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Comment by adsyoung | Hacker News Reader

Macro news. I get the news in my RSS feeds and its damn near useless.

These events tell me almost nothing about the world. The signal to noise ratio is not good. I don't want to know that another 6 people in iraq have been killed in some incident, I want to know whether the situation there is getting better or worse, is it happening in a new area than before, does it involve a new group of people...big picture stuff.

This is the kind of info you typically get from reading feature length editorials but I don't have the time.

I want big picture news and global trends, complete with graphs and visualisations to give me perspective on an issue, delivered to me in an RSS feed.

Also I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to different issues that I wish to follow from start to end.

Already exist?

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For big picture news I find nothing beats The Economist. No more kidnapped babies or small plane crashes! I've stopped reading (online) newspapers, and I don't miss them at all.

For subscribing to different issues - interesting! I'd like that too. In theory, you could subscribe to the RSS of the history page of wikinews/wikipedia. You'd get all the updates, but I'm not sure how useful or reader-friendly that is in practice.

Yeah, I'm mainly ranting at my feeds.

To some degree I'm wishing for a new style of journalism. Or at the least journalists actually learning to write headlines that make any sense and are useful.

The startup ideas there are:

- Subscribing to specific issues that you want to keep track of over time is something I want to see way more of.

- Sites that use data visualisations to increase understanding and perspective of...anything really, is something I've been thinking about. Think the world would be a better place if people had perspective and we have access to a lot of data now to play with.

A gripe... Journalists don't write headlines. Editors do.

One of the best thing about the Economist is that they create podcasts for certain articles you can put on your mp3 player. Works great for downtime you never have.

Something that is close but it is a print magazine. Is called "The Weeek" magazine. Very Very high signal to noise ratio.

They do exective summaries of the news, one page or less covering issues from all sides.

They just launched a new website www.theweekdaily.com no rss feeds that I can see. It is the one drop everything and read it magazine when the postman shows that I subscribe to. Well worth the $50 dollar subscription.

That's hard to do. What you ask for is just good journalism. I can only second mdemare's recommendation for The Economist.

Usually the trouble with big picture stories is that they are almost pure ideology without any data to back them up.

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