Ask HN: What good alteratives are there to Google News?

Im looking mostly for a news curation service.

I'm surprised nobody has cloned it, treemaps aren't exactly obscure and they're criminally underused. Thanks for reminding me about this, I'd forgotten about it and it's just what I needed to unpin the now-ruined Google News.

People put a lot of the blame on FB, but I think Google is as much to blame for the epidemic of fake/crap news as anyone. I have been appalled at the shitty quality of stuff showing up in my google news feed and treated as being on a par with other sources over the last year or two. It's obvious taht google only cares about this as a market rather than anyone there being invested in News as an end in itself.

Not really a direct alternative, but applicable to the spirit of the question:

I don't really like any news organization very much, so instead anytime a political/current events piece pops up here and I like it, I check to see if the author has a Twitter account, and follow them on there. Then, via their RTs and posts, I discover new journalists. If they consistently put out good stuff, I follow them too.

As an example, someone here once put out a piece about Silicon Valley and politics by Emmett Rensin, which I thought was spot-on. Rensin showcased Nathan Robinson, then Abi Wilkinson. And so on and so on.

If you keep a sufficiently varied crowd of followers, geographically and topically, you always see RTs of pertinent news events from eg: BBC, Reuters, AP, or what have you.

In essence, what some of these services do algorithmically, I rely on humans for. As a result I seem to be aware of just about any current event topic that comes up, so it's working for me.

Don't use Twitter like Twitter itself suggests, e.g: "Follow Lebron! Follow Donald Trump! Follow CNN!". Add people very very judiciously, so that your feed looks like the news aggregator you wish to see.

I’m surprised Blendle (https://blendle.com) hasn’t been mentioned yet - you end up paying a small amount for each article, but I’ve found the quality of curation pretty decent, but not perfect yet.

You have to apply for beta access, but it didn’t take long for me to be accepted in. It’s probably more of a marketing beta program, to feel exclusive.

A better question would be what good alternatives are there to news in general. When I see the same headlines with the exact same wording across many different news outlets, I begin to wonder why anybody trusts anything the media has to say about anything.