Computing desk
< May 29	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	May 31 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 30

Alternatives to Google News

Are there any better alternatives to the Google News aggregator? X-Editor (talk) 30 May 2019, 03:41 (UTC)

There has to be! :-) Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:51, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What are you seeking? More editorial control? Less editorial control? Different news sources?

I recommend reading several different sources, including at least a few different viewpoints, and then using the awesome power of the internet to locate primary source information.

For example, if there's a major news story about politics in my home country, I can read or watch stories from PBS News Hour; Voice of America News; and ABC News; and then I can visit the White House press office (who, for the present time, speak in an official capacity on behalf of the executive office); the website of the Speaker of the House (who, at present, represents our nation's opposition party); and the websites of my congressional representatives, who publish nearly daily updates on issues of importance.

This way, I reduce my reliance on the editorial viewpoints of commercially-interested news providers. It is hardly true that my news is "unbiased" - every author or primary source has its own bias - but at least I am very aware of whose biases are being presented at me. Put bluntly, I do not agree with many of the politicians whose statements I read - (very few of them are physicists) - but at least I have read their statements. If I need assistance to interpret these statements on a complex or unfamiliar issue, I can use directed internet search to seek out background information; or I can read editorial opinions from third-parties of various leanings.

As a general rule, I will not read a news website - nor, generally, any other source of information - until I first read about its authors or editors. (Who owns the New York Times, and who owns the Los Angeles Times, and who owns ABC, and who owns VoA, ...and who owns Google for that matter - and so on! - because if you don't even know who's talking to you, ... maybe it becomes a problem when you need to trust what they say?)

This is a strategy that I feel has helped to innoculate me against the rash of disinformation that has recently swept so many consumers of information. It is also a resoundingly convincing argument against "news aggregators" in general - these types of presentations typically throw short headlines at the viewer, from many unnamed sources of greatly varying quality, with very minimal effort to attribute the information to its source. The medium is the message: if your news aggregator shows you headlines and does not prominently display the authors and their credentials, then your news-media is essentially telling you that authorship and attribution don't matter; and if you're seeking out such a format, you're being complicit in the ongoing erosion of news-trustworthiness and reliablility in the sourcing of information.

Nimur (talk) 13:45, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I find https://lite.cnn.io/ to be quick and clean, though of course it's the "CNN Point of View". I also spend more time than I should looking at r/news Reddit comment threads. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 16:59, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]