I generally try to stay informed on current events. With the exception of what gets posted here, I normally get my news from CNN. I tend to lean left politically, but not always.
The problem I always run into is that every news site I read, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, is always filled with pointless bullshit. Specifically, sports, celebrity news, and product placement. “Some shitty pop singer is dating some shitty actor” or “These are our recommendations for the best mass-produced garbage-quality fast fashion from Temu” or “Some overpaid dickhead threw a ball faster than some other overpaid dickhead.”
What I’d love to find is a news source that’s just news that matters. No celebrity gossip, sports, opinion pieces, etc. Just real events that have an impact on some part of the world. Legislation, natural events, economic changes, wars, political changes, that kind of thing.
Does this exist, or is all journalism just entertainment?
Sounds like you’re looking for independent journalism, I’m in the same boat. I’ve found checking commondreams.org, scheerpost.com, therealnews.com, unicornriot.ninja, fair.org, thecanary.co, leftvoice.org, consortiumnews.com, labornotes.org, and popularresistance.org/news make for a great news feed. Those are an array of independent news outlets which keep it almost entirely just news. Setting up an RSS feed with these sites would be a solid move to ensure your getting news with none of the BS.
I would add Grist to that list for climate focused reporting.
I’m having a hard time getting their URL feeds. I think your post is very useful. Since you mentioned the RSS feed, could you share the links, please? It would be awesome if you can spare the time. Thanks.
I just use radindiemedia.com as my source for these news feeds. It’s curated by an activist who also mixes in some of his work as well as a few other news sources. But those sites make up the vast majority of the links.
Oh, that’s it. Thank you very much.
I can recommend Reuters, given it still has a little bit of sports and opinion, but I find it’s good at providing neutral facts and sources it’s knowledge from appropriate experts for its opinion pieces.
It only lacks in providing local level news, where I turn to my country’s national broadcaster.
Seconding Reuters. Their primary customers are other news agencies, so Reuters generally don’t add spin to a news article.
I guess AP is similar.
IIRC those are like the big two in reselling stories.
Yep, they are called news agencies.
Thank you!
Apparently “Agence France-Presse” or AFP is the third one, at least if you speak French.
News is a service that determines what’s newsworthy and summarizes it. You can’t do that without bias at some level.
I think what you’re describing is the need for RSS feeds. Generally, news outlets categorise their articles neatly so you subscribe with RSS to only headlines, or world events, or whatever. It requires you to have a look around the news site in question and setup RSS correctly.
The other neat thing is that you can read all your RSS feeds (ie multiple news sites) in one reader and there are tons of custom RSS apps.
I share your disdain for gossip and mainstream money grab promo. And ads. My god how much do ads suck.
It’s funny how often this is brought up and how the answer is that’s it’s been solved since nearly the begging of the web.
I’ve been using an RSS manager / server for decades! Right now it’s FreshRSS as the server and using Lire as a client on iOS. There’s arguably no better way to consume content.
RSS won’t solve OP’s problem. Most sites have a single feed with all their articles, if they have an rss feed at all (can’t sell ads in an rss feed).
Aside from maybe just the raw AP feed (which is free through their app) I’m not sure any modern news room just publishes the type of feed OP might be looking for.
I think that really depends on the news site. News from my country is very well suited for RSS.
100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn’t solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you’re shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn’t going to fix that.
Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.
Then again I’ve thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.
I’m subscribed to over 50 RSS feeds and never once have I wanted to subscribe to a site and they didn’t have a feed.
There are millions of blogs and news sources to browse off the beaten path. It really depends on how the site is built. A Wordpress enterprise solution has a default rss feed, but it can be turned off should the site choose. A medium or ghost based site has the same toggle. For a more bespoke solution it is extra dev time not all sites opt for anymore because so few people use rss these days.
Back in 2010 at the height of Google Reader’s popularity rss only accounted for 10% of traffic and depending on how the feed was configured it might consume 30% of the non-money-making bandwidth. There was a push to try to monetize rss, but it kinda backfired and the technology faded into (relative) obscurity for the average person.
There are tens of thousands of absolutely amazing blogs and news sources online today with no support for rss.
News sites often have multiple feeds, but many these days don’t. And the feeds still aren’t as granular as I’d like sometimes. My regional newspaper has a feed for news more specifically local to me, but it’s bogged down with children’s sports and obituaries.
I think my dream setup would allow some intelligent filters to get rid of any categories I just don’t care about, and any “top 8 widgets to do X” filler advertisement articles. Also, a way to lump together all news articles covering the same story, so I could either choose which outlets to actually read/compare, or mark all as read.
I recommend news agencies* like Reuters, AP, and AFP. If you want to just get pure news.
*News agencies are companies that primarily sell news to other companies like CNN.
NPR News is probably what you’re looking for. sports and celebrity stuff is relegated to the Culture section, which is its own separate thing (although there are a couple of music stories that seem to have been misplaced). here is the RSS feed for the News section: https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml
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I’ve had great experiences with reading socialist news sites. They tend not to care about ‘the spectacle’ and don’t like ads. Although you still have to avoid the ones like WSWS who just use it as a platform to call other socialists ‘pseudo-left’.
Side note: There’s a great famous analysis of the US media in the book Manufacturing Consent. You can find a PDF online, but at the very very very least you should read the Wikipedia summary. It explains the reasons why media organisations almost inevitably have some of these biases and bullshits.
WSWS?
“World Socialist Web Site”, the paper of the Socialist Equality Party (who, in my personal experience, are toxic idealists who will counterprotest pickets and any union action whatsoever)
Id probably use AP (Associated Press) since they seem to provide the least biased and most fact based reporting. However looking at their front page right now I see minimal content involving celebrities so it might not be your cup of tea.
I have the AP Top Stories page as my bookmark. It gets rid of even more of the stuff OP doesn’t want.
Only borderline story is about Taylor Swift and food banks, but the focus is on the economics and other issues food banks face, so I feel it is still within guidelines. There’s no celeb drama or gushing in it.
This and my local NPR affiliate are my primary news sources.
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Every news agency will have an inherent bias. There is no such thing as purely objective news without a perspective. However, you can learn to identify the biases, cross reference news with different sources, especially ones from different countries to see other perspectives, and then think about the topics yourself to get a deeper understanding.
This is the way. It’s a ton off work and often, you have to be willing to be wrong about what you thought you knew going into a subject. Approaching news from multiple perspectives reveals your own biases too.
The perfect news source for me would be a single, trustworthy aggregator that showed me several perspectives on every story, all in the same place. That doesn’t exist though.
there are some attempts like ground.news but I agree they leave a lot to be desired and tend to completely ignore non western sources
DW gets my vote
AlJazeera
1440 is what I use. It’s literally bare-bones news articles devoid of any opinion, just facts. They cover both US and international news, and have small culture and sports blips that aren’t click-baity. And it’s emailed to you every day. :)
I’ve not read 1440 at all, so this may or may not apply, but I’d offer a word of caution to any news that purports to be “just facts”. You can absolutely promote an agenda with only facts by choosing which facts to publish (and what stories to even cover). It’s sometimes better to aim to get news from sources that are just very transparent about their biases instead of claiming they don’t have any.
I don’t think it’s better to go for highly biased news at all, I don’t care what the reporter thinks or feels about the facts, I just want them. The overtly biased news outlets are filled to the brim with opinion. If there are facts a story is leaving out, it will eventually get to me through the absolute garbage microphone that is social media, and I can check out the sources from there.
All news has a bias, some news just doesn’t tell you what their bias is. I’m not advocating for intentionally aiming for biased news, I’m advocating for knowing what the bias of the author/editor of the story is, so that when you read it, you know what conclusion they might be trying to lead you to. Even if a journalist tries their best to be impartial, that’s not possible, and like I said, it’s very easy to tell a one sided story with exclusively facts.
I really wish there was a news source with coverage weighted by humanitarian impact.
That might actually be too far in the other direction for what you’re thinking of, though. Most political news wouldn’t be there, just because it’s hard to draw a direct line objectively to the impact it has. Many sites provide categories and filters, so maybe just using those more would be a start.
