How do you process the news?

Most news nowadays is mostly slop with clickbait headlines of breaking news, designed to get you to pay for "premium" and have to jump through hoops of paywalls.

It is best if mega news organizations just ultimately shut down at this point, we don't need more news.

The closest one I read is Tortoise (1), which is part of slow journalism(2) which I support at the very least, as soon as I see clickbait, I jump off.

(1) https://www.tortoisemedia.com/

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_journalism

I'll scan headlines a few times per day, and read the odd story. One problem I'm encountering with websites, aside from the ads and annoyances, is that much of the news seems curiously irrelevant.

There's a list of text-only news sites which ... slightly ... improves the situation, but only just, as few media outlets bother to organise their text-only offerings. What's generated is typically an unordered jumble of clickbaitish headlines. That said, the listing:

https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/>

Of those I'll hit NPR, CNN, and the Christian Science Monitor most often.

CNN annoyed me so much that I looked under the hood ... and found that the URLs encode both a news topic and date along with a title, e.g., from current headlines:

  https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-county/index.html

So, that's an 8 Mar 2025 article in US News about fires on Long Island.

Turns out that it's a SMOP[1] to extract URLs and headlines from the published Web page, and regenerate a far more useful page grouped by subject heading. Another interesting side effect is that I've accumulated an archive of > 4,400 stories published since mid-December 2024 and can easily run statistics on the story distribution. There are 30 sections, which I've aggregated to a smaller set of five, represented as follows:

  US:        1298 (29.29%)
  World:      917 (20.70%)
  Business:   638 (14.40%)
  Science:    371 (8.37%)
  Trivia:    1207 (27.24%)
  ----------------------------------------
  Total:     4431 / 4431  [0] (sections crosscheck)

(I'd started the project in part to quantify how much this was the case, and to dump all the trivia in one place so I didn't have to parse individual headlines to suss out what was what.)

Other sites are less amenable to this as they use random strings in URLs (e.g., Financial Times and NPR). Most website, even the so-called "lite" or "text" versions, read quite poorly in a terminal-based browser (I favour w3m, but others differ little).

I'll listen to foreign news services a fair bit, including CBC, BBC, ABC (Australia), Deutschlandfunk, and more. I find the quality of foreign-service news seems a bit better than most US sources. Most of these are via podcast.

I've been listening to The World, out of WBUR Boston. Unlike virtually all audio/video news these days, the programme is pre-recorded and edited. Its focus tends to reduce US-centric news, which I prefer, and what I find is that the editing and pre-recording make the segments (reports and interviews largely) far less disjoint than, say, NPR, BBC, or the PBS News Hour, which I find all but unlistenable.

Among other podcasts are those focusing heavily on philosophy and history, which I find tend to inform on current events without wallowing in them. Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, David Runciman's History of Ideas (and his several earlier podcasts), Stephen West's Philosophize This, and Nigel Warberton and David Edmunds's Philosophy Bites are all high on my list. Among those dealing with contemporary politics, Ezra Klein tends to be insightful without being overly grating or outrage-inducing, while also including a range of guests across the political spectrum (though he quite admittedly leans left), while also managing to generally keep them away from thought-stopping cliches and stale talking points by pushing back gently but effectively in a way that few interviewers seem capable of. Runciman also has this skill, though it's less often evidenced, see his Intelligence Squared (UK) appearances for good examples.

For those interested, my CNN category breakdown is:

   489 (11.04%)   US News
   809 (18.26%)   US Politics
    76  (1.72%)   World
   111  (2.51%)   World -- Americas
    62  (1.40%)   World -- Africa
   112  (2.53%)   World -- Asia
    29  (0.65%)   World -- Australia
    37  (0.84%)   World -- China
    17  (0.38%)   World -- India
   260  (5.87%)   World -- Europe
   183  (4.13%)   World -- MidEast
    30  (0.68%)   World -- UK
    91  (2.05%)   Economy
   369  (8.33%)   Business
     1  (0.02%)   Markets
    85  (1.92%)   Tech
     2  (0.05%)   Cars
    11  (0.25%)   Investing
    79  (1.78%)   Media
   112  (2.53%)   Science
   170  (3.84%)   Health
    48  (1.08%)   Weather
    41  (0.93%)   Climate
   163  (3.68%)   Travel
    26  (0.59%)   Food
     3  (0.07%)   Homes
   496 (11.19%)   Sport
   405  (9.14%)   Entertainment
   109  (2.46%)   Style
     5  (0.11%)   CNN 10 Minutes

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Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming>

The only way to consume news, without subjecting oneself to the inner turmoil that the news is designed to produce, is to develop a long term theory and then just check in with the headlines to make sure that things are progressing toward it.

If they don't seem to be, adjust the theory and then keep-on with the aforementioned method.

Sure, some people emotionally need to be apprised of the tragedy of every story. They may even convince themselves that the World's trajectory hangs on the balance of every event. I'd suggest that this is both irrational and hints at addiction behavior. But if this isn't you, or you want to become less addicted, then give the above method a try.

After awhile, you'll begin to admire the efficiency of and relative inner-peace from your new hard-won detachment skill.

I as a former progressive that worked in and with publishing houses had the exact opposite experience:

Although I was on their political side, all the news just became boring. Once you‘ve been part of that media-culture and you know your ilk and how little thought-diversity exists, you already know where a news item will go before you‘ve read it.

Since he‘s already in Switzerland he might better subscribe to the great https://weltwoche.ch/ – one will probably respond with „those are putin trolls“ to which i‘d respond „he doesn’t seem to have a general issue with subscribing to govt-aligned press“ (Le monde diplomatique, Bellingcat).

there are no objective news, people always have opinions (and those without have less reason to write about it) and the toolset to make them look objective is excessive. And thus enticing.

If you’re not willing to engage (at least from time to time) with the opposing view you‘ve risk cornering yourself like the author did.

In general, they won't. And this newfound knowledge can then be carried forward when reading the attention-grabbing predictions and declarations of today. It's basically a more generalized version of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/