Ask HN: What are the best-designed news websites you’ve come across? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best-designed news websites you’ve come across?

32 pointsl-andis29 comments

The web design of news websites are notoriously bad with most optimized for ad revenue rather than functionality or aesthetics. But are there any news websites that you think are well designed or at least interesting to you?

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https://lite.cnn.com/

https://text.npr.org/

Now, I don't know if minimal or text only counts as design. But I think these types of news sites are very appealing.

If there was a simple and obvious way to switch days, I'd be completely sold!

these are pretty great. I was turned off a little by the wall-of-text effect (could we break up the stories a little more, maybe put some small marker to distinguish them even if its an autogenerated pattern icon of colored blocks)

I'd love to see this for bbc or al jazeera

This is cool, but it lacks any sense of priority beyond ordering (maybe a feature?), but for most news consumers having a clear hierarchy of important vs. less-important is desirable so I don't know if this qualifies as "best-designed" from an informational standpoint.

Honestly? Hacker News.

Literally all the rest are so terrible that I only use their RSS feeds except to read specific articles.

Google News used to be pretty good, but they became terrible after that redesign they made a few years back.

This isn't a very HN answer, but https://www.nytimes.com (on Mobile) is very attractive and usable. It's just pretty.

There're ads if you don't block them, but they frequently have excellent visual and interactive stories.

The desktop site doesn't do it for me though, I think it's like a paper-legacy layout

Edit: also, https://theoutline.com/ it's fun, and there're cool interactive elements

https://brutalist.report

It's funny how the first section there is for links from HN.

Most dailies have ads. I don’t love ads, but it helps funding the operations so that the journos can get paid.

I think Svenska Dagbladet has a nice web layout: https://www.svd.se

My own script output,

https://ia902708.us.archive.org/2/items/news-aggregation-dem...

It scrapes a bunch of aggregator pages, just extracts linked text, casts out all but new links since last time, no whitespace whatsoever, and merges the links in a continuous stream so you can set a comfortable size and scroll. Sequence numbers help keep place as it takes several sessions to get to the bottom.

I like theguardian.com -- it's the right balance of density and design and it's not bloated with ads. It's got good at-a-glance design too.

https://www.boringreport.org/app

The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/). Clean layout, no ads for subscribers, native mobile apps that perform well. Overall, it's my favourite source for general news.

https://orf.at/

Minimal, but not too. No ads because state funded broadcaster. Good design, no patriotic shit

This one. Not the best design, but it works. HN by premii[1] works too.

[1]: https://hn.premii.com/

https://donosy.info/ (for Poles outside Poland since early 1990’s)

Of the big ones I love Bloomberg so much. So crisp

https://www.nzz.ch/

I just like something that reads easy on mobile: I find substack blogs good for that. Keep it simple!

Omni.se, it's Swedish and more of a news aggregator I guess?

Vice.com is pretty decent in my opinion

Axios.com is also pretty clean for the most part

And government / publicly-funded news I've found to be pretty clean since they tend to not have ads, e.g. svt.se

drudge report

68k.news

https://68k.news/

no SSL cert

It seems this site seems to focus on catering to retro computers. SSL is infeasible on many retro platforms.

If the site doesn't transmit any sensitive data, it does not need HTTPS.

I really don't care, I said it because the parent comment links to https not http.

Agreed, but it does open the door to MITM and tracking.

I shamefully nominate my site; https://thetechee.com/.

Some people tell me it looks good though..

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