps as well.

For anyone claiming NYT quality has gone downhill should try and read this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/08/arts/design/d...

This article has single handedly ignited my interest in arts and paintings. This is just an example but in general what I find great about NYT is the way they do storytelling with mixture of interactive visualization and text-based news and facts.

I read this article and a week later came across one of his works (with the signature lemon peel!) at the Met. Would not have been able to recognize him without it. I love how the NYT experiments with different mediums, like their weekly friday news quiz, their stellar cooking app, the crosswords, and now these little art explorations

Their tech is quite decent and open source too:

https://github.com/nytimes

I think the BBC does something similar as well:

https://github.com/bbc/

NYT's visual journalism team is top-notch.

This was great!

IMO the NYT really shines with their arts/culture sections! Makes the subscription worth it for me personally.

I do feel like their politics/opinion sections have gone downhill.

But every now and then they do a long-form article which convinces me to re-subscribe for a year. This one was incredible: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/world/asia/the-jungle-pri...

Really enjoyed that! Thanks!

I already subscribe to NYT and this makes me feel good about it.

Thank you for this one! Do you follow any of their newsletters?

Yes I do subscribe to their Upshot and Weekender newsletters. The weekender especially shows the breadth and depth of great NYT journalism.

Thanks I'm going to look up what Upshot is about.

Their visual journalism is some of the best in the industry and often gets overshadowed by the print shenanigans.

+1 Economist

- When they cover something I’m knowledgeable about, they get the facts right, so I trust them in other areas

- App lets me listen to the weekly edition read by humans

- Only comes out weekly (so no daily bullshit treadmill, and they have time to get things right)

- Genuinely useful and interesting info. Since I switched from NYT to the Economist it’s like I have supernatural powers to see into the future; nothing surprises me anymore. Recent issues where I knew what was coming months to weeks before others: COVID, post-COVID inflation, Ukraine

I listened to the podcasts for months before paying to subscribe, and the podcasts (The Intelligence and Economist Asks are favorites) cover some of the content of the weekly edition. If you like the podcasts, you’ll love the genuine article.

Same, I subscribed a few months ago and i think it's pretty amazing. Esp the weekly cadence: turns out that being up to a week behind on major news items is quite the blessing. More often than not, the dust will have settled and the Economist can write a balanced analysis.

Another +1. Although I don’t necessarily believe neoliberalism is the best thing ever at least the Economist doesn’t hide its editorial stance and generally supports regulation where it’s needed. And there is plenty of really good content (book reviews, science/tech, coverage of Russia-Ukraine war) that doesn’t have a political skew one might dislike.

For a general news pub, either The Economist or the New York Times. They have pros and cons depending upon what you're interested in. Both of them are a bit rich for my blood given that they're mostly competing for a fixed amount of bandwidth on my part. Personally, at the moment, I get the NYT (I've had The Economist in the past) but it's a fairly close call.

Is also recommend Bloomberg to go with the Economist subscription. It has all the right ingredients to keep you on top of all worthwhile news.

The Economist is owned by a few ultra rich families, 43.5% by the Italian Agnelli family

Do you get the magazine as well?

I read the Financial Times and The Economist. I think they are pretty well researched without leaning in a specific direction too much. The comments on FT are also mostly very civil, with good discussion.

The Guardian is “intelligent” but is way too blatantly leftist, to get any sort of balanced information.

Seconding the Economist. When I read it, I find I can stay in the loop without having to follow the news daily. A weekly high level summary is good enough for me.

Second both FT and The Economist. You can get by just with the Economist if you are happy with it being a weekly.

Both FT and Economist are very good at not including any fluff, in the language they use and in the content itself.

the FT has probably the best info:word count ratio of any daily publication i’ve ever read

Everything is biased. I quite like The Economist but it's liberal, "markets first", stance is just as much an ideology as anything The Guardian espouses. Its trick is to make itself seem above the fray, offering a god's eye dispassionate opinion. It is clever marketing and presentation.

I rate it for world affairs and it is a good news source. I just think it gets undue levels of praise.

This, the financial focused papers have to at least be somewhat honest in their reporting as investors and other business folks depend on their reporting. Vs advocacy of whichever social/political/etc issue is currently in vogue.

How do you explain the popularity among that crowd of the Wall Street Journal?

The WSJ news section is generally described as center-right, and the editorial pages as hard-right

The WSJ is published by the same organization as Fox News.

Hard-right implies nationalism or even fascism.

I think you mean conservative. I think it's important to be able to articulate the ideas of those we disagree with. One can be supportive of right-wing economic ideas and socially conservative positions without being hard-right. I say this as a moderate reader of the WSJ, and not a Republican.

The silo-ing of ideas leads to alienation among people and preconceptions of what the other people believe and who they are. That's tearing the country apart.

The WSJ advocated nationalism and was a fellow traveller with fascists during the Trump administration. The WSJ editorial page definitely includes substantional hard right content.

> The silo-ing of ideas leads to alienation among people and preconceptions of what the other people believe and who they are.

The WSJ is the most siloed of the major publications. I challenge you to find anything supporting a Democratic or liberal position. As I wrote in another comment, I once collected about two weeks of opinion articles, which IIRC was abouyt 200 of them. As I recall, only one included (not advocated) any support of a Democratic position, only three included any support of liberal positions.

The NY Times covers the political spectrum, from Ross Douthat to Bret Stephens (former WSJ opinion page editor) to David Brooks, etc.

That's an un-nuanced take. The NYT or WP Editorials aren't? I will say things have improved but look at the headlines throughout 2020 and 2021, at least on U.S. social topics, of the NYT. The editorial page spilled outside of the opinion section. Almost every article about any topic, from domestic policies to art to education or health, was about an identity issue. BTW, Brett Stephens almost got booted, as the staff revolted, if you recall.

However I'm not going to defend the WSJ - I'm only going to point out that you're overlaying your own political litmus tests and establishing a spectrum that reasonable people can disagree with. It doesn't matter if you polled 200 articles, because your criteria are debatable (along with Trump = fascism, and I loathe Trump).

Fascism is something you could define objectively with agreed definitions with a historical context: there are philosophical underpinnings and political programs. Fascism as a label is not subject to arbitrary definitions outside of student activist circles.

These claims about the NYT are popular on the right, but can you substantiate them? Otherwise, it's just like the opinion pieces everywhere.

> The NYT or WP Editorials aren't?

I don't know about the WP, but I gave plenty of examples of the ideological spread of the NYT opinion pages.

> t doesn't matter if you polled 200 articles, because your criteria are debatable

OK, debate them! I think they are rather objective and uncontroversial.

> I challenge you to find anything supporting a Democratic or liberal position.

Three weeks ago the editorial section ran a piece by Joe Biden: https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-plan-for-fighting-inflation-...

Interesting, but it's a piece by the POTUS, so we might call that an exception.

The Wall Street Journal _used_ to be a good financial reporting paper. The editorial page has always been hard-right (varying between mercantilism to straight-up fascism depending on the era) but the general reporting was solid and you could depend on it to tell you the truth with as little spin as possible. This was very important when it was the primary source of business and financial news in the US. By the time Murdoch bought it things had started to slip a little because Bloomberg had eaten a large chunk of the 'deliver fact-based news I can use to make trading decisions' mandate and as you would expect, everything Murdoch touches turns to shit. The current WSJ is now basically a print version of Fox Business News and will never regain the trust and reputation it once commanded.

> The current WSJ is now basically a print version of Fox Business News and will never regain the trust and reputation it once commanded.

You and I are the only people I know who think that. Everyone else I know treats the WSJ just like they did pre-Murdoch.

It's comical to call the Economist unbiased. They make their bias very very clear.

I think a better way to put it is that The Economist has a bias unique to itself. They typically publish articles which are consistent with their own particular editorial voice rather than remaining properly dispassionate.

Really, the big difference between The Economist and other popular "biased" publications is that The Economist has avoided becoming a party mouthpiece. Yes, it's certainly a political publication, but they arrive at that position without having fallen prey to the usual motivated reasoning. I credit this unusual distinction to the international nature of their operation and the focusing effect granted by virtue of hanging everything on a single overarching topic.

TheGuardian.com is worth it, in my opinion. It's not expensive, and it gives world news, not just national news. The proofreading on the website is not impressive, though, compared with the weekly paper version (to which I also subscribe).

I've also had WP and NYT subscriptions, and I think these are fine choices. One thing, though: I found it quite difficult to cancel my NYT subscription. Subscriptions are like hash functions -- easy in one direction and hard in the other.

I can easily cancel on the nytimes.com by going to settings. I’m in Asia though so maybe it is different on your region.

I also like "the guardian", it is also less US centered, and has some great coverage of movies and technology ethics). The only catch is that the android subscription is not valid on the computer or any other device than android.

Unfortunately the quality has also gone downhill and they’ve switched from news reporting to pushing an agenda.

It's always had a left-wing angle, but it has become more strident in recent years as the comment section began to dominate. Their straight news reporting is generally pretty good. I read it even though I'm not at all aligned with the politics of many of the writers.

They did a piece once on a subject with which I'm very familiar (a fairly controversial thing that happened in my city). They asked for feedback from the public at large before publishing it, and I filled out the questionnaire.

What came out was a disgrace. Straight up propaganda, writing up only the exact words of the only person they interviewed -- easily the most controversial person in the entire city. But you see, he's far left and entirely in line with The Guardian's agenda.

I will never read The Guardian again. It is not a newspaper; it's a propaganda rag of no news value.

I was supporting them for a while.

Unfortunately, over the past few years, they stopped doing journalism and are just trying to output the same misleading clickbait as everyone else, interspersed with ideology-driven, fact-free propaganda pieces.

I used to subscribe to the Guardian, and then I read one article whcih was so blatantly false and politically motivated that it made me question why I have ever decided to subscribe in the first place.

I really, really respect that they make their articles available for free though, so I still feel compelled to pay them, it’s just that I don’t want to read their articles any more.

Another vote for FT ( Financial Times). Pricey, but reporting is good and covers a vast arrays of topics and geos ( i can read about FC Barcelona's financial troubles, the fall of the latest Bulgarian cabinet and why that's going to end bad, an investigative report about fraud in Wirecard, etc. and it will be in decent depth), is factually correct and gets updated when it isn't.

I really like the FT. If someone is considering the WSJ, I’d highly recommend getting FT instead. I had access to both while working at a hedge fund and read them both all the time, but much preferred FT.

If you're in the Apple ecosystem, subscribing and unsubscribing to several of these news sources, so long as you read them in Apple's News app, becomes a lot easier, though it can be more expensive than going direct to the publisher. But hey, you get dark mode! And no major hassle when you want to stop a subscription!

As far as quality of news, I'd echo the sentiment others have given that Wall Street Journal's factual reporting is stellar, but their opinion and editorial pieces leave a lot to be desired. I'd say the same about The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

The Atlantic is decent for thoughtful editorials as can be The New Yorker, but honestly, you're just going to run into some sensationalism and knee-jerk, politically-motivated slant no matter what editorial/opinion sources you choose, so caveat emptor.

It's too bad the Apple news app is so user hostile. If you block a news source they don't remove it from any grids, they just hide images and text and replace it with something saying you've blocked the source. I block a lot of sources so it gets ugly fast.

I blocked a news source and I still see it in the Top Stories area all the time. It made me wonder what the point was.

It also bombarde me with celebrity gossip I don’t care about. I’ve started hitting the button to hide certain topics, but I’m always hesitant. I don’t need to know every time Will Smith posts a tweet, but if he slaps Chris Rock in the middle of an award show, I’d be interested in that. Apple News seems to have trouble surfacing just the big stuff I might care about.

That being said, I do like they it gives me access to the WSJ.

I agree! I have subscribed before to NYT, Economist using Apple’s subscriptions and therefore never had any issues in unsubscribing, or needing to call somebody to unsubscribe.

Another vote for The Economist.

It is a weekly publication with good writers. Meaning: it is rarely, if ever, sensational, and covers prominent issues around the globe so I stay informed after about 60 minutes of reading. I still haven't figured out which way the editorial staff swings because they do a good job of keeping explicit bias out, but they seem to be left of center.

I also subscribe to The Atlantic. They are solid long-form reporting, but occasionally they get a really far-out article.

I used to get The Baffler, great out-of-the-box ideas, but the content was too depressing.

The Economist is very definitely on the right economically, and on the left socially. In other words it's classic liberal, and they regularly make that clear. They've been going with more opinion pieces in the last few years, which is not an improvement IMHO.

Only real downside to The Economist though is their app. It's a complete embarrassment, the worst I've seen. It's comically bad, don't-just-fire-them-shoot-them bad.

The app could be better, but the access to actual human narration of all articles outweighs the downsides IMO. Maybe the reading experience is bad?

For listening, I download the weekly copy and that makes it a bit more reliable.

If anyone from the economist is listening, please give me the option of putting the next 15s, previous 15s buttons on the Lock Screen (it matches what I do for podcasts).

Yes, the reading experience is what's so bad. Very often when you're reading it'll suddenly crash, or blank the page, or switch to a random page in the next issue, etc etc etc.

A few months ago they broke swiping, if you can believe that. It's now suddenly hard to swipe to the next article, because it wants to scroll up or down instead. How the hell do you break swiping in an Android app in 2022!

And to top it all off, the insult on top of the ridiculously bad experience: the regular pop-up (when you're reading), to ask how you like the app? Type your feedback here! Which is 100% ignored of course, for YEARS. I've taken to just sending in "fuck you".

What, me bitter?

It sounds like the Android app is worse than the iOS app. Unfortunately, that means my recent discovery won't help you, but will hopefully help others:

With the Apple News app, you can log in to your Economist account and get access to the economist content through the News app.

For what it's worth I was having exactly the same experience as you on my Pixel 1. But a few weeks ago I upgraded to the latest pixel and the app works great now.

I suspect that the app is just so heavy and bloated that it performs really poorly on older phones.

Not that there's any excuse for that. All it should be doing is displaying some text so you'd think it would be pretty lightweight.

I agree that the app is awful (in particular, it's both slow and buggy), but the content in the app is amazing. Eg it has posh Brits who sound like they got plucked straight from the country club reading every single article out loud, it's super handy and delightfully done.

I’ve been reading the Economist digitally using their app for years. They had a few issues over the years - I think they prevented copy/paste for a minute. I was pissed about that.

But now I love the app. The typography is decent, they support light/dark themes, you can play human-read audio of every piece individually, etc.

I’m curious, what are your problems with the app?

+1 for Economist.

Don't let the titles of New York Review of Books and London Review of Books fool you. They do much longer view of contemporary news but thru book review.

Most news is probably not worth following every day. The rearview mirror of a weekly magazine gives better context than trying to follow most news the same day when details are still ongoing.

I live in Seattle and pay for The Seattle Times. Anyone who can afford their local paper should probably subscribe. I learn a lot about how Seattle works from the paper. You can get federal news anywhere, that is boring. Make sure you are informed about local and state issues.

Yes, I live outside of Detroit, have been here for 7 years, and have learned just so much more about the city since I started subscribing to the Detroit Free Press late last year.

The ST reprints a lot of NYT articles for their non-local news. Too bad they never reprint WSJ articles.

I cancelled my Seattle Times subscription since the ads on their site are garbage. From the full page red and yellow "Video Only!" ads to some that would redirect to some scam site on mobile without clicking. After complaining repeatedly by email I decided to vote with my wallet and called to unsubscribe. They did their whole retention spiel and said I should just use an ad blocker on their site...

Some of the local coverage was good, but I prefer even more focused coverage like CHS Blog/The Urbanist/Seattle Transit Blog and Geekwire.

I know paper is old-school, but it's a lot easier to ignore the ads there, so I pay for the Sunday paper.

> Some of the local coverage was good, but I prefer even more focused coverage like CHS Blog/The Urbanist/Seattle Transit Blog and Geekwire.

Are these all Seattle-centered? Which of these do you recommend the most?

Pretty much all Seattle centered except maybe Geekwire that’s a bit broader. If you live in Capitol Hill, then CHS blog is by far the one I’d recommend the most

> I cancelled my Seattle Times subscription since the ads on their site are garbage.

Install an ad blocker.

I want to subscribe to a local paper but I can't get over the fact that they charge 3x as much as I pay for a Washington Post subscription. There just isn't that much news going on here.

A lot of the suggestions here are for USA national or local regional news. For international news, Foreign Policy (foreignpolicy.com) is excellent. It avoids the "Breaking News" noise trap and instead explains the context and significance of world events. Largely apolitical with a slight slant of liberal internationalism.

I have subscriptions to the Economist (never had a problem pausing or canceling my subscription), the Athletic for sports (they always give me a huge discount when I try to cancel), and since the war in Ukraine started I have subscriptions the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for $4/month each (those will be a pain in the ass to cancel).

If you're worried about canceling and getting billed, put it on a credit card, and if you still get billed dispute the charge as "unauthorized" and block the merchant

+1 for The Economist. I enjoy their international coverage.

FYI every time I try to cancel my NYT subscription, they give me a deep discount. Also, if you have an All-Access NYT subscription, it now includes The Athletic. I cancelled my Athletic subscription a while back, but since it's included in NYT now, I'm more inclined to keep my NYT subscription and kill both birds with one stone.

Yes this was my “trick” before. Right before my NYTimes subscription ends I always take on their $0.25 per month offer but I am not sure if they’re gonna introduce it again this time. Thank you for the advice, I have an Athletic subscription and no idea it is already included in NYTimes. This is a game changer for sure.

I’m not familiar with WSJ, how good is there coverage on world news?

Pretty good I gotta say. More emphasis on business/economic issues than the Times

Excellent for English Language financial news, and probably just OK compared to the NYT for political news.

> the Athletic for sports

I would be wary of supporting The Athletic at this exact moment. Just last week they issued new corporate directives to their journalists barring them from covering anything political. This might sound good in theory, people follow sports as an escape from their life including topics like politics. However, there is no way to talk about sports intelligently without the ability to discuss politics.

What is currently happening in golf is a great example. A new league has just started up that is financed by the Saudi government as a means of sportswashing[1] their international reputation. Discussing a league like this without touching on politics would be both inherently lacking and a gift to the Saudi government.

I would recommend a subscription to Defector if you are looking to a sports site to support. Here is their article[2] on the new rules at The Athletic.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportswashing

[2] - https://defector.com/the-nyt-owned-athletic-lays-down-new-no...

Absolutely recommend Defector. Hands-down the best place on the internet, just a joy of skilled folks who love and care about what they do, no funny business.

None, there's no reason to follow the news. You're better off reading history books if you want to understand geopolitics / finance / whatever.

I'm pretty close to this myself. I still want to stay up on current events, without opinion pieces, entertainment, and other junk I don't care about.

Closest I found was turning on Bloomberg for an hour or two in the morning randomly, but wish there was a print/site like that.

How do you know Bloomberg isn't an opinion piece?

Truth is hard to come by these days.

Subscription to your regional or local newspaper will help you connect more with your community. We have so many wonderful regional newspapers. You can choose from your region.

  - Los Angeles Times
  - Chicago Tribune
  - The Boston Globe
  - San Francisco Chronicle
  - Miami Herald
  - Dallas Observer
  - Houston Chronicle
  - Denver Post
  - Star Tribune

I paid for LA Times but it logged me out so frequently that it became very frustrating to use. NY Times on the other hand never logs me out.

> I paid for LA Times but it logged me out so frequently that it became very frustrating to use.

Do you clear your browser's cookies often?

I've had that happen with ArsTechnica. I log in, read an article, maybe some comments. My build is finished. I run some tests, do some debugging. I changed a header that everything includes, so here comes another long build. Back to Ars... and I'm logged out. I subscribed specifically to not see ads, and as soon as I'm logged out, ads start showing up. I literally never read more than 1 article per half hour, so it basically defeated the point. I'd be logged out after every article I read. I canceled, which was surprisingly easy given the dark patterns that other people here experience with NYT, et al.

I have a subscription to AppleNews. I don't love it, but I get the same Ars articles with far fewer ads and no auto-play video wasting my bandwidth. I don't love Apple's algorithm for finding me content, but it's not the worst I've seen. Sometimes it's spot-on, and other times way off. What's more irritating to me about it are the following:

1) Shows me an article I'm not interested in, so I don't click it. It keeps showing me that article for the next 10 weeks. Sometimes hides it for a week or two, then suddenly brings it back for no discernible reason.

2) No granularity on how to tell it why you did or didn't like an article in your feed. For example, it was shoving some sex-related article from Cosmo at me. I don't mind sex-related articles. I'm not a huge fan of Cosmo (not really the target demo, but whatever). But if I click "Show me less like this" (thumbs down), is the signal "sex articles," "Cosmopolitan," "articles we've repeatedly shown you that you haven't clicked on," or something else entirely?

3) News sources that I've said I never want to see (Fox News, People Magazine) are sometimes "featured" which means instead of putting a different article where that one would have been, I get a blank spot in the feed that says, "You have asked not to see articles from People magazine." Yeah, thanks. I don't need to be reminded of that. Just put something else there!

4) Sections show up where you have no ability to like, dislike, or remove them. This week it's a section on Major League Baseball, because guess who just got rights to show MLB games? AppleTV+. Great, I don't begrudge others who want to watch baseball. I just couldn't care less and never want to see any article about baseball in my feed. I'm paying for this, so it isn't like they can justify it by, "we need to sell your eyeballs to others to make money."

Given all that, it's still the least-worst option I've found at the moment. It's mostly leading me to just read less news, which is better for me anyway.

not every local newspaper has local ownership. for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Gannet...

The primary Dallas local is the Dallas Morning News

Yea I really like going local. Even if something like the LA Times is a huge newspaper they still have a lot of cool little local stories that you would probably never hear about otherwise. Then again I am getting the physical delivery so it may be the format that is encouraging such things as well vs just reading their website.

The Seattle Times

There are some good writers on dedicated subscription platforms, unfortunately forking out for several of them quickly costs substantially more than a single one to a "legacy" provider.

Example: For an alternative view into US politics to some of the hopelessly biased mainstream platforms you could try Tangle, but that's just one unfortunately.

https://www.readtangle.com/

It would be nice if you could collate several of those sort together but I guess that's what the old style providers are still good at.

Came to endorse Tangle. I’m a huge fan of what is being built there.

I'm actually fairly happy with NYT. They still cover most topics, although generally I agree they aren't as great as they were. They are pretty much my local paper too I guess.

I like to stop by a news stand and pick up an Atlantic, or New Yorker from time to time, and whatever else seems interesting.

This all depends on how you're approaching the question. Why do you want to read the news?

What do you hope to get out of it? You're absolutely right that the NYT has changed in recent years, but that change has been part of systemic shifts that have affected all of journalism as it existed before the internet.

For most outlets, "the news" is now substantially more infotainment and in-group sermonizing than it used to be. Buzzfeed-y clickbait and Facebook-y rageporn juice engagement numbers like little else. Competition for your attention online is fierce and, with access to alternatives at the click of a button, audiences have very little appetite to continue reading an outlet that publishes things they don't agree with.

Are you looking to stay abreast of conversational topics in certain social circles? Are you looking for high-quality information that will help you form more accurate predictions about the world? If so, what types of predictions are most important to you? Economic? Social? Political?

Do you like your facts presented in an editorialized fashion or do you want events to be reported without being nudged to feel one way or another about them? Do you just want a news source that provides fun stuff to read? Do you read the news because you're not very into sports and books are too long? (I've been there in life.) How important are polish and sleek UIs to you? Do you want to read content that goes down easy or do you want to survey a broad set of views on subjects to know what other people are thinking even if some of that makes you angry or confused?

This is maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I'd use this decision as an opportunity to step back and reflect on the bigger question of why you want a subscription to a news publication in the first place.

Once you have the answer to some of those questions, that should help narrow down your search.

If you're interested in some articles that further reflect on changes in the news, I'd recommend these two: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displaceme... and https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-is-americas-new-relig...

I let my NYT subscription lapse because their articles were clearly pushing an agenda rather than reporting the news.

I now subscribe to the WSJ. That way I can get the business and financial news I'm interested in by people who are educated in business and finance, rather than activism.

> I now subscribe to the WSJ. That way I can get the business and financial news I'm interested in by people who are educated in business and finance, rather than activism.

I don't think that's a fair characterization of NYT. I'm curious if you're putting NYT's reporting and NYT's op-eds into the same bucket.

> I let my NYT subscription lapse because their articles were clearly pushing an agenda rather than reporting the news.

There aren't many large publications that publish w/o an angle, whether that effort is in the name of truthiness or personal gain is difficult to discern.

In my opinion, the only solution to the 'getting unbiased news consistently' problem is solved with news aggregations. Looking at the diff between the major publications on any specific story may not reveal which angle/agenda is the most true, but it will reveal the variables that are being used to steer the ship.

I can distinguish the news articles from the op-ed ones. The news articles were horribly slanted. Just their choice of words for the headline made it glaringly obvious that their news articles were opinion pieces. They didn't even try.

I know the WSJ is biased, too. But their headlines tend to be neutral.

https://youtu.be/ozg7gEchjuM?t=106

> I let my NYT subscription lapse because their articles were clearly pushing an agenda rather than reporting the news.

Are you sure you weren't reading something from the Opinion section?

This thread illustrates the problem where reporters rely on sources on one side of an issue. If it isn’t pushing an agenda, it’s extremely lazy journalism: https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1533168009140916225

Are you willing to look beyond US issues? Check out Le Monde Diplomatique https://mondediplo.com/

Thanks! Yes I am more interested in geopolitics and long reads. Let me check it out.

Anyone aware of any news or magazines subscriptions that distribute their issues with EPUB as an option? I like to do my reading on a Kobo, and EPUB is supposed to be the standard for such things, even though it seems like 95% of magazines use a Kindle format or a PDF for their digital stuff.

The only publication I'm aware of was Linux Journal back in the day, but it's gone now.

Have you considered setting up Calibre to automatically fetch and convert articles?

I mean, I could probably use Pocket for that, which Kobo already integrates with. It seems to do a decent job of getting stuff from behind the paywall.

But no, I don't want to setup a Calibre workflow because I don't want my Kobo flooded with the stuff. If we estimate 15-18 articles per normal issue, that's 18 distinct files that Calibre would pull down instead of just one EPUB that I can read and discard when I'm done with it.

Main ones are NYT and Economist. I don't see how the NYT has gone downhill as much as they have broadened a bit into some less serious stuff. Their mainstream news coverage is still second to none.

Otherwise, I lean towards non-profit news like NPR and local affiliates, ProPublica, The Markup, Grist. They all cost nothing, but monthly gifts are accepted.

The Financial Times is the best Western generalist publication by far.

It is... hard to do better.

I subscribe to FT and get the physical paper.

What makes it so useful to me is that its political bias is largely divorced from American politics. They may have a bias on topics in Britain, but my American sensibilities aren't tuned to pick up on them.

Also, financial news sources in general don't spend a lot of time on the highly charged red vs blue stories unless they somehow affect markets or the economy.

I canceled the NYT about two years ago when I felt the paper took what seemed like a closed-minded and inflammatory turn in order to 'take a stand' and appeal to its subscribers. I don't care how cheap it got, I could no longer support a paper like that (after many years of doing so).

I try to stick to the financial press since the financial press has an interest in objective facts at least some of the time, since its readers use the information to inform investment decisions. WSJ and Bloomberg. I had an FT subscription, which I think is much better than the previous two (especially for international news and commentary), but it's also quite pricey.

For daily News: WSJ and NYT

For global news: The Economist (simply the best!)

For Science news: National Geographic (more on photography and travel side), Scientific American (A little more hard science but especially good to keep up with space related scientific progress)

I'd recommend the Economist. It's a lot less US centric. It is more expensive.

I am very happy with https://newsasfacts.com/. It helps me to catch up on global events in usually under a minute.

Interesting! They have a nice logo btw.

The NY Times. I get annoyed with their obviously feminist agenda in some articles but I just skip those. Their methodology is stellar though and the articles are well researched and in-depth.

> I get annoyed with their obviously feminist agenda in some articles but I just skip those.

Interesting. Do you have links to examples?

WSJ, if you can ignore their editorial page, which is so blatantly biased and promotes so much false information that it is a surprise its a part of the same news organization.

Seconded. I subscribed to Financial Times for a year, whose prose, editorial balance, and coverage insight are noticeably inferior to The Wall Street Journal's. I also subscribed to The Economist and feel it is also inferior, but it is a weekly, so that's kind of comparing kettles and fish.

I subscribe to Noam Chomsky's opinion that the best journalism is found in the financial press because businesses need a more accurate and timely view of what's going on.

And yes, the op-eds are a blemish on the paper's outstanding journalistic reputation. It got jammed full of cronies after News Corp purchased the paper. Its workaday editorial staff remain fiercely independent, however.

agreed. It's expensive, but I bit the bullet and subscribed 2 years ago and I find the non-editorial articles to be incredibly high quality.

The iPad app could be better.

I'd recommend avoiding the news. As far as I can tell, the news exists to sell ads.

That said, if you still want to read the news and have access to an Apple device, why not consider Apple News+? It's just about the only news service I'm aware of where you can cancel your subscription without any hassle and you get multiple news sources to boot.

NYT, WSJ, Economist and all the other commonly-recommended news places are a hassle to cancel.

> I'd recommend avoiding the news. As far as I can tell, the news exists to sell ads

The ask in this Ask HN is literally about subscription news, which rarely have ads ( for instance FT do, but they're ads for conferences and stuff they run, so it's kind of acceptable).

> That said, if you still want to read the news and have access to an Apple device, why not consider Apple News+?

Same with Google News/Play, subscribing/unsubscribing is quite easy.

Really love the Apple News+ subscription. Includes a ton of content including WSJ.

I also subscribe separately to NYT & Washington Post. All great options.

> I’m not sure if anyone noticed but NYTimes’ quality has gone downhill for the past 2-3 years

This has been said every year for my entire life. I would keep the NY Times, but also:

* The Financial Times is on the NY Times level IMHO, but far more expensive

* The Wall Street Journal is published by the same people behind Fox News. It's Fox News for the elite - framed in ways appealing to them, and trading on an old established brand. Same results, IME.

* The Economist can be fantastic in terms of knowledge gained / minute. It's ideologically free-market - applying that tool to every situation. And it's not actually journalism, it's analysis: They generally don't dig up stories, interview people, etc. They summarize and analyze.

* The Washington Post is nearly on the NYT level, IMHO.

* Maybe The Guardian?

That's it. Nothing else worth paying for (in English).

The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash. Notice I didn't say anything about politics of left or right - I think there's trash there of both sides. We're talking people who are not good writers, who add nothing to public discourse, and who I would say spread a lot of at best half-truths and ill-informed ideas. So, I can't see paying for either one even though at least some of the journalism outside those sections is at least ok. Frankly, I think they both ride their past reputations and the fact they have survived by being in major urban centers while their past competitors (IE: small town newspapers, etc) have died.

The WSJ has equally horrid opinion pages, as does my local paper. Editorial sections are basically trash in general, avoid them like the plague and your experience will be much better.

Editorial sections are “clickbait” even before that was a thing. They’ve always existed to fire people up and sell papers.

The WSJ deserves its own special place in hell. Once upon a time 20ish+ years ago, it was solid business and economic news. Then they decided to do a redesign to be more general news, and then Murdoch came along and turned them into the comics.

I don't give The Economist a pass either. I started reading it in high school decades ago. Over time, they've moved away from deep journalism towards more of a weekly recap. If I want to know what happened this week, frankly I can get that from Twitter or Apple News for free. What is lacking is the kind of forward, somewhat out there perspective. There are still little bits of this with The Economist, but its a shell of its former self. I'd also remark that they have an angle on the world that I find at time ethically questionable.

WaPo's opinion articles are by far the worst thing about their paper, and some of the writers are worse than others (Thiessen is a master of bad faith arguments and dishonesty), so I've been avoiding reading them. I wish they had a way to permanently hide them in the app.

I think that describes all opinion writers. I (almost) never read them. If you are reasonably well-informed about an issue, almost every opinion article is transparent nonsense and manipulation.

The only exceptions I've seen are Will Bunch, who writes for one of the local big city US news publications but seems to get wider distribution (maybe syndicated?), and The Bulwark, a conservative (in the actual non-Trump sense) publication that is actually intellectually honest. I think there's another that I wish I remembered atm.

> The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash.

It sounds like you're emo-quitting over published perspectives that might be too challenging for you.

Oh for Pete's sake go back to your mom's basement you troll. Have you looked through your comments on this thread and others? You aren't adding to the dialog here, you are just being a jerk. No, I don't find the opinions of these writers challenging rather I get tired of having to go find sources that show just how munch bunk gets published. My beef is that I expect better from what are supposed to be journalistic leaders.

> I get tired of having to go find sources that show just how munch bunk gets published.

What is this "bunk" you've seen?

The Financial Times is really good. It's not just about finance, don't worry. It's the most balanced and informative news source I've ever read. It's a little expensive but it's worth it. Been a subscriber for about 3 years now.

I like bloomberg. Good signal to noise ratio. They generally only cover topics which move money markets, and thus have a real impact on me. Its not cheap but aside from HN thats my only source of news for a better part of a decade.

> Good signal to noise ratio

Honest question: did SuperMicro microchips story [pun intended] moved the marked measurable for you?

Yeah, I remember that one - but to be honest, those kind of fck ups dont happen to them very often. I am still wondering how did that happen. I also dont remember any story that they would get so factually wrong in about a decade of reading them daily.

If you own apple devices try Apple News+

Here are the included publications: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

Ars Technica is only $25/yr and has a lot of deep knowledge on specific topics

Surprised I had to scroll so far to see Ars here. I'm a subscriber too.

Not a subscription, but in the competition for my time, I like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events -- it fills a similar role for me as the Economist did in another era (I used to read the paper version religiously) -- globalish coverage of important events, some pleasurable idiosyncracies, bias toward Western culture and politics due to language and authors.

LWN.net is the only news subscription I can recommend without reservation, but of course it's not general news. :)

Get a library card and most media including newspapers and magazines are free… Libby is also a really great and performant app and on top you get books, audiobooks, some video and audio streaming it’s an incredible value.

NASA Spaceflight on YT, all things space news

https://www.youtube.com/c/NASASpaceflightVideos

I used to subscribe to Newsweek when it was marketed and printed in India and at non-USD prices. Tried New Yorker as well. Slowly it started becoming apparent they’re just American magazines mostly only about America somehow or the other and Newsweek stopped India print operations anyway.

Now it’s just Caravan monthly, Outlook weekly (Indian magazines). Biblio (Indian book review magazine).

I only read printed news. It’d be nice to subscribe to a few (better) International printed magazines. The ones that really covers the globe.

I still subscribe to NY Times online, but in the past couple of years I added a paper subscription to the FT, even though I'm in the US, and it tends to be a bit UK-centric. The paper subscription is their cheapest option, otherwise I would've gone with online. I actually read more news from the FT than the Times now, even though it tends to be about a day late, due to printing/editorial cycle etc, but I find it covers more of what I'm interested in. YMMV

I went from WSJ to Barron’s to Barron’s and Bloomberg to now just Bloomberg. As far as unsubscribing from any of those I haven’t found it too difficult

Hacker News, $0/mo.

For following the war in Ukraine, I used "TLDR Daily":

https://www.youtube.com/c/TLDRDaily

https://open.spotify.com/show/3yoF2Uwd1JQsErhBHnGQKD?si=pk3F...

More free Ukraine coverage:

https://www.understandingwar.org/publications

Wall Street Journal

If I had more time I’d do Financial Times as well.

I found PressReader's offer pretty interesting and would probably be using its premium plan if I were seriously going to read 1-2 papers on an average day to be able to regularly try out different sources. Buying individual papers on it seemed a bit expensive but is better than going a-la-carte on individual sites and needing to avoid the resulting spam, etc.

I really like subscribing to the actual Sunday delivery of a physical paper. Choose your poison. Go read it at a local coffee shop or farmers market or something and then watch as people everywhere look at you like your some kind of crazy person.

Old people love it though - plus you can give it to someone else once your done!

Also when was the last time you read The Funnies?

I was a longtime NYT subscriber who cancelled a few years ago. I switched to the WSJ & have been pretty happy with it.

No mention so far of any weekly newsmagazines. TIME is from the old school and not very good for actual news these days, but decades ago it was much better.

Also, The Week is a well-edited digest of the best of U.S and international news sources, albeit with a U.S. liberal slant at times. And no ads, except maybe inside front & back covers.

Guardian. Amazing value.

I do NYT Sunday delivery as well as The New Yorker, Economist, and The Atlantic print editions.

I think that I enjoy The Atlantic and The New Yorker the most but Economist and NYT are more information dense.

I mostly read my news in print, offline, and don't bother with the apps except I do like the live coverage on NYT app.

Financial Times and Bloomberg. While I'm not a fan,the Economist gives good coverage on global events.

WSJ! Subscribe through your app store of choice and you can cancel on the app store listing page of choice.

New Yorker is kind of expensive, but a new issue every week with usually a very interesting and long 10-12 page in depth article is great. I look forward to a new issue arriving in my mailbox every week.

The Washington Post is only $5/month if you're an Amazon Prime member.

Financial Times

Economist

NY Times (I disagree that it has gone downhill)

The New Yorker

I personaly quit reading any news. Those really important gets to me from differnet sources (friends or here on HN). I rather invest my time to read articles on various topics, philosophy, art... RSS helps to get feed of very interesting ideas.

Ground (https://ground.news/) attempts to deliver news while allowing readers to compare how media outlets with different political ideologies are covering stories.

Looking down the list of a lot of the news sources they cover, I don't see much coverage of mainstream US press - or mainstream world press for that matter. and I do see a massive number of sites I don't recognize the name of. Quite strange.

Catholic News Agency somehow isn't tagged "right", ditto for "The Catholic Telegraph"

I recommend Axios - the have a number of free, topic-specific daily newsletters. They're quick reads and well put together, and they usually link out to more detailed reporting on stuff that merits further reading.

I came across a guy who reads all the most important news outlets, selects all the important articles, makes digests and sends a news letter daily. It is subscription based.

I just have to find it in my tens of thousands of bookmarks. :(

None.

I set up shell twitter accounts for each issue I'm interested in, follow all the relevant people, take a month or so to adjust by deleting irritating flame baiters and accumulate a few sharers of high quality information.

Twitter's algorithm recommends a bunch of similar content, but because I only follow one issue per twitter account, it's all (or mostly) on topic, without distractions.

Use web archive to get around paywalls, uBlock Origin to remove the irrelevant parts of the twitter web UI, and Video Speed Controller to quickly watch video content at 2, 3, or 4x speed.

This gives a quick, easy, and extremely effective way to scan important info on a topic. Since many "news" sites get their material from social media anyway, you just get the "news" a little earlier than everyone else by going to source. It's more cumbersome than Zite (remember that?), but very effective.

For this to work you must be ruthless about navigating around attention sinks (like worthless twitter squabbles).

Why would some random internet user have better news than literal companies dedicated to it? This sounds more like you’re creating a misinformation bubble rather than objective information.

50-100 good sources on a topic is arguably a lot more expertise than most newsrooms have available, especially if they’re approximately single topic tweeters, and considering they probably aren’t only tweeting their own original thoughts but also providing other ideas (e.g. articles, videos etc) by others.

Presuming the minds you follow have the same concern (to take on uncomfortable, ambiguous, and challenging ideas), then the approach is already far ahead of virtually all publications I’m aware of, including the most upvoted ones on this thread (economist, for example), since they all have problems too: revenue incentives for one, which shapes what they can and cannot report on, a need to produce content to fill pages (e.g. manufacturing drama), bias towards sensational but unimportant topics etc.

Also, Twitter is somewhat self regulating, at least, more so than “news” sites. Since an author of a news article may face little backlash for biased or wrong information, whereas on Twitter it takes only a few seconds to get a whiff that something’s not right (scan replies for compelling counter arguments, look who endorses via retweet/like etc).

I personally only reallt pay for WSJ and I guess Apple News but indirectly I am not a fan of Apple News since a number of articles feel politically biased. I just want raw facts not opinion pieces.

WSJ feels "necessary" but a lot of their coverage and especially opinions are nuts. I expect a pro-business, pro-capitalist slant, but sometimes they go a little too far down the Murdoch ladder. Their coverage of the Durham investigation looks like it was written by Trump campaign staffers.

I like FT and economist for the podcasts. Between them they push out just enough podcast for me to listen to everything and have it not be overwhelming in volume.

I have been happy with Inkl for several years. Curated access to many mainstream sources, including Guardian, Atlantic, Forbes, Financial Times, et al.

The ones that are the most worth-it tend to be trade publications. Of course, they are only worth it to people who are in that particular industry.

A recent post here a few weeks before gave me the impression that LRB subscription is quite worthwhile. Not exactly the "news" though.

I subscribe to the print edition of Jacobin. It's the only one I think is worth paying for these days. Everything else is either pushing scam reflinks (NYT, CNN, etc), complete garbage content (Fox and the like), or straight up falsehoods.

For everything else I evade paywalls either using the bypass paywalls extension or some other method. I explicitly refuse to pay for the content because I want to see these businesses die, and consuming their content without giving them money is one way to help accelerate their demise.

We're in the scam stage of late stage capitalism, and between the climate crisis and the slow decline into populist fascism, our best hope as a species is degrowth.

Another Jacobin subscriber here. I love the art.

Killed the NYT and added Foreign Affairs. Focus is on non-ephemeral news. Longer pieces than the Economist but at about the same depth.

I subscribe to The New Paper, it's good enough to stay up to date while still being concise and non-partisan 99/100 times.

Tried various news sources, but got stuck w/ the following subscriptions: Washington Post, Financial Times & The Economist.

If I may ask why Washington Post? I’m starting to like their news coverage though seems lacking on the opinion and newsletters department.

That's a good thing, right?

What's "lacking" on the opinion and newsletters?

I like The Information.

https://www.theinformation.com

I have been intrigued by Axios.

The Economist and only read the print edition.

WSJ and signup with a privacy.com virtual credit card that you can easily pause/cancel/limit anytime.

Financial Times is #1 by far. WSJ is a good second option. Perhaps subscribe with a virtual card you can cancel?

https://www.levernews.com/

Perhaps unrelated..

Is theinformation.com really worth it for $33/month?

They seem to publish tech stories which do not appear anywhere else.

Opening front pages of Bloomberg, FT and WSJ will give you pretty good picture of what’s going on for free

there's way too much news in too many categories. i can't spend the necessary amount of time to become an expert in those areas. patreon and substack seem like a decent alternative to support and consume news in niches.

I really like Business Week but IDK how hard it is to cancel (have it through Apple News).

Le Monde Diplomatique is in my opinion the best for in-depth quality journalism.

Try to support your local news service first if possible.

Standard journalism is often lacking in details. I don't think they're worth a subscription.

I think you'll get more in depth news by subscribing to politicised commentators, possibly on both sides of the spectrum.

You'll get way more focus on different details (of course to support their point of view) and you'll actually get to experience what newspapers felt like in the 90s, before they turned into left wing outrage and ad click machines.

I think this would help you understand where your values lie on any issue and will reduce polarization.

Financial Times

The guardian and NPR (they're free)

Axios. Free. More objective than most.

I subscribe to :

The Economist

The Guardian (voluntary)

Financial Times

Barron’s

WSJ

Cook’s Illustrated

NY Times

Bloomberg

I find each of them useful in their own way.

Maybe not what OP is looking for, but for folks who can't afford news subscriptions I would recommend (https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome).

Always subscribe with a virtual card with limit such as privacy.com. cancellation is as easy as a click to turn off card.

Pay the creators you want to keep creating and pirate the rest. I let you determine who to support. Use bypass paywalls extension or 12ft.io for the rest.

I pay for a physical copy of the Japan Times and New York Times. They come bundled, but I barely ever read the New York Times.

I doubt it is relevant for you, but I’ve been happy with the Japan Times.

archive.ph

None.

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