How do you process the news?

Media's aim is to keep people emotionally hooked on short term directional adjustments in political trajectory, including the presented minutia of the events that seem to determine it.

The only way to consume news, without subjecting oneself to the inner turmoil that the news is designed to produce, is to develop a long term theory and then just check in with the headlines to make sure that things are progressing toward it.

If they don't seem to be, adjust the theory and then keep-on with the aforementioned method.

Sure, some people emotionally need to be apprised of the tragedy of every story. They may even convince themselves that the World's trajectory hangs on the balance of every event. I'd suggest that this is both irrational and hints at addiction behavior. But if this isn't you, or you want to become less addicted, then give the above method a try.

After awhile, you'll begin to admire the efficiency of and relative inner-peace from your new hard-won detachment skill.

I struggled my whole life with “high empathy/hypersensitivity“ and what helped to fundamentally shift my experience of life and especially news is body-centered trauma therapy and learning how to establish and keep inner boundaries between me and the world around me (without needing to isolate from it).

To give one possible but specific recommendation if you don’t want to try regular therapy again would be to do a basic multi-weekend training in Focusing, in a group setting.

Personally and collectively, I see it as an exercise in how to process and integrate feelings of grief/loss, anger, overwhelm, helplessness and powerlessness, amongst others, and still live a happy life.

I decided to go "founder mode" on my news-consuming experience. The "founder" here being Tim-Berners Lee, whose vision was for an internet of dumb pipes where the view layer was controlled by the end-user.

News sites have trashed their user experience in search of ad revenue and clicks. But many have RSS feeds, so I created a PHP web page running on localhost that pulls in RSS feeds from news websites.

I have only got it to list the stories with hyperlinks so far, not the full content. I then disable images on the sites I'm pulling feeds from with UBO, so when I click on something on my PHP page, it remains a text-only experience.

I've realized that images on most news stories are utterly useless. They are usually stock images, and not original up to date pictures taken for the story. And considering that newspapers for the past decade have chosen to splash one guy's scowling face in the headlines day after day, I've decided I don't need that. Text-only for me.

I'm hugely sympathetic to this, but at the same time, I want to say, "snap out of it!"

We shouldn't take on the burden of things we cannot control. I think telling kids that they can change the world is mentally damaging. They could easily come to believe that if the world sucks, then it's their fault for not trying hard enough.

As for how to actually process the news, I remember a scene from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Total Perspective Vortex is a torture device that shows your true place in a vast, uncaring universe. You are revealed to be an insignificant spec on an insignificant dot, thus demoralizing you. But when Zaphod Beeblebrox steps into it, he come out unscathed. "How?" ask the torturers. He replies, "I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox!"

I'm a Gen X'er. We lived through the end of the Cold War, when we expected 30 minutes to say goodbye after WWIII started. We lived through the AIDS pandemic, which made every sexual encounter (rare or not) a life-or-death decision. And we were at the tip of the spear of the technological revolution that is still changing the world today.

As a generation, we are cynical optimists. We believe people are idiots and the world sucks and it's probably only going to get worse, but...yeah...things will work out for us personally.

Nowadays, I mostly consume news via HN - and much less than I used to. When I come across something relevant - which rarely happens - I post it to my aggregator[0] where I try to make sense of the news. It’s like a draft of contemporary History.

[0] https://www.slowernews.com

feel sad for the guy that the attention economy on politically induced steroids (aka news) forces him into „hiding“. Kudos though for the self awareness.

I as a former progressive that worked in and with publishing houses had the exact opposite experience:

Although I was on their political side, all the news just became boring. Once you‘ve been part of that media-culture and you know your ilk and how little thought-diversity exists, you already know where a news item will go before you‘ve read it.

Since he‘s already in Switzerland he might better subscribe to the great https://weltwoche.ch/ – one will probably respond with „those are putin trolls“ to which i‘d respond „he doesn’t seem to have a general issue with subscribing to govt-aligned press“ (Le monde diplomatique, Bellingcat).

there are no objective news, people always have opinions (and those without have less reason to write about it) and the toolset to make them look objective is excessive. And thus enticing.

If you’re not willing to engage (at least from time to time) with the opposing view you‘ve risk cornering yourself like the author did.

Hundreds of RSS sources. Multiple purposes; together with pluralistic perspective and search for lesser known goods, you must consider:

-- the most important pieces of news may be hidden in thousands of instances of noise;

-- you have to have the ability to identify the best commentators, in order to follow them (and the search is continuous also because even the topmost are not perfect).

Since the article explains how they "process" the news, i'll anecdote for a moment.

Prior to 2001, i watched maybe 15 minutes of news a day, like while making lunch, or just KNX 1070 in the car. September 11th, i began watching 2+ screens of news, recording it, analyzing it. This went on until at least 2002.

Something "snapped" and i got rid of my TV. a few years later, i still had no TV, no cable, etc. I just didn't "watch" news. Professor Naji Dahi said i was the first person in his class to ever answer "0 TVs" when he polled the class about how many screens were in their house, around 2004-2005.

I still don't have a "TV". And 50% of my news is "social media", and the other 50% of "real news" comes from a news analysis podcast that i won't evangelize. I've linked to archival news clips hosted by the showrunners, here, though. THe podcast is ~5 hours a week, and i spend about 5 hours actually researching and analyzing news i see on social media, usually so i have an understanding if someone mentions the news story later in the week (or whatever).

The news stresses me out. It makes me angry - but approaching it from an analysis standpoint makes it less so. It makes it funny in a "tragedy" sort of way.

Just as an example, i look outside every day and it's the exact same. regardless of what the news says is going on. This might not hold true for everyone.

I don't have some deep philosophical wisdom to share, here. No matter what you ingest and process, if you talk about it in public, someone will disagree with you.

I 'process' the 'news' by following RSS feeds for a diverse (as in 'diversity of opinion', the only diversity which really counts) set of sources which gives a relatively clear view on what those sources consider worth reporting and how they report on those subjects. It also shows which subjects are not reported on by some sources which in itself is an interesting observation. I follow both legacy media sources as well as 'new media' - sometimes called 'alternative media' but that term no longer applies now that these new media are moving past legacy media in both reach as well as public trust - which gives as wide a view of current events as feasible. I initially just compare headlines, then read deeper into those subjects which are of interest to me. Many legacy media just regurgitate whatever the larger press agencies have published, some legacy media from e.g. the Netherlands (which has seen an alarming consolidation of legacy media which now mostly are owned by the same Belgian company) publish the same articles across several titles.

Generally speaking new media is better/more reliable when it comes to digging deep into specific subjects while legacy media is still better at reporting on current events due to their larger ability to field reporters. Their reporting tends to be heavily biased which often becomes clear once new media starts reporting on the same subjects.

So, the process consists mainly of scanning headlines, comparing reporting between different outlets on subjects and selectively diving deeper into subjects of interest. New media have made large strides and now surpass legacy media in some ways but they need to add the ability to field reporters to react to current events. Television is dead, radio is largely dead, printed news is largely dead. Sites like archive.org are getting more important by the day with the diminishing presence of printed news media because they are the only way to keep track of how online sources reported on past events.

One, I'd like to note that Alex has an exceptional component of his site dedicated to older-edition-style tabletop roleplaying and it's well worth checking out if you're interested.

Two, given a choice between the front page of the New York Times and a PDF or expert blog post - I typically select the latter - or read about my town and local jurisdiction. I keep Bloomberg and the AP around for things that are events I may need to know about quickly.

Of course this gets into the problem of filtering and knowledge gaps, I might be reading something really interesting about natural gas but I have no idea if the person is a crank or not because of my lack of domain knowledge - so I've got to cautiously work the bubble perimeter every time.

My wish for a better news ecosystem would be this:

At the bottom of every story should be - at least one but preferably a few - exact quantitative predictions based on the story.

So, for example, after a dramatic story about a pending government shutdown it should say:

- over 100 children will die due to loss of funding to lunch programs (if shutdown occurs %78

- Government will be shut down for > 2 weeks %63

- > 10,000 gov employees lose a month of pay %54

And then if the predictions don't pan out it'll be obvious that most of it was hyperventilating, and if they do, I'll know to take seriously their warnings about the world coming to an end.

Another plus is; I think while the writer is choosing probabilities, he/she will realize he/she might have oversold the story, and will go back and rewrite it

Mostly I read Slashdot, HN, and the Wall Street Journal. I read the Economist when I feel like paying for it (sometimes I get a deal like $50 for the digital version for a year). I did Ground News for a year.

I solve theoretical engineering problems that would be faced during a new American civil war or revolution. I imagine I am tasked with supplying novel means and kit for asymmetric warfare against the US military. I roleplay in my head and review the outcome of skirmishes by Wagner and in Ukraine. I go over what I know of the Winter war. I think about supply lines. I think about the mindset of the opposition in such a scenario. I compose scenarios that would drive fear into their foot soldiers. Then I take my dog for a long walk and wait.

I felt pretty betrayed post election. Not exactly sure in what. It’s not like I didn’t see it coming. Not just by news sites (which I had lectured others on about how the profit motives work again and again). A lot of my “news” was actually coming from comedy/satire stuff, because it helped me cope and I like that stuff, but it was still just sucking me in. I found I was constantly morally outraged.

So I swore it all off (mostly). I just don’t want to be angry anymore. I read HN and some other tech sites.

One thing I do do is ask others about the news. I tell them I’m not interested in what’s going on, what they’re excited about or mad about, but ask them to tell me what new thoughts or observations they’ve had of late as news consumers. I have found that this studying/observing/listening how others are cognating is much more healthy for my own mental state.

I skim, and I skim quickly. I completely ignore entertainamy,and have learned to avoid empty stories, and ... Literally bot-shit. I had to take over a mailbox from an employee who almost never used it. 30k of emails. I started at 1~200 a day, and soon reached 1000+ and kept up with the current stream. Completed the whole task before my probationary review.

The trick always is...

NewsNotFound was posted here https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound Quite cool, requires openai credits, it gathers stories from multiple sites and combines them into one story with images

I get two physical news papers. One English daily, covers mostly Indian news. One a regional daily in vernacular that covers my residential state.

International news for me is whatever shows up on my Twitter feed but I don’t pay much attention.

Worth mentioning: "I hate the news", a 2006 essay by Aaron Schwarz.

[0]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Every time I operate on urgent news I get burnt, so any sort of world changing news can handle a nights rest before responding. Things that are published on paper have a higher priority on my Apple News process.

I have a library subscription which comes with PressReader. I get all the magazines and periodicals and I don’t pay anything. It’s my right as a taxpayer and I get to be an informed citizen.

Something I have been thinking about lately:

Is there a "way out" of hyper-optimized, propagandistic, attention-grabbing media overtaking all sources of information in a society with rock-solid free speech laws? Is there even a remote possibility that a nuanced, truthful organization that covers global events could even get funded and exist? I'm a bit skeptical.

We might imagine that in a sort of fictional closed elitist society, so-called guardians could control what the information/media network looks like and ensure that the regulations aren't abused to hide crimes, disallow propaganda-type content, and so on. In reality, that usually ends poorly, but at least theoretically it's possible.

But I don't think that's even a possibility in the kind of media world we live in. Any restrictions on free speech tend to be strongly criticized and repealed, and judging on past events and human flaws, they should be criticized and repealed. The danger from restrictions on speech is almost certainly greater than those from unrestricted speech. And that's not even mentioning the vast, vast ecosystem of media organizations and the billions (trillions?) of dollars they control.

But that doesn't really solve our problem. The best answer I can come up with is that capital funds organizations which explicitly do the things I mentioned, as well as the funds required for them to compete with other sources of media. But for all the philanthropy billionaires have done, none seems to have any interest in establishing such an organization.

I often feel like it is news that process me.

On a more serious note, always ask yourself: "who would this particular sequence of events benefit the most?". Helps a lot with the analysis.

I mainly read local news, and I listen to the audio edition of The Economist every week. Also, I replaced most of my podcasts and social media use by listening to audiobooks.

The state of news publication in Denmark is sad, which I suspect is a universal state of affairs. Even the tax funded state propaganda outlet "DR" (Danish Radio), has become clickbait garbage. Most publications are heavy left leaning. There are a few that are not, but everything is terrible and I just don't care any more. If I close my eyes and ears, I won't notice the perpetual clown show that is the world in current year.

Do as Taleb does: if it’s important it’ll reach you.

Distantly.

I'll scan headlines a few times per day, and read the odd story. One problem I'm encountering with websites, aside from the ads and annoyances, is that much of the news seems curiously irrelevant.

There's a list of text-only news sites which ... slightly ... improves the situation, but only just, as few media outlets bother to organise their text-only offerings. What's generated is typically an unordered jumble of clickbaitish headlines. That said, the listing:

<https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/>

Of those I'll hit NPR, CNN, and the Christian Science Monitor most often.

CNN annoyed me so much that I looked under the hood ... and found that the URLs encode both a news topic and date along with a title, e.g., from current headlines:

  https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-county/index.html

Link: <https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-...>

So, that's an 8 Mar 2025 article in US News about fires on Long Island.

Turns out that it's a SMOP[1] to extract URLs and headlines from the published Web page, and regenerate a far more useful page grouped by subject heading. Another interesting side effect is that I've accumulated an archive of > 4,400 stories published since mid-December 2024 and can easily run statistics on the story distribution. There are 30 sections, which I've aggregated to a smaller set of five, represented as follows:

  US:        1298 (29.29%)
  World:      917 (20.70%)
  Business:   638 (14.40%)
  Science:    371 (8.37%)
  Trivia:    1207 (27.24%)
  ----------------------------------------
  Total:     4431 / 4431  [0] (sections crosscheck)

Note that nearly a third of the "news" is trivia topics (Travel, Food, Homes, Entertainment, Sport, Style, CNN). A deeper look at both US and World news shows that about 2/3 of the former is relatively minor nonsystematic crime, and the latter is entertainment / gossip / personality. It's not that CNN leans one way or the other, it's just mostly irrelevant.

(I'd started the project in part to quantify how much this was the case, and to dump all the trivia in one place so I didn't have to parse individual headlines to suss out what was what.)

Other sites are less amenable to this as they use random strings in URLs (e.g., Financial Times and NPR). Most website, even the so-called "lite" or "text" versions, read quite poorly in a terminal-based browser (I favour w3m, but others differ little).

I'll listen to foreign news services a fair bit, including CBC, BBC, ABC (Australia), Deutschlandfunk, and more. I find the quality of foreign-service news seems a bit better than most US sources. Most of these are via podcast.

I've been listening to The World, out of WBUR Boston. Unlike virtually all audio/video news these days, the programme is pre-recorded and edited. Its focus tends to reduce US-centric news, which I prefer, and what I find is that the editing and pre-recording make the segments (reports and interviews largely) far less disjoint than, say, NPR, BBC, or the PBS News Hour, which I find all but unlistenable.

Among other podcasts are those focusing heavily on philosophy and history, which I find tend to inform on current events without wallowing in them. Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, David Runciman's History of Ideas (and his several earlier podcasts), Stephen West's Philosophize This, and Nigel Warberton and David Edmunds's Philosophy Bites are all high on my list. Among those dealing with contemporary politics, Ezra Klein tends to be insightful without being overly grating or outrage-inducing, while also including a range of guests across the political spectrum (though he quite admittedly leans left), while also managing to generally keep them away from thought-stopping cliches and stale talking points by pushing back gently but effectively in a way that few interviewers seem capable of. Runciman also has this skill, though it's less often evidenced, see his Intelligence Squared (UK) appearances for good examples.

For those interested, my CNN category breakdown is:

   489 (11.04%)   US News
   809 (18.26%)   US Politics
    76  (1.72%)   World
   111  (2.51%)   World -- Americas
    62  (1.40%)   World -- Africa
   112  (2.53%)   World -- Asia
    29  (0.65%)   World -- Australia
    37  (0.84%)   World -- China
    17  (0.38%)   World -- India
   260  (5.87%)   World -- Europe
   183  (4.13%)   World -- MidEast
    30  (0.68%)   World -- UK
    91  (2.05%)   Economy
   369  (8.33%)   Business
     1  (0.02%)   Markets
    85  (1.92%)   Tech
     2  (0.05%)   Cars
    11  (0.25%)   Investing
    79  (1.78%)   Media
   112  (2.53%)   Science
   170  (3.84%)   Health
    48  (1.08%)   Weather
    41  (0.93%)   Climate
   163  (3.68%)   Travel
    26  (0.59%)   Food
     3  (0.07%)   Homes
   496 (11.19%)   Sport
   405  (9.14%)   Entertainment
   109  (2.46%)   Style
     5  (0.11%)   CNN 10 Minutes

That runs ~12 Dec 2024 through today, and is de-duplicated, though it's also based on when I've happened to request the latest CNN headlines, and may miss some stories. Ordering is roughly by my level of interest and/or what seems to be logical classification to me. I've picked up a few additional classifications (e.g., "CNN 10 Minutes" and "Cars") after my initial run, there is some logic to make previously unknown categories jump out.

________________________________

Notes:

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming>

I read the news through my RSS reader YOShInOn which (1) shows me articles one a a time and gets a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for each article, (2) trains a classifier to predict if I like something, (3) shows about 10% of random articles to keep the classifier learning and calibrated and (4) runs a k-means clustering on incoming articles to group them into 20 clusters and shows me the top N articles from each cluster to generate a batch of 300 articles.

When I am done reading the batch it creates another batch.

It learned that I'm not interested in breathless articles about Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the like so it shows me very few of them. I have about 120 RSS feed including news from some free sources like The Guardian and also some paywalled sources such as the LA Times and the Japan Times but also papers from arXiv, top articles from Lobsters, a few open source "planets", etc. I'd like to add more independent blogs but those are expensive to ingest with the superfeedr head end I use now which costs about 10 cents/month/feed. YOShInOn helps me find articles to submit to Hacker News so if you look at the articles I submit that gives you some idea of what I subscribe to.

YOShInOn generates links to archive.today for paywalled articles, which I don't feel bad about. The news media tolerates that site for the same reason you used to be able to log into every news site with media/media -- every journalist has to have access to every paper there is for fact checking, but no way is the New York Times going to stoop to buying their journalists accounts for every small town newspaper and no way a small town newspaper can afford to buy their journalists accounts for The New York Time. So they need some kind of paywall bypass, they just want it to keep quiet.

You shouldn't process the news, at least not the big ones anyway.

Most news nowadays is mostly slop with clickbait headlines of breaking news, designed to get you to pay for "premium" and have to jump through hoops of paywalls.

It is best if mega news organizations just ultimately shut down at this point, we don't need more news.

The closest one I read is Tortoise (1), which is part of slow journalism(2) which I support at the very least, as soon as I see clickbait, I jump off.

(1) https://www.tortoisemedia.com/

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_journalism

I downplay the news big time, and use it as a great source of humour for the straight up stupid individuals.

I have also started to act dumb while in social gaherings, like "oh I don't know that happened".

As an example.

Did Trump make presidency ? I didn't know.

That way I leave it at that and I don't let people tell them how they feel about whatever nonsense they are fed and obviously not throughly digesting.

Read books instead of news. Much better.

I spend several hours/day reading news on around 30 websites.

I don't read anything that starts with an @

I don't use any asocial media. I read news websites.

Given paywalls, I mostly scan headlines. The overwhelming majority of posted articles are pure shit. They couldn't pay me to read them, much less the other way around. When an article seems to contain meaningful information, I find a way to read the contents.

Even once I delve into the text of an article, most are badly written. I call the journalistic/literary style "It was a dark and stormy night". They're much more focused on story telling than conveying information. This seems to be what people want now. So, in total opposition to historical news reading, I skip the first couple of paragraphs, instead of expecting to find the gist of the information in those first paragraphs.

It's like a classic relationship problem: the issue is on both sides. The media producers are striving to "hook 'em and gouge 'em", and the readers are mostly so vacuous that this seems to be what they're looking for anyway.

But don't worry! It's going to get worse, much worse.

Good luck with that...

It's weird to consider differences just between my father and I, my father who consumes news voraciously, from newspaper, television, radio, gossip, and still retains his reason, critical thinking, faith, and ability to make good decisions. We've had subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, but mostly ad-supported, and Dad Hates Ads, moans and groans and mutes them, and I'm my father's son.

Social media, but yes even mainstream media, or just living as a farmer or ranch-hand, can turn some of us into unhinged feral animals. I'm a victim.

During my last round of college we learned "The CRAAP Test" for evaluating sources. My father applies it instinctively. If only we could internalize this.

Lately I'm at a point where there's a sameness and familiarity to all the news from everywhere. And if I notice the recurrent themes, I begin to ponder why it's recurring, what context/sources/seasons, and not the facts or emotional content themselves, but "why do these sources want me to know about this sort of thing?"

For example, ever since COVID-19, or even 9/11, or 1903, the news cycle has run air disasters and played-up in-flight incidents, and I'm thinking, are they trying to discourage the hoi polloi from flying? Indeed, travelers beware; are they trying to scare us into compliance? Just cranking up fear, uncertainty and doubt across the board?

Also lately, I've shifted my news sources (because all mainstream media is really behind thousands of paywalls) and I hearken directly to gov't or organizational sources, where they make good PR and favorable press releases and they hold conferences to tell us how good they're doing. Now hopefully we can also see through that, but at least it feels like good news in these hard times. [Except it's never my good news, it's someone else's Good News...]

All the "good information" is paywalled. You won't get something for nothing. You can get some ad-supported stuff or you can pay for better stuff, or you can content yourself with horrific free crap. The Social Media newsies are just baiting you for subscriptions and website visits.

Make a monthly budget for your infotainment. Pay for what's important to you. Admit that you're in the proletariat and you're not entitled to be "in the know" beyond your pay-grade. Curiosity killed the cat; "knowledge is power", but you won't gain knowledge--and you could lose WIS points-- by consuming news.

Curated/personalized media can manipulate or influence in amazing ways, but I guess so can family/church/neighbor/community via meatspace. Perhaps they're more similar than we think.

Being "in a bubble[s]" is a crazy thing to consider: none of my neighbors or people at church have similar experiences of watching films, music, industry/employment experience, hearing specific news or whatever. Floating through the online bubbles and then popping them to enter meatspace is an enormous leap of faith. The context-switches I do every day, taking a lot of concentration and preparation.

A worker at church began greeting me with "What do you know?" and there's no answer to that... just silence... I think he likes it that way