1d ago

How do you keep up to date on current events?

There's so much so-called "news", but most of it is just noise. In this situation, it seems easiest to either A) get consumed by it, trying to follow everything and reading every "he said what?"-piece posted or B) become more or less apathetic and avoid news altogether.

To be able to make proper choices and help move things in the right direction, B) is not an option, as you need to understand current events to at least a minimal level, but A) leaves you just as clueless, overflowing with useless information, with a heavily worn-down ability to be source critical, not remembering where you read any given "fact".

So how do you keep up to date with current events? Have you found a good way? Am I mistaken in my above assessment?

25 comments

I find I like to follow what analysts like Ben Norton report to get some context around the news. I evaluate whom I pay attention to based on their track record, and how well their predictions align with the way things actually developed.

what a great way to Segway to our sponsor grind news

I generally try to use RSS feeds, but I've come to realize this doesn't really work too well with current-/world news, because it becomes a firehose that drowns my entire feed. So these days, I just have my other interests in RSS feeds and use the BBC and The Guardian front pages to quickly get a summary of current events. I also visit my local newspaper site for headlines (they put their stuff behind paywall though, so it's just headlines).
I've culled my social media to Lemmy and Mastodon and I use pretty aggressive word filtering on Mastodon to get rid of topics I'm not very interested in.
It's not perfect by no means, but I haven't really found anything else that works. I wish I had some better way to follow European and African news and commentary, but everything (apart from manually visiting sites) seems to always result in a firehose of news that drowns all other sources.
- I wonder if this could be a good use-case for an LLM: feed it that fire-hose of an RSS-feed and have it group and spit out a short and sweet summary per group with the original links. It's something I would want from actual journalists, but while they are busy writing about Trump's latest tweet, this might be a usable substitute?

I enjoy Democracy Now, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Zeteo, Dropsite News, and some others.

my boy Philip DeFranco has never led me astray

I use an RSS app called Feeder, and Lemmy. I find I go back to The Conversation a lot as I find it covers topics in a calm tone of voice and with a level of academic rigor that I appreciate.
- I use Feeder, but even with filters to try and remove as much stuff as I'm not interested in, there's still too much for me to keep up with. I imported all my feeds to Nunti to filter things down more. Nunti allows you to either upvote or downvote articles, and that information is used by the app with a transparent, relatively simple algorithm to try to predict what type of things you want to see vs don't want to see. It doesn't give much priority to breaking news, and it doesn't have the article snippets or built in reader mode like Feeder does, so i still use Feeder.

best thing to do is spend all day and all night on the internet tapped into the latest news and arguing with people about it
- Hm, what letter comes before A?

Keep a tab of text.npr.org open and occasionally peruse it. No pictures, no ads, and what I perceive to be less sensationalistic.

No, I think it's a good assessment.
I swing between A and B and find B to be most healthy and reasonable, because I have no political power as well as for my own wellbeing.
Ive tried RSS for world news but find it even more overwhelming than browsing news sites because it's displayed more compactly and looks like an avalanche of dystopian madness if I dont open the feed for a day or two.
What I really want is a weekly or maybe bi-weekly roundup of the five or ten most important global events. If anyone knows of a feed like that please let me know!

A combination of Lemmy and The Economist.
The Economist is very anti-Russian, but I find they don't pull punches regarding how economic policy will fuck with the working class in Western countries.
- Rolling Stone is good too sort of in that regard.

Filters; opt-out of negativity. I switched to Voyager from Boost because it supports filters and I can just blacklist topics that cause me stress. Anywhere I can just stop a topic from ever entering my perception, the better. A single bad headline may ruin my mood for hours from just a glance, better to never get the chance.
Subscriptions; opt-in to the topics and news you care about. Find a good source that offers curated feeds instead of a firehouse of everything. You can only care so much, so use that attention sparingly on things that deserve it.
Avoid algorithms. They are designed to keep your attention on them and outage is good at that. Save your health, find it yourself.
Community. Find people, groups, or organizations that have a similar mindset and share good content with them. If they share good content in kind, you all can improve your state of mind.

I mostly just listen to a few daily podcasts. If I feel overwhelmed with a topic or news story, then I just delete the episode.

Why not a middle-ground? Stay informed, but don't read everything?
I lean heavily towards A, but I don't read every newsflash there is. I tend to keep track of major events, reading up on past news if there's need for background information.
I don't need to hear everything Musk or Trump says, but if there's a major news that require some context I read up on that.
- I think the problem is that the media reports everything Musk and Trump says, so having an effective way to filter through everything to get at what keeps me informed is not straightforward. This wouldn't be an issue if news outlets acted more as a filter and reported only on the more essential developments with proper analysis to go with it. In my country, the main page of our main news outlet will report Justin Bieber having a baby as breaking news on the front page, alongside notices of American "celebrities"' demise (I put it in quotes, because they need to refer to the character they played in a 90s sitcom because nobody knows their names), and five articles about the same unfolding event.
  
  Just eye the headlines and skip the ones not interesting?
  "Justin Bieber is having a baby" is a headline read, and article skipped. Thus to amount of energy is given and you can focus on other news of more interest.

My answer: I'm leaning more towards A), getting increasingly desperate to find a better way. I've tried for some time to use RSS-feeds to avoid scrolling the front pages of the newspapers I follow. This makes the situation much better (the constant headlines updating is better), but it is still overwhelming. Ideally I would want to have a mixture of daily and weekly digests of the most important news (with descriptive headlines), made by knowledge and trusted teams, with sensible analyses and links to longer reads if I were so inclined. That way I could spend 5-15 minutes a day catching up, and then diving in deeper if I needed that. I just don't know where to find these. I would also ideally like to be able to follow important events in other regions than my own, such as Africa and Asia. I've tried following AfricaNews for events in Africa, which gives me at least a sense of things going on there that I never hear of in domestic news outlets, but have not found similar for Asia or South-America for instance.

I aim for B. I can't seem to avoid it though so i stick to a set of sites mostly. i have a folder of bookmarked pages that i check every day or three by using 'open all in new tabs', labelled 'news and junk'. it contains slashdot, hackernews, phoronix, techdirt, lemmy and reddit. my reddit is subscribed only to a very small set of local subs, because reddit is trash but i can't get my entire hometown to move to lemmy. also in that folder are a group of local websites, for the library, parks department, a couple local event lists, a local computer group, a local linux users group, a furry events calendar and local amateur radio stuff.
one things i really wish existed is an extension that detects and blocks any site leading to garbage about the current US president, who i despise and want to ignore, despite ignoring it being to my detriment most likely. that vile man needs to go away.
additionally, i have a collection of hundreds of map sites bookmarked, with a folder containing a set i check with about the same regularity as my news sites. ventusky.com for weather, adsb.fi for tracking aircraft (i live by a major air force base in the US, directly under the main landing flight path, so i hear and see large planes flying under 1000 feet a lot), the noaa space weather dashboard page for space weather enthusiasts to see if aurora might be visible and for amateur radio solar radiation interference likelihood, timeanddate.com to check for astronomical events like eclipses, communitycrimemap.com to see reported crime going on near me, https://redskyready.com/auxcomm-usa-dashboard/ for a variety of maps to see if anything stands out like fires or earthquakes and also to check amateur radio stuff, and finally https://rsoe-edis.org/eventMap to see worldwide disasters that might be important to know about.
my system doesn't keep me perfectly up to date but it covers what i think i need to know and comes from sources i trust well enough (although not entirely, like with communitycrimemap which is lexisnexus and the news sites are mostly aggregators with dubious links at times)
- Thanks for a detailed account of your system!
  one things i really wish existed is an extension that detects and blocks any site leading to garbage about the current US president, who i despise and want to ignore, despite ignoring it being to my detriment most likely. that vile man needs to go away.
  I think that man (and the team around him) is a perfect example of someone who exploits this barrage of "information" to their advantage, and does that very well. I remember how nice the relative silence some months into Biden's presidency (after the insurrection stopped being a constant headliner in the news cycle). This is one of the reasons I desperately want to find a way to keep on top of things, because it feels like the overall events matter if I can only cut through the noise and understand the big picture. I live in Europe, and current events leads to a lot of uncertainty for the region that I think is better to understand and be prepared for, rather than ignorant of.
  additionally, i have a collection of hundreds of map sites bookmarked, with a folder containing a set i check with about the same regularity as my news sites.
  This is an interesting source I have not really explored myself (aside from weather and occasionally a flight map). I need to investigate what kinds of local maps could be beneficial to have bookmarked. The event map is already bookmarked now!

C) Accept that perfection is impossible and do your best to stay informed but keep the information faucet at arms length. No sense in knowing everything if you sacrifice everything for it. Will you make mistakes because of it? Yes. Will it matter? Probably not. That last part is less true if you’re not emotionally intelligent enough to accept your failures and make up for them. If you have a decision you know matters ahead of time spend the extra time to investigate the options. Time management and resource delegation is more important than knowing everything.

I have a Lemmy account specifically for news. I check it when I think I can handle it. Also, MSNBC app as it’s the most centrist I trust in the U.S.

I just don't check news sources personally. My thinking is if something big happens then I'll hear about it anyway through family and friends so I'll just wait for them to fill me in.

25 comments