On Reading the News

This article from NiemanLab titled “I’m a journalist and I’m changing the way I read news. This is how.” didn’t start particularly well for me. It read less about ways to read the news, and more about the inability of some people to just, you know, keep their phone in their pocket when they’re with other people. I know some people truly struggle with this, with connectivity, social media, and all that stuff leading to real mental health issues but, well, I don’t get it.

Anyway, there’s a great bit in the middle of the article, when the author decides to change their ways:

I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news. I have resubscribed to print newspapers because they are finite; when you’re done, you’re done

The first part is very good way to phrase what always bothered me with people “reading the news” on social media, even dating back to the high points of Twitter or Facebook. I never understood it. I’ve always followed the news through news websites’ RSS feeds. I guess it helped I reached true adulthood in the golden era of RSS, a few years before Google Reader. Social media has so much commentary upon commentary that the “news” part gets buried under obfuscated algorithms and your contacts’ biases. Social media is great for some things, but “news”, in the broader sense of it, has never been it.

The second part is quite insightful. RSS feeds do have that “finite” quality — once you’ve read all the articles in your feeds, you’re done too. But paper subscriptions have many other advantages:

• It’s easy to end up subscribing to too many RSS feeds, whereas I doubt you could ever receive so many newspapers that they pile up on your doorstep and you have trouble ever getting to the bottom. So RSS feeds possibly require more “discipline” than newspapers and magazines.
• News websites can publish many, many stories through the day, whereas their paper publication has to make editorial choices about what to print and what to cut. I find news websites’ RSS feeds often have too much. Some have dedicated feeds for the “top stories”, or something similar, but that’s far from the norm. I’d love if news websites offered curated RSS feeds like this more often.
• Articles in RSS feeds are “flattened”: they’re all equal to each other. A top story from a national news organization sits next to some post from a friend’s blog. This is both great and not great. When you read a physical newspaper, there are the big stories that jump at you: they’re on the cover or sprawled across a page spread, they have a big title and eye-catching pictures. Secondary stories take less space, and may be tucked in a side column. You immediately know what’s important to read, and what you may skip or leave for later. Of course, that means someone else is making that decision for you. A human editor-in-chief is better than an algorithm, but you’re still not in control. Still, I suspect that scanning through a uniform “river of articles” is less fun and more tiring than looking at a clear hierarchy of information delivered through the glorious means of graphical and typographical design. It would be great if RSS feeds could include some “importance” or “weight” factor to articles, and that RSS clients would optionally translate that to compelling magazine-like layouts. Some RSS clients already try to do that, actually, but mostly by guessing what you think you like, with various degrees of success, as opposed to following the instructions of an editor-in-chief.

Anyway, if you’re curious about trying this RSS business I speak of, or if you remember Google Reader but haven’t used RSS ever since Google killed it, these days I recommend you try Inoreader (which I use), NewsBlur, or Feedbin. The first is supported by a “proper” company, the latter two are pretty just a couple of indie developers. Of course if you’re a serious nerd, you can host your own RSS feed reader (there’s a plethora of good ones out there), and I did that for a while a long time ago… now I’m old and don’t give a much of a fuck anymore.