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).
It’t not just that—they also overstate the severity of the event covered, in each report, even as they inevitably follow that by “well, no cause to really worry yet, we’ll have to see in coming weeks”.
I wish for a solid news source that did unbiased reporting in a way that doesn’t offend knowledgeable viewer/reader’s intelligence. Just assume I already know what happened up to this point; then add links/annotations as appropriate. Don’t drum up sensational headlines and speculations. Save your effort, save my time.
This isn’t something that can be found on YouTube, as it wouldn’t generate grand amounts of ad revenue.
When something "big and scary" turns out to be nothing, they don't usually post an "all clear" on the front page to tie up the loose ends for the reader.
The resulting accumulation of worrying information probably contributes to a chronic stress in regular readers.
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.
I care about the effectiveness and approval of Pfizer's treatment, but I don't care to be informed about every single new piece of information that comes out about it. In this case the news was that Pfizer released additional data that's consistent with the interim report it released a little over a month ago. If the final analysis contradicted its original report, or if their emergency use authorization were approved or denied, that's something I'd want to see. It's still the most newsworthy item on the list IMO, and I wouldn't be upset if it slipped into my feed.
If you don't check every day, it's inevitable you will miss something. I guess the real need is not a webpage but more of a notification service that tells you the major news stories of the day.
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.
