I have (and still use) a feed reader, but it doesn't really replace Google News. It's often helpful to have an algorithm tell you what's important on other news sources you're not reading. It's also nice that it filters out a lot of the noise/click-bait that all publishers use nowadays.
Second this, in that I mostly don't want to maintain a current and relevant RSS list of a size that I would want to have. RSS is also a firehose which can be just as bad as a small list of sources.
Just to give another option, I use feedbin, $3pcm and open source. I looked at it and feedly, the latter seemed to (deliberately) abstract RSS too far from my perspective.
Inkl looks about the best (at least in theory, as I haven't tried it). The problem is I want to be able to use it mostly on desktop, and Inkl seems to be mobile only.
I'd be interested in talking with this team about partnerships. Any chance you could make an intro? Also, the animations on their site load so slowly (at least for me), that often I was scrolling and just seeing white. By the time the animation loaded, I was already halfway past it.
Nextcloud [1] with the News [2] app. Feed it whatever RSS/Atom feeds you want - which can include Google News feeds - and let it rip. You can read the feeds in a browser or in one of the compatible apps [3] (14 of them are listed here, there might be others).
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.
Should adjust this question to say desktop aggregation version, and I am assuming this ASK is in response to the recent Google News redesign that pretty much removed the desktop version of the site.
Apps and mobile is cool and all, but high density or high volume data consumption is not the use case for those platforms.
The redesign isnt an issue...works well enough on desktop. I just refuse to use a news service where 50% or more of the health stories are viagra spam. Completely unacceptable. Especially since people have been reporting it to google for the past month. It makes me wonder about the quality of their curation.
Offtopic, but I've never found a newsfeed / RSS reader that compelling. After a while you've subscribed to say many things that you don't want to (and can't) spend the time required to catch up on everything.
Personally, I subscribe to one newspaper, watch one cable news network and browse HackerNews and Reddit (HN trending upward vs. Reddit in recent months) and listen to a few podcasts and I'm able to keep up with the world on a wide range of topics.
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.
I haven't recently found a news organisation that is consistently rational and has done their homework. Given that news is still worth reading, in moderation.
I roll my own sources including:
1. A variety of newsfeeds through a desktop reader. (Can be improved by writing your own rating system.)
2. A list of news sources on a web page, this evolves. (Would also benefit from code that throws out the things I'll never read.)
3. Blendle.
4. People I correspond with (they dig out good stuff, I reciprocate).
5. Less obvious (to some) news sources like HN... are on that web page list.
...
Google used to do custom feeds defined by an arbitrary search string, that had some power.
There are tools out there that help identify material worth reading (DNN's etc.).
I find likes and dislikes are often valueless even if you "assume the opposite".
Your most important weapon may be the realisation that most journalists are under extreme pressure and don't do their job at even a basic level. Makes it easier to quickly ignore the garbage..
I find the print version of The Week to be surprisingly consistent in their balanced review of high quality news sources. Sadly, the online version is a bit click-baity, but the print version is amazing.
It scrapes headlines from Wikipedia once per day at 8p PST. It's encrypted. There's no ads. It loads fast, as-in one request. Your activity isn't logged.
I built this because I got tired of all the shitty tricks news websites play: obnoxious ads, "breaking news", auto-play videos, pumping megabytes of crap into your browser, lack of privacy, and lack of citations.
Legible news is boring. It's non-addictive. If you click on a link you might accidentally learn something about the historic context of a news story. I don't log anything because I don't care. Daily headlines delivered in one HTTP request (look at it in an inspector) over a CDN. It's fast. I hope you like it, but if you don't no worries, I built it for myself.
Is the code open source ? I live in Europe, and it would be great if, with the same product, we could choose the time at which we want the news to be delivered, and the language in which we want it delivered.
I've thought a lot about this use case. My vision is that a few KB of text is delivered once per day to whatever-device at a desired time. No more. No less.
What language and locale would you be interested in?
The daily hour-long version here is the only regular news I consume(minus notify NYC RSS): https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos I find them to be less jumpy than similar news sources, probably due to the lack of incentives to bring in massive profit.
If I am interested in something specific/real time, I will open up google news, reddit news, twitter, local news, web search, popular newspaper sites(nytimes, washington post etc.) and/or other relevant places.
Protip: identify the news sources you don't like and ban them wholesale under "Manage Sections / Sources" in Google News. Banning just a few improves the experience tremendously. HuffPo and Buzzfeed are prime candidates for the ban hammer.
Isn't Buzzfeed news decent? I know their main site is full of clickbait, etc. but I was always under the impression that they used the money from there to fund their other journalistic ventures? Interesting, I suppose, how a negative perception of their clickbait side can negatively skew any decent/viable journalistic efforts...
Now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure if I find it decent because I'm sub-consciously comparing it to the rest of Buzzfeed vs. all other news in general.
It actually looks like all of these are legitimate news sites that have been hacked so that they redirect to viagra sites if the url is crafted correctly and if the referral comes from google news, e.g. http://www.maceandcrown.com/?zhq49qb=1658898069 (link works fine there, but when referred from google news it goes to a viagra site).
This is a great tip (eg banning TMZ seems like a great idea). Unfortunately, if you switch between US & regional Google News often (maybe you mostly read Google News Australia), it has a tendency to delete all your carefully curated settings on both sites.
You can also add preferred sources now, which helps a lot (when they don't delete it). I found adding WSJ, Deutsche Welle, FT, Bloomberg, Financial Review & similar sources improved things for me. I wish I could add blogs I follow there too.
I'd love to see a Google News alternative that used a customisable whitelist of sources, and mute filters to block topics I'm just not interested in.
115 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadRiple and News360 are mobile, but pretty cool apps.
Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder.
Edit: http://contentgems.com
Think you may have a typo, and intended to direct OP to http://contentgems.com
[1] https://www.inkl.com
[1] https://nextcloud.com/
[2] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news
[3] https://github.com/nextcloud/news#sync-clients
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.
Apps and mobile is cool and all, but high density or high volume data consumption is not the use case for those platforms.
Personally, I subscribe to one newspaper, watch one cable news network and browse HackerNews and Reddit (HN trending upward vs. Reddit in recent months) and listen to a few podcasts and I'm able to keep up with the world on a wide range of topics.
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.
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.
Curation is a valuable service. It's worth paying for.
I roll my own sources including: 1. A variety of newsfeeds through a desktop reader. (Can be improved by writing your own rating system.) 2. A list of news sources on a web page, this evolves. (Would also benefit from code that throws out the things I'll never read.) 3. Blendle. 4. People I correspond with (they dig out good stuff, I reciprocate). 5. Less obvious (to some) news sources like HN... are on that web page list. ...
Google used to do custom feeds defined by an arbitrary search string, that had some power.
There are tools out there that help identify material worth reading (DNN's etc.).
I find likes and dislikes are often valueless even if you "assume the opposite".
Your most important weapon may be the realisation that most journalists are under extreme pressure and don't do their job at even a basic level. Makes it easier to quickly ignore the garbage..
- Payday loan spam (two spams on the front page)
- No way to customize your interests
- Duplicated stories with near identical headlines appear from multiple sources. This isn't usually an issue with Google.
Happy to answer any questions.
It scrapes headlines from Wikipedia once per day at 8p PST. It's encrypted. There's no ads. It loads fast, as-in one request. Your activity isn't logged.
I built this because I got tired of all the shitty tricks news websites play: obnoxious ads, "breaking news", auto-play videos, pumping megabytes of crap into your browser, lack of privacy, and lack of citations.
Legible news is boring. It's non-addictive. If you click on a link you might accidentally learn something about the historic context of a news story. I don't log anything because I don't care. Daily headlines delivered in one HTTP request (look at it in an inspector) over a CDN. It's fast. I hope you like it, but if you don't no worries, I built it for myself.
I've thought a lot about this use case. My vision is that a few KB of text is delivered once per day to whatever-device at a desired time. No more. No less.
What language and locale would you be interested in?
https://legiblenews.com/?l=de,en
If I am interested in something specific/real time, I will open up google news, reddit news, twitter, local news, web search, popular newspaper sites(nytimes, washington post etc.) and/or other relevant places.
Continuous stream of socially curated news, formatted for mobile.
Now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure if I find it decent because I'm sub-consciously comparing it to the rest of Buzzfeed vs. all other news in general.
You can also add preferred sources now, which helps a lot (when they don't delete it). I found adding WSJ, Deutsche Welle, FT, Bloomberg, Financial Review & similar sources improved things for me. I wish I could add blogs I follow there too.
I'd love to see a Google News alternative that used a customisable whitelist of sources, and mute filters to block topics I'm just not interested in.