Ask HN: News Website without the 'Silly News'? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: News Website without the 'Silly News'?

5 pointsComputerGuru15 comments

I'm looking for a "normal" website (i.e. not the drudge report) with normal news, minus all the sensationalist headlines.

I'm sick of the "common man's" approach on CNN and BBC, which are my primary two sources. I'm tired of polls asking "Do you agree with the racist decision by xxx?" and 8-month old news recycled as a news video taking up the headline spot.

Anyone know of a good, real, hard-core news site? It needs to be "mass marketable" because this'll be going to some non-geeks.

View on HN

Try the English version of Al Jazeera - http://english.aljazeera.net I'm sure it won't be your primary source but it's usually worth a look.

On paper, it was always The Economist.

And in my opinion the BBC World Service does the same thing on the radio.

The Economist and The New Yorker are both high-quality and put almost all of their content from the print magazines in their RSS feeds, and between the two of them it's nice getting a European / US and center-right / center-left perspective.

The biggest problem is that The Economist RSS feed is only updated once a week, so you've got this deluge of info. Still I find it my primary source for serious news. The New Yorker features some of the best investigative journalism and high-quality writing, but doesn't make an attempt to cover the full spectrum of ordinary news in any given week.

Thumbs up to the New Yorker and the Economist. For daily news I find that the New York Times does an excellent job. You'll never see something like 'All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing' there (I pulled that from CNN's "latest news" just a second ago). The top-left column (to the left of the center image) contains the current top stories. This is always serious news. The Business, Science and Technology sections (among others) are always worth reading as well.

For offline news I really recommend The News Hour on PBS with Jim Lehrer. Excellent in depth coverage of important happenings worldwide. Each night they focus on 2-4 issues and speak on them for 10-20 minutes each. I learn a ton from that show. They gave that boy in a balloon story the other day about 10 seconds of coverage in the intro update before they moved on and started talking about real news.

I keep track of The Economist online, but the problem is, it's not a general news service.

You don't find news in real-time (with the breaking bar, etc.) and it's more geared towards discovering the effect of a particular story rather than learning about the story itself for the first time.

e.g. You wouldn't find news about a shooting in a school in real-time on The Economist.. nor would you hear about foreign stories until they've had time to be analyzed and stripped down. It's pretty much The Economist paper edition in online form, and ergo it suffers much the same as traditional media on the front of news discovery.

Disconcerting that school shootings are now a recognized category of news. That was not true when I was growing up.

But I would argue that it's not a coincidence that the more serious news source is a weekly. News that happens suddenly seems more likely to be fluff. Plus if anything really important happened, friends would tell you.

I had a subscription for a while but was really surprised by how slanted many of the stories seemed.

That doesn't mean their bias didn't match some pet bias of my own, it's just that I was expecting more factual analysis and less opinion than I perceived. It was a little disappointing because they're usually so favorably reviewed.

Relating this to some of the other comments, maybe the solution is to get closer to the sources of information (disintermediate) so we can make our own decisions instead of relying on opinion-makers to make up our minds for us.

What has been your experience with customizing Google News? Google will never have the fastest coverage of a breaking story like the balloon boy, because it is aggregating other people's content with a time lag, but I have tweaked my preferences a lot on Google News to where I can rely on it for a lot of international news and very little news that shows up on local TV. (I do have a Google News customization that shows me local news from my town, but not most of the silly stuff.)

I agree with the endorsements of The Economist (especially), BBC, and the New Yorker already posted, but what I like about Google News is the even broader reach of sources and stories.

I was thinking about starting a site like this (perhaps based on this source code). The only issue I thought of was that people would just have to accept that I was going to be the dictator in what goes in and what doesn't. With topics like politics that can cause a problem and also if I don't know enough about a given topic (say local US politics) to know if it's a recycled story or not.

I still might do this though so if anybody wants to help out or has any ideas please chime in.

BTW, my fallback is global.NYTimes.com - it doesn't have as much "news" as CNN/BBC but it does update fairly quickly and with less Bull.

Tell me when you've found it.

Seriously. I'd love a site like that.

I like http://www.democracynow.org/

I"m guessing you likely won't get any suggestions and that this is one of those cases where, if someone wants to act on it, this might be a good business idea because the solution probably doesn't already exist.

I have yet to see anything listed that fits the exact criteria listed, so I don't see why my thought on it should be downvoted. I'm also amused that my remark is the second remark and the one before it was the one indicating they would love to see something like this. In other words, suggestions for things that met part of the criteria didn't begin appearing until I remarked that I didn't expect to see any suggestions. I see that kind of thing a lot and I think it's not mere coincidence. In some sense, it appears to be a sort of "rebuttal" of my observation. But it doesn't change the fact that I still have not seen a website link listed that meets the full criteria listed. Listings include: print versions, radio versions, a tv show, once-weekly RSS feeds and a foreign publication, all of which are listed with provisos concerning what portion of the criteria they likely won't satisfy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com