I'm working on something that you might like - though it's not released yet.
It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.
For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.
The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:
- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change.
- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
- I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic.
Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of things happening with explainers for everything they could easily link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining an event and provide context for experts and normal consumers.
e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they're interested in it.
Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they had to fit in the article format even though they had big plans for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren't articles is difficult.
[This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein's Vox Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox and why they ended up where they were]
> I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren't articles is difficult.
I think Axios fits what you're describing much better. Vox is a boilerplate left-biased blog[1], with their only unique quality being a sneering insistence that they're just "explaining". They're like the Economist, but without the self-awareness or quality.
Axios, on the other hand, is much better at the just-the-facts style of reporting, to the extent this is possible. They even use a non-traditional article format, making heavy use of bullet points and standardized paragraph headers like "Why it matters".
well gpm's idea doesn't necessarily involve any writing from my read of it.
Actually I'd like to see a news site that has no story telling, no explainers, no narrative. Just the core facts as much as possible, but presented over a timeline. So the timeline itself ends up providing the narrative/structure to a large extent.
> You're actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of things happening with explainers for everything they could easily link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining an event
I see something different in gpm's idea. Vox wanted to update their articles. That's bad. gpm wants to aggregate coverage of the same topic over time. That's great; it gives you an easy way to look at "what did people think in 2018?".
I was thinking about building something that sounds very similar when I was working at a news site. For me the main benefits of organizing articles into sagas is, that you can easily start reading up on something only once there is actually sufficient information there and to follow stories over time.
Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story.
The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.
This sounds very useful. The quality of sagas would matter a lot. This is from my personal experience of trying to build a news site in my past life which cuts the clutter and focuses on facts. The problem I faced was in how do I decide which link to choose without biases. This turned off a lot of people who did not conform to that view. Even on clear topics. For instance most people agree racism is bad but there would be diverse opinion on where to draw the line and what actions constitute racism.
However there are quite a few topics where you could be objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.
Basically they would distill an article down to facts with links to the original source of the facts. Users could subscribe to a story and it would update you when a new substantive fact was added to the story.
I found Circa to be an amazing way to consume news. News was written in the most boring way possible, and it would have bullet points for news stories along with sources for each bullet point. As much as I like reading full articles to get all the nuance, there's just too much information to consume. Circa seemed to be the sweet spot between brevity and information density that I need.
I've been hoping for something like Circa to pop back into existence, but unfortunately I can see why it's not a profitable venture.
This is very cool, especially the assembling news into units of longer duration, it would be great if you also expanded on that with design and make the overarching sagas visually distinct.
I absolutely want to get users to submit links and help out with organization. I'd never manage to find every source, even for the most important stories, without that sort of help. That said, I expect I'll be doing a lot of the research and submission myself (with helper programs) for the core stories - for one thing I don't think there's any other way to bootstrap a community.
For niche and more "local news" stories I want to rely on a more wiki-like model, where anyone can directly edit them (and full history is preserved). I wish I could do that for everything, but I think bad actors would present a pretty insurmountable problem. Even for local news "anti-evil" will be difficult, and I'll need to clearly mark that this is community-controlled content, I don't want to be hosting/recommending spam after all.
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I don't really think of the organization system as tags, though I suppose in some sense it's equivalent. I think of it as more of a top down hierarchy, saga -> event -> link, and if the same link ends up in multiple sagas/events, that's ok and not really an important fact - i.e. the fact that the link is tagged as something isn't the important bit.
I'm sure I'll want to solve nested sagas better eventually, but for now I'm ignoring the problem. This is a bet that for most sagas a single layer of time based interior organization (grouping links into events) is sufficient. There will also be other forms of intra-saga organization, like link type (article/legal document/study/video/tweet/press release/...).
For now a covid-19 saga would link to a delta saga much like it would link to an external site, and result in a certain amount of duplication of content. I think covid is unusual in how long of a saga it is.
Interesting, how are you planning to collect articles for the news "sagas", and how often do you want to update information? I'd say articles written on the same day as some event will always have more noise than summaries written later.
So I plan to collect every link I can, and then sort them into "events" that are based on something that actually happened.
This just moves the problem to being "what links to prominently display for an event". I'm not sure on the details, but I'll probably end up with some heuristics for what links are the best with an option to manually override it. I also want to implement a fair bit of user-controlled filtration (think along the lines of https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/, except for news articles instead of motherboards)
Organizing links is, I think, best done manually in the end. But with automation to make it easier. For example scrapping RSS feeds and using keywords to suggest where I might want to put them. I also want to make it possible for users of the site to add content (or for high profile articles, just suggest it, because spam sucks).
In some sense this is "realtime", but without any plan to race to make it happen as quickly as possible. Pushing updates to email of course less so. Triggering "this is a big enough of a change to send an email" will be a separate manual action. As for when that email will be sent, I'm thinking of setting it up so people can subscribe to a saga with daily (default)/weekly/immediately on change.
This resonates with one idea I've had. A email-only service: I subscribe to your email and get notifications when you find something interesting in the internet and post a link to the service.
Interactions with the service don't need a website. You literally send a email with a link to news@foobar,com, the service sees where the email came from, adds the link to your newsfeed and distributes it to your subscribers.
Ideally, you wouldn't even need to setup an account, just send a link from any email and your account is that email. Subscribing to someone's email could be as simple as sending a "subscribe to joe@schmoe,com" to the service.
All hard-to-argue with pain points that could be addressed in a novel way. There’s a lot of unsolved problems in the new media morass and it would be great if a couple of new white hat firms emerged in this space to cut through the noise and the bullshit.
But identifying what’s wrong and even getting an MVP together is one of the easier problems.
The burning question is how do you monetize your efforts without giving into the ad cartel? Will people pay a premium for a link tree? Unless this is more of a civic minded volunteer type thing?
Either way, best of luck. There’s a sack of coins somewhere in here.
Monetization is definitely a hard problem. If I have any advantage it's that my costs should be a lot lower, since I'm happy pointing people at pre-existing articles instead of writing my own. Unfortunately I don't think I have any great insights that the news industry hasn't already had on it.
In the end, I suspect I will be using advertising, even though I do find that industry pretty distasteful. Low costs mean that if I do go down this route I should be able to keep it pretty unobtrusive and minimal, which gives up short term income but is likely a good long term tradeoff.
I don't think it makes sense to put the core product behind a subscription wall. Apart from the issue of "would people pay for it", it's the sort of thing that benefits from network effects. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I tried. Conceivably the tools I'm making to help gather the information could make a useful product for professional researchers of various kinds (hedgefunds, paralegals, etc) - but that would be more of an offshoot and not something I could really pursue before gaining traction.
Another idea I've had (and again, this is largely ripping off existing monetization schemes), is that it might make sense to have a section of the website dedicated sagas about "products" (e.g. "IPhone 17"), linking to things like reviews and spec sheets, with affiliate links to amazon. Conceivably you could attract the /r/buyitforlife crowd to something like this, and make it a force for good in the world.
Just asking for donations seems to work to some extent to (see The Guardian, and wikipedia) - though given how hard they seem to need to push for them I'm not sure that's a route I really want to go down.
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Like you say, there's a sack of coins somewhere in here. I'm willing to believe that if I make a useful product that people like, I'll figure out how to pick up at least a few of them.
> Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
Omg, so true. A while back i found out about Axios and thought they were really cool. A nice way to skim news, keep up to date... but the lack of sourcing made the information worthless to me. Difficult to tell what is opinion, reality, how they got to a summary of a quote, etc.
Axios has the right idea for me, but they need to pair it with detailed sources, quotes, etc to drill into. Reality is often too strange these days to trust a summary, i need sources.
I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. I am desperately searching for a (preferably lightweight) site that would offer important world news, limited updates on that story, and be willing to be quiet when nothing is going on. The site I linked is way better than most, but still is full of low-value updates, and it tends to miss stories of real significance. In the past I have used text.npr.org, but it is worse yet about missing stories and giving low-value updates.
The problem with this is question is that it all comes down to how you define "relevant". What is very relevant to one person is not the same as another, and news orgs are in the business of sending out as many updates as they can.
I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
I think “news service that only alerts me about important stuff” is sufficiently specific in that you could probably come up with a service that generally satisfies most people. I think the reason it doesn’t exist isn’t that we don’t know what people think is important, it’s that important news is bursty.
It would have to be fully subscription supported, since advertisers probably want to see an even amount of engagement each week (even if it’s small) so that they can set predictable budgets. But important news doesn’t work like that, sometimes there are 3 huge news events happening at the same time, sometimes there’s a slow month with no really big news happening.
As a counter-anecdote, I have been inundated with the Russia/Ukraine story every day for weeks since the US intelligence report.
Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments.
Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”.
I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
On the 99% rehashing, that is another compromise that is forced by the format. The news org doesn't know how much context a reader has: they have to balance between a brief update to a known story (in which case a reader unfamiliar with the story will have no idea who's who, or what's going on) and a full rehashing every time there's an update (which is repetitive and harder to follow over time for someone familiar with the story).
I didn't know about the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border[0] until half way through because I wasn't paying attention to the news in Hungary (a very pro-Poland and anti-"migrant" country) and then was surprised by it when I went to Germany and randomly picked up a newspaper.
Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts.
Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot.
In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it.
I am very specific about the news I read. So, I aggregate news (particularly opinion features) from an easy to scrape news portal. Than I latex-format that to a pdf document using Pandoc and read it offline.
I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
On the median day, major western news sources have zero articles I care about. Here are the current headlines from https://text.npr.org:
- The parents of the accused Michigan school shooter head to court again
- Experts crack the secret to last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots before her execution
- The Air Force discharges 27 service members for refusing to get a COVID vaccine
- Their lives were changed by gun violence, and now they're running for office
- The best and worst places to live if you care only about money
- To save lives, the overdose antidote naxalone should be sold over-the-counter, advocates argue
- Vaccine protection vs. omicron infection may drop to 30% but does cut severe disease
- The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by white people
- Rep. Liz Cheney read the text messages she says Mark Meadows got during the Jan. 6 siege
- Kentucky crews search painstakingly for 109 people missing after deadly tornadoes
- 'Return of the Jedi,' 'Selena' and 'Sounder' added to National Film Registry
- Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective against severe disease
- Saule Omarova gets candid: Banks sank her nomination to become a key regulator
- The Supreme Court again leaves a state vaccine mandate in place for health care workers
- Survivors of Nassar's abuse reach a $380 million deal with USA Gymnastics and the Olympic committee
- This year's Golden Globes nominations avoid obvious pitfalls, but won't restore the awards' luster
- More Black families are homeschooling their children, citing the pandemic and racism
- No U.S. troops behind a drone strike that killed Afghan civilians will be punished
- What dish is never missing from your holiday table? Tell us why you love it
- Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year
I'd love an RSS feed that lets me know about Russian troops on the Ukranian border but not about any of those "stories." Actually reading the news is a frustrating experience because the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor.
There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources.
What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth.
Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.
Yes, there is correct attribution on the bottom reflecting this: "Original text authored by Wikipedia contributors" & linked to Revision history of the corresponding Wikipedia Portal:Current events/2021 December 13
It's a nice summary if you read the whole thing, but the alphabetical ordering (both by category and by title) is not great for a quick skim. If there is no 'priority ordering', the most important article is on average going to be buried somewhere in the middle.
It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
Along side each event it would be great to have a small link to a google news search for that event. Possibly even a google news search that isn't personalised or tailored to a location, if that's possible.
Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small international section, where it takes the most important important, almost always long-form articles per day and translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and better than most English language publications (in curation, not sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander:
I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person.
Answer: I misunderstood the submission prompt, thinking my comment would be attached to the post and not lost below. I linked that as a halfway-there example of what I want, and also because I'm a slave to SEO and HN ranks posts higher if they have a link.
You can edit the title of your post, or if it's been too long for editing to be an option, email hn@ycombinator.com to ask dang to do it for you. I had a similar reaction to others. Ask HN posts are supposed to just be a question, not a link to a site.
No, I don't think so. I've answered elsewhere in this thread: when making the submission, I thought my comment would stay with the initial post, and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the submission. The linked page is a decent page, and a halfway-there example of what I'm looking for.
Readit News
It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.
For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.
The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:
- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change.
- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.
- I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic.
Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they're interested in it.
Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they had to fit in the article format even though they had big plans for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren't articles is difficult.
[This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein's Vox Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox and why they ended up where they were]
I think Axios fits what you're describing much better. Vox is a boilerplate left-biased blog[1], with their only unique quality being a sneering insistence that they're just "explaining". They're like the Economist, but without the self-awareness or quality.
Axios, on the other hand, is much better at the just-the-facts style of reporting, to the extent this is possible. They even use a non-traditional article format, making heavy use of bullet points and standardized paragraph headers like "Why it matters".
[1] Not to treat them as the final word, but Allsides has their bias marked as Left, not even Center-Left. They have Axios as Center. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/vox-news-media-bias
Actually I'd like to see a news site that has no story telling, no explainers, no narrative. Just the core facts as much as possible, but presented over a timeline. So the timeline itself ends up providing the narrative/structure to a large extent.
I see something different in gpm's idea. Vox wanted to update their articles. That's bad. gpm wants to aggregate coverage of the same topic over time. That's great; it gives you an easy way to look at "what did people think in 2018?".
Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story.
The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.
However there are quite a few topics where you could be objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.
Good luck. Hope to see it on Show HN one day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circa_News
Basically they would distill an article down to facts with links to the original source of the facts. Users could subscribe to a story and it would update you when a new substantive fact was added to the story.
I've been hoping for something like Circa to pop back into existence, but unfortunately I can see why it's not a profitable venture.
https://newscatcherapi.com/news-api
The open source stuff you guys have is also interesting :)
- https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/python-web-scraping-librarie...
Will reach out to you via email later today
Would it be user-submitted links & tag based?
My imagination takes me to something like: the overall #covid-19 saga, plus the sub-sagas: "#covid-19 #delta", "#covid-19 #omicron"
Super curious what your approach will look like!
Partially and not really.
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I absolutely want to get users to submit links and help out with organization. I'd never manage to find every source, even for the most important stories, without that sort of help. That said, I expect I'll be doing a lot of the research and submission myself (with helper programs) for the core stories - for one thing I don't think there's any other way to bootstrap a community.
For niche and more "local news" stories I want to rely on a more wiki-like model, where anyone can directly edit them (and full history is preserved). I wish I could do that for everything, but I think bad actors would present a pretty insurmountable problem. Even for local news "anti-evil" will be difficult, and I'll need to clearly mark that this is community-controlled content, I don't want to be hosting/recommending spam after all.
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I don't really think of the organization system as tags, though I suppose in some sense it's equivalent. I think of it as more of a top down hierarchy, saga -> event -> link, and if the same link ends up in multiple sagas/events, that's ok and not really an important fact - i.e. the fact that the link is tagged as something isn't the important bit.
I'm sure I'll want to solve nested sagas better eventually, but for now I'm ignoring the problem. This is a bet that for most sagas a single layer of time based interior organization (grouping links into events) is sufficient. There will also be other forms of intra-saga organization, like link type (article/legal document/study/video/tweet/press release/...).
For now a covid-19 saga would link to a delta saga much like it would link to an external site, and result in a certain amount of duplication of content. I think covid is unusual in how long of a saga it is.
This just moves the problem to being "what links to prominently display for an event". I'm not sure on the details, but I'll probably end up with some heuristics for what links are the best with an option to manually override it. I also want to implement a fair bit of user-controlled filtration (think along the lines of https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/, except for news articles instead of motherboards)
Organizing links is, I think, best done manually in the end. But with automation to make it easier. For example scrapping RSS feeds and using keywords to suggest where I might want to put them. I also want to make it possible for users of the site to add content (or for high profile articles, just suggest it, because spam sucks).
In some sense this is "realtime", but without any plan to race to make it happen as quickly as possible. Pushing updates to email of course less so. Triggering "this is a big enough of a change to send an email" will be a separate manual action. As for when that email will be sent, I'm thinking of setting it up so people can subscribe to a saga with daily (default)/weekly/immediately on change.
Interactions with the service don't need a website. You literally send a email with a link to news@foobar,com, the service sees where the email came from, adds the link to your newsfeed and distributes it to your subscribers.
Ideally, you wouldn't even need to setup an account, just send a link from any email and your account is that email. Subscribing to someone's email could be as simple as sending a "subscribe to joe@schmoe,com" to the service.
You send an email to world@hey.com, it posts it as a blogpost, people can subscribe to your blog.
But identifying what’s wrong and even getting an MVP together is one of the easier problems.
The burning question is how do you monetize your efforts without giving into the ad cartel? Will people pay a premium for a link tree? Unless this is more of a civic minded volunteer type thing?
Either way, best of luck. There’s a sack of coins somewhere in here.
In the end, I suspect I will be using advertising, even though I do find that industry pretty distasteful. Low costs mean that if I do go down this route I should be able to keep it pretty unobtrusive and minimal, which gives up short term income but is likely a good long term tradeoff.
I don't think it makes sense to put the core product behind a subscription wall. Apart from the issue of "would people pay for it", it's the sort of thing that benefits from network effects. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I tried. Conceivably the tools I'm making to help gather the information could make a useful product for professional researchers of various kinds (hedgefunds, paralegals, etc) - but that would be more of an offshoot and not something I could really pursue before gaining traction.
Another idea I've had (and again, this is largely ripping off existing monetization schemes), is that it might make sense to have a section of the website dedicated sagas about "products" (e.g. "IPhone 17"), linking to things like reviews and spec sheets, with affiliate links to amazon. Conceivably you could attract the /r/buyitforlife crowd to something like this, and make it a force for good in the world.
Just asking for donations seems to work to some extent to (see The Guardian, and wikipedia) - though given how hard they seem to need to push for them I'm not sure that's a route I really want to go down.
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Like you say, there's a sack of coins somewhere in here. I'm willing to believe that if I make a useful product that people like, I'll figure out how to pick up at least a few of them.
Omg, so true. A while back i found out about Axios and thought they were really cool. A nice way to skim news, keep up to date... but the lack of sourcing made the information worthless to me. Difficult to tell what is opinion, reality, how they got to a summary of a quote, etc.
Axios has the right idea for me, but they need to pair it with detailed sources, quotes, etc to drill into. Reality is often too strange these days to trust a summary, i need sources.
I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
It would have to be fully subscription supported, since advertisers probably want to see an even amount of engagement each week (even if it’s small) so that they can set predictable budgets. But important news doesn’t work like that, sometimes there are 3 huge news events happening at the same time, sometimes there’s a slow month with no really big news happening.
Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments.
Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”.
I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts.
Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot.
In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_bo...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ
[Edit: it's debatable whether this was a "refugee" crisis so I removed that word.]
I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
That's pretty unbelievable. It was on the frontpage of all major western news sources.
- The parents of the accused Michigan school shooter head to court again
- Experts crack the secret to last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots before her execution
- The Air Force discharges 27 service members for refusing to get a COVID vaccine
- Their lives were changed by gun violence, and now they're running for office
- The best and worst places to live if you care only about money
- To save lives, the overdose antidote naxalone should be sold over-the-counter, advocates argue
- Vaccine protection vs. omicron infection may drop to 30% but does cut severe disease
- The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by white people
- Rep. Liz Cheney read the text messages she says Mark Meadows got during the Jan. 6 siege
- Kentucky crews search painstakingly for 109 people missing after deadly tornadoes
- 'Return of the Jedi,' 'Selena' and 'Sounder' added to National Film Registry
- Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective against severe disease
- Saule Omarova gets candid: Banks sank her nomination to become a key regulator
- The Supreme Court again leaves a state vaccine mandate in place for health care workers
- Survivors of Nassar's abuse reach a $380 million deal with USA Gymnastics and the Olympic committee
- This year's Golden Globes nominations avoid obvious pitfalls, but won't restore the awards' luster
- More Black families are homeschooling their children, citing the pandemic and racism
- No U.S. troops behind a drone strike that killed Afghan civilians will be punished
- What dish is never missing from your holiday table? Tell us why you love it
- Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year
I'd love an RSS feed that lets me know about Russian troops on the Ukranian border but not about any of those "stories." Actually reading the news is a frustrating experience because the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor.
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There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources.
What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth.
Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.
It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
https://currentevents.email
(looks like my GitHub action has stopped working - will fix it tmr)
https://www.spiegel.de/international/
I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person.
[0] https://slowernews.substack.com/
[1] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
Looks like a decent site.
Wait so are you the originator of the link you posted or not?