I got a lot of my headlines from reddit. Due to the impending death of my favorite app (Sync for Reddit) however, that’s coming to an end.
I’m now realising my Reddit experience had deteriorated slowly, just doomscrolling the hours away wasn’t healthy and I’m even kind of glad this is a good reason to end it. However, reddit has been really useful for news, especially the comments (taken with the right amount of skepticism) could be very informative.
I hope Lemmy builds something similar, but the defederation of beehaw’s news has been a setback.
What would be a good alternative, going forward, for getting news and backgrounds from varied, trustworthy en unbiased sources?
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RSS feeds from PBS and NPR
As someone that’s never used RSS, how does it work?
You install an RSS reader app on your phone or computer and subscribe to the feed links. Those contain some metadata for each story and a link to the content. The RSS reader will display everything in a readable way.
Is there an RSS reader with built in comment sections?
No, that’s kind of antithetical to how rss works.
The RSS protocol is basically just a list of links. So each content producer publishes their own list, to which people subscribe. Comments stay in their respective communities.
For example, you could have an rss feed from a reddit sub, and another from a lemmy community, and another from a newspaper.
Of course you could build an app with its own comment section, but as I said that would kind of undermine the elegance of RSS.
Both of them have truly neutral coverage, as in they report based on fact and reality and don’t limit what they write in order to maintain some false sense of neutrality. Many news sites nowadays play down objective fact in order to maintain “neutrality” between one side of the political spectrum that believes in evidence and statistical fact and one that expressly does not.
This of course means that they’re seen as being “anti-Trump” or “anti-Republican” but in actuality it’s reality itself that is anti-Trump and they just report reality.
If you want as close as possible to true “neutrality” – which is to mean verifiable fact-only reporting without commentary, you’re going to need to go to the wire services directly – the AP and Reuters are the largest.
I would caution against putting so much faith in them both so strongly. They both favor American establishment liberal politics, which is transparent to many due to the fact that a lot of Americans agree with those politics, and that they appear very reasonable in comparison to whatever tf Republicans are up to on a given day.
It’s not a bad thing that they tend to have a very dry and straightforward tone, but all outlets are biased, and it’s important to remain critical at all times if you want to have an accurate picture of a current event.
Oh fully agree, of course. Every once in a while I see a neoliberal dipshit in their opinion columns making some abhorrent take, but generally they’re signs significantly better than WaPo, NYT, CNN, Fox, CNBC, NBC, or CBS.
Some other good ones are Reuters, Al Jazeera, and the Associated Press, which of course each come with their own set of biases as well. Reuters is also fairly establishment liberal, Al Jazeera is useless for any news about the Middle East, and AP’s opinion and analysis columns lean pretty conservative.
My comment was more in the sense that a “neutral” news site is one where they do not suppress facts because those facts favor a perceived “side” of a debate, which is becoming increasingly common as major political parties in the US and abroad start pushing outright falsehoods in their rhetoric.
Fair enough, that’s actually close to the mix I have in my RSS reader, although I also would add the SCMP and teleSur as well
I’ll take a look at those! I should really consider setting up an RSS feed for news coverage. Kinda been meaning to for a while, do you have an RSS reader that you prefer?
Liferea works well for me, but if you aren’t using Linux then we can all long for Google Reader to come back lol. https://miniflux.app/ also looks good but takes some setting up it looks like.
Also be aware in advance that teleSur is Cuban/Venezuelan/Bolivian state media, but it sounds like you have decent enough media criticism skills to appreciate their point of view in comparison to the US-based outlets.
I just discovered https://newsnotfound.com/ and I quite like it! Well worth checking out. :)
The context I got from reddit comment threads was invaluable. I hope to find something similar in the federated wilderness.
Very interested in others folks answers. Honestly, I follow a lot of people on Mastodon who share news. I also follow hashtags for my local area (and here on threadiverse, subscribed to communities focused on my local area). This seems to work okay but isn’t quite the firehouse I’m used to.
I use an app called Artifact that aggregates news from many sources into a FYP and categories. There’s even comments for each article.
Reuters and the Associated Press are probably the most neutral and trustworthy news agencies.
Edit: My bad, they aren’t news aggregators, I still highly recommend them, though.
Just subscribe to RSS feeds from your new sites.
I use InnoReader, which I prefer to Feedly. Syncs Free plan allows you up to 150 feeds and shows ads (which you can easily get around).
I’m currently using Feedly. I subscribe to news outlets that I trust, and just read what I’m interested in there
Thanks for suggestion Inoreader! I’ve just had a look and it looks great, in particular with their pre-made collections.
Check out ground news. It is a news aggregator, but with a twist: it aggregates all articles on the same event from various sites so you can see how the event is portrayed by different sites.
ground.news is great.
There’s also allsides.com, which has a similar idea.
I was just going to link that! Two articles on the topic:
https://www.thefactual.com/blog/what-are-the-best-nonpartisan-news-sources/
https://www.makeuseof.com/top-unbiased-news-sources/
I tried my hand at creating a magazine https://kbin.social/m/neutralnews
Haven’t done a lot with it, though. But it was in response to the same dilemma as OP
Aljazeera is fantastic, I’ve been reading them for years and years. Their middle eastern news tends to be biased, but everything else is good. Of course, never trust a single news source on anything
go to ground.news, they have news from both sides of the spectrum and label them as such and it’s kind of like a reddit for news?? world news specifically tho
While i like the idea on principle, I think they have a lot of bothsideism on their site. Dividing everything into “left” or “right” is not a really valid approach.
I like brutalist.report.
It shows the headlines of many news sites in a clean way: just text links. It also has filters for tech, science, politics, etc.
Edit:typo
Anything wrong with going to a news site directly? I find https://www.theguardian.com/au and https://www.abc.net.au/ work well for keeping on top of news but your country would surely have equivalents.
If you’re willing to make a new account, I use lemmy.ml and so far I’ve been able to connect to every major instance including beehaw. Or you could make a separate beehaw account just for their content.
I’ve started using newsminimalist.com It’s one of the most useful LLM based services I’ve seen. It’s an aggregator that uses ChatGPT to identify the significance of stories and group the articles on different sites about that story together and then summarise them.
I don’t want to spend hours every day reading news, but I do want to keep up to date with major events and it’s been good for that.
Wow this is pretty neat, have you encountered often that it hallucinates news and such?
No, because the primary purpose of the LLM is to choose among news stories on existing news sites and just group them together put them in order - not so much opportunity to make stuff up.
It’s also doing summarisation, but that is something LLMs do pretty well and in that constrained way also don’t hallucinate (in my experience).
I think it’s best to never read the news, you’ll find about stuff that actually affects you naturally anyway.
Focus on communities for your hobbies and career instead.
I like to keep up to date enough on the things my government chooses to do so that I can make an informed choice the next time I vote.
I very actively followed news and politics a couple of years ago, and had been doing that for a long time. One day I just got completely fed up, and stopped. And holy shit, I’ve been so much happier and harmonious since then. Strongly recommend, 5/7
