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Is there such a thing as a bullshit-free news agency? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I generally try to stay informed on current events. With the exception of what gets posted here, I normally get my news from CNN. I tend to lean left politically, but not always.

The problem I always run into is that every news site I read, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, is always filled with pointless bullshit. Specifically, sports, celebrity news, and product placement. "Some shitty pop singer is dating some shitty actor" or "These are our recommendations for the best mass-produced garbage-quality fast fashion from Temu" or "Some overpaid dickhead threw a ball faster than some other overpaid dickhead."

What I'd love to find is a news source that's just news that matters. No celebrity gossip, sports, opinion pieces, etc. Just real events that have an impact on some part of the world. Legislation, natural events, economic changes, wars, political changes, that kind of thing.

Does this exist, or is all journalism just entertainment?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I think what you're describing is the need for RSS feeds. Generally, news outlets categorise their articles neatly so you subscribe with RSS to only headlines, or world events, or whatever. It requires you to have a look around the news site in question and setup RSS correctly.

The other neat thing is that you can read all your RSS feeds (ie multiple news sites) in one reader and there are tons of custom RSS apps.

I share your disdain for gossip and mainstream money grab promo. And ads. My god how much do ads suck.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

News sites often have multiple feeds, but many these days don't. And the feeds still aren't as granular as I'd like sometimes. My regional newspaper has a feed for news more specifically local to me, but it's bogged down with children's sports and obituaries.

I think my dream setup would allow some intelligent filters to get rid of any categories I just don't care about, and any "top 8 widgets to do X" filler advertisement articles. Also, a way to lump together all news articles covering the same story, so I could either choose which outlets to actually read/compare, or mark all as read.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

RSS won't solve OP's problem. Most sites have a single feed with all their articles, if they have an rss feed at all (can't sell ads in an rss feed).

Aside from maybe just the raw AP feed (which is free through their app) I'm not sure any modern news room just publishes the type of feed OP might be looking for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm subscribed to over 50 RSS feeds and never once have I wanted to subscribe to a site and they didn't have a feed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

There are millions of blogs and news sources to browse off the beaten path. It really depends on how the site is built. A Wordpress enterprise solution has a default rss feed, but it can be turned off should the site choose. A medium or ghost based site has the same toggle. For a more bespoke solution it is extra dev time not all sites opt for anymore because so few people use rss these days.

Back in 2010 at the height of Google Reader's popularity rss only accounted for 10% of traffic and depending on how the feed was configured it might consume 30% of the non-money-making bandwidth. There was a push to try to monetize rss, but it kinda backfired and the technology faded into (relative) obscurity for the average person.

There are tens of thousands of absolutely amazing blogs and news sources online today with no support for rss.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think that really depends on the news site. News from my country is very well suited for RSS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn't solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you're shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn't going to fix that.

Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.

Then again I've thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It’s funny how often this is brought up and how the answer is that’s it’s been solved since nearly the begging of the web.

I’ve been using an RSS manager / server for decades! Right now it’s FreshRSS as the server and using Lire as a client on iOS. There’s arguably no better way to consume content.