8 ms·

Show HN: 22 top US newspapers in an RSS OPML list

83 points by newman8r 8y ago

newman8r 8y ago
A lot of people have been interested in cnn's lite version, but unfortunately it seems like most other sites don't offer one. RSS is essentially that though, so even if you don't use an RSS reader you can bookmark the RSS versions and browse them individually.
- smhenderson 8y ago
  NPR's Text Only is pretty good too. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
- ravenstine 8y ago
  There's a little project I made some time ago that takes either the text-only or AMP version of news stories and displays them in sandboxed iframes, which disables all scripts leaving one with just text. https://stripped.news/ https://stripped.news/ And there's an RSS feed(headlines only): https://stripped.news/feed.rss https://stripped.news/feed.rss I think Washington Post is broken though, but everything else is working fine. Sadly, it appears both the Atlantic and Reuters have added some annoying elements to the top of their AMP pages that take up a lot of space; that wasn't how it was when I first made this project.
  - forgotmypw 8y ago
    Keep doing what you're doing.
celadevra_ 8y ago
I am not sure this helps people get into the habit of paying attention to news instead of hovering over social media sites, other than raising awareness. Every one of the feeds can flood your RSS inbox in a few hours, and a normal person simply don't have time to catch up with all of them. I remember this was how I abandoned RSS the first 5 times. You may want to pick only a few of them, maybe one for each political leaning, and look at their site to see if they provide feeds by section, then pick the section you are interested in, instead of importing the OPML whole.
- newman8r 8y ago
  Yeah I can see how that might bog down a newcomer, that's not bad advice. You could also import the 22 feeds and delete any that seem to be posting too often for your taste. A rough estimate is that these 22 feeds would generate about 300-600 stories a day.
  - krick 8y ago
    By my experience, you don't even need all 22 to feel overwhelmed. I still haven't found one news agency with a feed that would feel like "important news". Actually, all the news are simply the worst, and getting worse still. All the most prominent media resources manage lately to combine in a news feed tell-you-nothing headlines, lengthy writing style of the newyorker w/o a summary, and still not including a recap/timeline of previous events when following up on something that's ongoing for the last 2 months. Plus, I do understand that importance is somewhat a matter of perspective, but they still manage to post some nonsence every 2 minutes, while not covering really impactful business news/economic events.
    - kthejoker2 8y ago
      This was the original intent of Vox.com ... and here we are. Think we're in the minority of the reading audience, unfortunately.
    - namibj 8y ago
      I considered creating a service that you subscribe to and that gives you reasonably detailed content filtering. With configurable classes to sort news between e.g. newsletters and chatbot interfaces, based on how time-critical they are. There are meta-agreggators like GDELT [0] that supply machine-readable classifications that should somehow allow filtering useless stuff out based on what they contain. Do you think there is significant demand for this, possibly even in a way that you pay a (small) amount for the service? It seems like a (comparably) sane idea to pursue, but pre-implementation market validation is a strong motivator to prioritize work on it without direct financial pressure. [0]: https://www.gdeltproject.org/ https://www.gdeltproject.org/
adamdrake 8y ago
For those interested, this might be a good place to mention Newsbeuter, but Mutt of feed readers! It can be pretty efficient to do feed reading and management via CLI. https://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html https://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html
- upofadown 8y ago
  Then this would also be a good place to mention the currently maintained fork of newsbeuter; newsboat[1]. [1] https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/
__bee 8y ago
I found RSS feeds to be better alternative to read the news beyond the filtering bubble that our social media platforms create. There was an interesting tool to monitor RSS list of newspapers[1] on HN sometime ago. I wish that this tool [2] is hosted somewhere to easily get notification on my slack without setting it up or managing it. With load of information we face everyday, the idea of monitoring RSS feeds through Slack interface is very interesting. [1] https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/wren/config/rss_feeds.yml https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/wren/config/rss_fe... [2] https://github.com/tzano/wren https://github.com/tzano/wren
kristianc 8y ago
I would be interested to know if the OP has actually attempted to use this, and if so how they have avoided feeling completely overwhelmed. The challenge with RSS isn’t finding the feeds - they are for the most part readily available. It’s having a feed that doesn’t completely overwhelm. That’s the problem that social, for all the concerns about filter bubbles and tracking, does actually do a good job at solving.
- kop316 8y ago
  Not OP, but I recently have set up Tiny Tiny RSS and did something similar. I find that there are two categories: High bandwidth feeds (your NYTimes, Reuters, etc.), and low bandwidth feeds (blogs/projects I like to follow, the occasional youtube channels, etc.) If you curate it (I have worlds news, US news, politics, tech, science, etc), I find it's actually pretty nice to be able to scan through the headlines and see what interests you. It seems to augment my Reddit/HN feeds pretty well. I find that I can scan through all the headlines in ~3-4 minutes. I also find it is incredibly nice for the low bandwidth feeds. I don't feel like I need to check those everyday, when I get an update it shows a notification and I can go straight through it. As a result, I am subscribed to a lot more of those, as it very easy to look through.
- writeslowly 8y ago
  I've experimented with using clustering algorithms to rank stories from about a dozen different RSS feeds to get results based on media coverage. I have some basic output set up here, it could use a lot of improvements but it seems like a decent way to sort national/international news without needing social media data: https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/ https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/
  - jpfed 8y ago
    I've wanted to do this as well. How does your site rank stories within a cluster? I had always imagined that if I were to do this, I would order them by centrality, where the distance metric is Euclidean distance between the word histograms.
mindcrime 8y ago
Upvoted just for mentioning OPML! I can't remember the last time I saw an OPML reference on HN. Hopefully there will be more RSS, Atom, OPML, ActivityPub, ActivityStrea.ms, FOAF, SIOC, etc. related work showing up here in the future.
dionidium 8y ago
"Hey, where's the St. Louis Post-Dispatch," I thought to myself. Ugh, it's now the 26th largest by circulation [0]. How the mighty have fallen. They do have RSS feeds, if you want to add them: https://www.stltoday.com/rss/ https://www.stltoday.com/rss/ However, like most other smaller dailies on this list, they no longer do much national reporting (it's all from the wire services). So, unless you're really into hearing about local politics in various mid-sized U.S. cities -- which I'm not disparaging, because I actually am! -- a lot of these are going to be pretty useless for you. [0] https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-and-magazines/top-100-newspapers-united-states https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-and...
pasbesoin 8y ago
For those hitting the JS-disabled/blank-page syndrome, the referenced Github resource: https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml/blob/master/us-newspapers.opml https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml/blob/master/u...

83 points by newman8r 8y ago

A lot of people have been interested in cnn's lite version, but unfortunately it seems like most other sites don't offer one. RSS is essentially that though, so even if you don't use an RSS reader you can bookmark the RSS versions and browse them individually.

smhenderson 8y ago
NPR's Text Only is pretty good too. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
ravenstine 8y ago
There's a little project I made some time ago that takes either the text-only or AMP version of news stories and displays them in sandboxed iframes, which disables all scripts leaving one with just text. https://stripped.news/ https://stripped.news/ And there's an RSS feed(headlines only): https://stripped.news/feed.rss https://stripped.news/feed.rss I think Washington Post is broken though, but everything else is working fine. Sadly, it appears both the Atlantic and Reuters have added some annoying elements to the top of their AMP pages that take up a lot of space; that wasn't how it was when I first made this project.
- forgotmypw 8y ago
  Keep doing what you're doing.

celadevra_ 8y ago

I am not sure this helps people get into the habit of paying attention to news instead of hovering over social media sites, other than raising awareness. Every one of the feeds can flood your RSS inbox in a few hours, and a normal person simply don't have time to catch up with all of them. I remember this was how I abandoned RSS the first 5 times. You may want to pick only a few of them, maybe one for each political leaning, and look at their site to see if they provide feeds by section, then pick the section you are interested in, instead of importing the OPML whole.

newman8r 8y ago
Yeah I can see how that might bog down a newcomer, that's not bad advice. You could also import the 22 feeds and delete any that seem to be posting too often for your taste. A rough estimate is that these 22 feeds would generate about 300-600 stories a day.
- krick 8y ago
  By my experience, you don't even need all 22 to feel overwhelmed. I still haven't found one news agency with a feed that would feel like "important news". Actually, all the news are simply the worst, and getting worse still. All the most prominent media resources manage lately to combine in a news feed tell-you-nothing headlines, lengthy writing style of the newyorker w/o a summary, and still not including a recap/timeline of previous events when following up on something that's ongoing for the last 2 months. Plus, I do understand that importance is somewhat a matter of perspective, but they still manage to post some nonsence every 2 minutes, while not covering really impactful business news/economic events.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    This was the original intent of Vox.com ... and here we are. Think we're in the minority of the reading audience, unfortunately.
  - namibj 8y ago
    I considered creating a service that you subscribe to and that gives you reasonably detailed content filtering. With configurable classes to sort news between e.g. newsletters and chatbot interfaces, based on how time-critical they are. There are meta-agreggators like GDELT [0] that supply machine-readable classifications that should somehow allow filtering useless stuff out based on what they contain. Do you think there is significant demand for this, possibly even in a way that you pay a (small) amount for the service? It seems like a (comparably) sane idea to pursue, but pre-implementation market validation is a strong motivator to prioritize work on it without direct financial pressure. [0]: https://www.gdeltproject.org/ https://www.gdeltproject.org/

adamdrake 8y ago

For those interested, this might be a good place to mention Newsbeuter, but Mutt of feed readers! It can be pretty efficient to do feed reading and management via CLI. https://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html https://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html

upofadown 8y ago
Then this would also be a good place to mention the currently maintained fork of newsbeuter; newsboat[1]. [1] https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/

__bee 8y ago

I found RSS feeds to be better alternative to read the news beyond the filtering bubble that our social media platforms create. There was an interesting tool to monitor RSS list of newspapers[1] on HN sometime ago. I wish that this tool [2] is hosted somewhere to easily get notification on my slack without setting it up or managing it. With load of information we face everyday, the idea of monitoring RSS feeds through Slack interface is very interesting. [1] https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/wren/config/rss_feeds.yml https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/wren/config/rss_fe... [2] https://github.com/tzano/wren https://github.com/tzano/wren

kristianc 8y ago

I would be interested to know if the OP has actually attempted to use this, and if so how they have avoided feeling completely overwhelmed. The challenge with RSS isn’t finding the feeds - they are for the most part readily available. It’s having a feed that doesn’t completely overwhelm. That’s the problem that social, for all the concerns about filter bubbles and tracking, does actually do a good job at solving.

kop316 8y ago
Not OP, but I recently have set up Tiny Tiny RSS and did something similar. I find that there are two categories: High bandwidth feeds (your NYTimes, Reuters, etc.), and low bandwidth feeds (blogs/projects I like to follow, the occasional youtube channels, etc.) If you curate it (I have worlds news, US news, politics, tech, science, etc), I find it's actually pretty nice to be able to scan through the headlines and see what interests you. It seems to augment my Reddit/HN feeds pretty well. I find that I can scan through all the headlines in ~3-4 minutes. I also find it is incredibly nice for the low bandwidth feeds. I don't feel like I need to check those everyday, when I get an update it shows a notification and I can go straight through it. As a result, I am subscribed to a lot more of those, as it very easy to look through.
writeslowly 8y ago
I've experimented with using clustering algorithms to rank stories from about a dozen different RSS feeds to get results based on media coverage. I have some basic output set up here, it could use a lot of improvements but it seems like a decent way to sort national/international news without needing social media data: https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/ https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/
- jpfed 8y ago
  I've wanted to do this as well. How does your site rank stories within a cluster? I had always imagined that if I were to do this, I would order them by centrality, where the distance metric is Euclidean distance between the word histograms.

mindcrime 8y ago

Upvoted just for mentioning OPML! I can't remember the last time I saw an OPML reference on HN. Hopefully there will be more RSS, Atom, OPML, ActivityPub, ActivityStrea.ms, FOAF, SIOC, etc. related work showing up here in the future.

dionidium 8y ago

"Hey, where's the St. Louis Post-Dispatch," I thought to myself. Ugh, it's now the 26th largest by circulation [0]. How the mighty have fallen. They do have RSS feeds, if you want to add them: https://www.stltoday.com/rss/ https://www.stltoday.com/rss/ However, like most other smaller dailies on this list, they no longer do much national reporting (it's all from the wire services). So, unless you're really into hearing about local politics in various mid-sized U.S. cities -- which I'm not disparaging, because I actually am! -- a lot of these are going to be pretty useless for you. [0] https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-and-magazines/top-100-newspapers-united-states https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-and...

pasbesoin 8y ago

For those hitting the JS-disabled/blank-page syndrome, the referenced Github resource: https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml/blob/master/us-newspapers.opml https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml/blob/master/u...