More than two weeks after the presidential election, there’s just one thing that all of us in this very divided nation can agree on: The media sucks.
The headlines are trash. The stories are skewed. Articles that should be big news on front pages, or really home pages, get buried, while cat videos dominate our social feeds. If the good stuff exists, we can’t find it, and the bad stuff rises to the top, like turds in a kiddie pool. No wonder we endlessly scroll Instagram and TikTok with no hope of learning a damn thing about how the world got the way it is today.
My friends, this is completely wrong. YOU are completely wrong. There is a very easy way to cut through the noise and stay on top of everything. There’s a way to see every single story that your favorite news source is publishing almost as soon as they publish it, regardless of whether it winds up on the front page, or any landing page. There’s a way of following the news that focuses you on the most straightforward versions of the headlines, and without images—either flashy or generic—to mislead you in. Best of all, this way of reading the news often lets you bypass ads and janky, slow-loading layouts altogether.
My friends, this way of reading the news has been around since 2005.
(Before I go any further, I have to say that talking about this makes me feel like the absolute worst kind of Internet nerd, both a technological pursuit and an old man in love with his throwback systems. This approach is just so dorky! And yet it’s also frankly the best way to read everything you want as soon as it’s available. So bear with me!)
Let Me Tell You About RSS
Actually, fuck that. I had a few paragraphs written here about what RSS is and how it works and its whole history, with tragic stuff about Aaron Swartz, but who cares? You wanna know—go read the footnote. Meantime, here’s the meat:
Just go to Feedly.com. It’s one of the descendants of the excellent RSS reader that Google introduced waaaaay back in 2005, which is when I got hooked on this stuff. You make a free account. Then you start entering the web addresses of the publications you want to keep an eye on. NYTimes.com. The Verge. Business of Fashion. Catster. Whatever you like. You can organize them into thematic groups—Politics, Sports, Cats—or do like I do and lump them all together, so old personal blogs that some weirdo keeps publishing run up against breaking news of world-shattering importance.
Then, when you’re following everything you like, you get something like this:
HAHAHA! I swear, I’m not trying to scare you away! I just shrank the display down to 67% because I thought it would look crazy. Here’s a more normal view:
That’s better, right?
Anyway, I’m writing this at 9:27 p.m. That NYT “China’s Hacking” story was published at 9:12 p.m., but on the NYT homepage it’s sitting well below the fold—hard to notice unless you’re a dedicated scroller. Whatever I want to see from my preferred news sources, it’s right there: I don’t have to wait for someone else to share it on Facebook or Threads or Mastodon or Bluesky or LinkedIn or… wait, I think that’s all of them?
Even better, Feedly has those green-text slugs which you can click on to find not only summaries of the story in general but links to pretty much everyone’s coverage of the topic. “Hegseth faces sexual assault allegations” lines them all up, noting that 47 feeds covered the story over the course of just six hours. You can see different outlets’ approaches and biases right up front, from ABC’s “Hegseth claims he's 'completely cleared' in sex assault case when he wasn't" to NBC’s “Republican senators offer mixed reactions to the Pete Hegseth police report" to “Megyn Kelly Suggests Sex Assault Accusation Against Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Pass Smell Test" from the Daily Wire (🤮).
And then, best of all, when you go to read a story there are no ads. And no layout crap to distract you. No pop-ups. It’s just the story itself and the photos within. If you are truly interested in reading and understanding, this is what you want.
(To be fair, some publications only put the first 1–3 paragraphs into their feeds, encouraging you to click through and read. Which is fine! They need the clicks. You should click. But most, especially the sites without paywalls, just put the whole shebang right there.)
During a typical day, I keep this Feedly tab open all the time, refreshing it a couple of times an hour to see if anything new has happened in the world. Given the world we live in, something new has usually happened. (There’s an app, too, so you can do this wherever you are.) Once in a while, you’ll spot a “Test Post” full of TKs that some intern has accidentally published; that’s always good for a chuckle. After too much reading, I’ll start to identify linguistic patterns in the construction of headlines, and when those patterns annoy me enough, I turn them into terrible poetry. Mostly, I get to feel like I’m up on everything, without having to go hunting through social feeds or clicking through dozens of different sites and subsections in search of something to grab my interest.
Are you convinced? You should be, unless you love wasting time hunting for the things you want to read. Or maybe that is you. But if so, I don’t want to hear you ever complaining about not seeing stories, because there is a better way!
If you are convinced, then WOW. I did it! And then I can let you know that Feedly is not the only reader out there. There’s, like, five of them, maybe? Each has different features—AI whatever, search ability, cool interfaces, blah blah blah. Check them out, I guess? Whichever one you wind up using, know that your media-consuming life is about to get a whole lot better.
I mean, the media will continue to suck. Can’t do nothin’ about that. But you’ll be able to see the suckitude so much more clearly. And that’s my gift to you. You’re welcome. 🪨🪨🪨
Notes
Maybe you’ve heard of RSS before? It stands for Real Simple Syndication, and it was developed as a way to take web content of all kinds and strip it down to its bare bones, so that anyone—any computer, really—could understand it. In the world of news and media, when a story gets published, all that data gets put into a feed—a web document that labels, story by story, each headline, body text, link, and so on. The stuff that doesn’t really matter, like the typeface or the specific layout, goes away, leaving behind the stuff that really matters. Then any other piece of software can read (“ingest,” we like to say) the feed, and make use of that data.
Pretty much every single media website on the Internet today now automatically puts out every one of its stories on an RSS feed. And ever since 2005, companies have been making RSS readers, software—websites, really—that take a whole bunch of RSS feeds and smush them together so you can get an ongoing list of headlines from a million different sources that are utterly up-to-the-minute. This is where I realized no one cares and stopped writing about the inner workings of RSS feeds. Did you make it this far? Go google the rest if you want more.
