HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you consume and stay on top of news?

6 points by prassarkar ↗ HN
Twitter, Facebook, RSS, GReader, Summify, custom intelligence solution? Share your tips or projects that help you:

a) consume a large variety of news sources

b) stay on top of it by reading only relevant interesting news

Edit1: formatting

7 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] thread
jefftala
In the browser and on my phone I use: Google Reader, Twitter, and a little bit of Facebook. My Google Reader has something like 150 sources and I generally skim the headlines of all them together. If I've tapped that source I'll head to Techmeme and HN directly.

On my iPad I subscribe to The Economist and I also use Flipboard (again, with Google Reader).

Via shared links on Twitter and Facebook I generally end up on the NY Times a few times a week, as well as the WSJ and Wired.

prassarkar
1. GReader (can't keep track of 200+ feeds every day so I've pruned it to a few dozen that I check every day and always sort by magic)

2. HN (for tech related news)

3. Curated newsletters (subscribed to Summify, Startup Reading List,and other email newsletters that curate news daily/weekly)

4. Zite (using it increasingly since it's machine learning algorithm is spot on)

Tycho
my browser opens on Yahoo UK which has normal headlines. the rest i get from HN. i have been experimenting with Twitter a bit, but some sources just announce way too much stuff. i odn't want 150 new tweets every time i open the client. so i'm trying to build a follow list of people who say funny and/or informative stuff no more than a few times per day
cpeterso
I read Google News' headlines in the morning to get a "what's happening in the world today" overview. I use Google Reader to track some niche blogs.
orky56
It really comes down to priorities. If your goal is to consume the most amount of information as possible, you cannot afford to go to multiple sources. This is because you will be wasting your time with redundancy, getting used to a different tone/bias, and the overall time of navigating somewhere else. This is good for knowing stuff for "top of mind" reasons and just being "in the loop."

That being said, if there's a particular topic you are interested in, you should get multiple perspectives on it and become an active reader. This is the stuff where you can not only recall information but you can contribute to a meaningful discussion.

HN and Google News 7x a week. Google Reader on special topics 2-3x a week. BusinessWeek/Time/FastCompany/Inc 1x a week.

triviatise
google reader to collate around 75 sources. I mostly just skim headlines. The nice thing about the reader is that even when stuff is off the front page I can go a few days without checking in and then catch up.