Distantly.

I'll scan headlines a few times per day, and read the odd story. One problem I'm encountering with websites, aside from the ads and annoyances, is that much of the news seems curiously irrelevant.

There's a list of text-only news sites which ... slightly ... improves the situation, but only just, as few media outlets bother to organise their text-only offerings. What's generated is typically an unordered jumble of clickbaitish headlines. That said, the listing:

<https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/>

Of those I'll hit NPR, CNN, and the Christian Science Monitor most often.

CNN annoyed me so much that I looked under the hood ... and found that the URLs encode both a news topic and date along with a title, e.g., from current headlines:

https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-county/index.html

Link: <https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-...>

So, that's an 8 Mar 2025 article in US News about fires on Long Island.

Turns out that it's a SMOP[1] to extract URLs and headlines from the published Web page, and regenerate a far more useful page grouped by subject heading. Another interesting side effect is that I've accumulated an archive of > 4,400 stories published since mid-December 2024 and can easily run statistics on the story distribution. There are 30 sections, which I've aggregated to a smaller set of five, represented as follows:

US: 1298 (29.29%)
World: 917 (20.70%)
Business: 638 (14.40%)
Science: 371 (8.37%)
Trivia: 1207 (27.24%)
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Total: 4431 / 4431 [0] (sections crosscheck)

Note that nearly a third of the "news" is trivia topics (Travel, Food, Homes, Entertainment, Sport, Style, CNN). A deeper look at both US and World news shows that about 2/3 of the former is relatively minor nonsystematic crime, and the latter is entertainment / gossip / personality. It's not that CNN leans one way or the other, it's just mostly irrelevant.

(I'd started the project in part to quantify how much this was the case, and to dump all the trivia in one place so I didn't have to parse individual headlines to suss out what was what.)

Other sites are less amenable to this as they use random strings in URLs (e.g., Financial Times and NPR). Most website, even the so-called "lite" or "text" versions, read quite poorly in a terminal-based browser (I favour w3m, but others differ little).

I'll listen to foreign news services a fair bit, including CBC, BBC, ABC (Australia), Deutschlandfunk, and more. I find the quality of foreign-service news seems a bit better than most US sources. Most of these are via podcast.

I've been listening to The World, out of WBUR Boston. Unlike virtually all audio/video news these days, the programme is pre-recorded and edited. Its focus tends to reduce US-centric news, which I prefer, and what I find is that the editing and pre-recording make the segments (reports and interviews largely) far less disjoint than, say, NPR, BBC, or the PBS News Hour, which I find all but unlistenable.

Among other podcasts are those focusing heavily on philosophy and history, which I find tend to inform on current events without wallowing in them. Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, David Runciman's History of Ideas (and his several earlier podcasts), Stephen West's Philosophize This, and Nigel Warberton and David Edmunds's Philosophy Bites are all high on my list. Among those dealing with contemporary politics, Ezra Klein tends to be insightful without being overly grating or outrage-inducing, while also including a range of guests across the political spectrum (though he quite admittedly leans left), while also managing to generally keep them away from thought-stopping cliches and stale talking points by pushing back gently but effectively in a way that few interviewers seem capable of. Runciman also has this skill, though it's less often evidenced, see his Intelligence Squared (UK) appearances for good examples.

For those interested, my CNN category breakdown is:

489 (11.04%) US News
809 (18.26%) US Politics
76 (1.72%) World
111 (2.51%) World -- Americas
62 (1.40%) World -- Africa
112 (2.53%) World -- Asia
29 (0.65%) World -- Australia
37 (0.84%) World -- China
17 (0.38%) World -- India
260 (5.87%) World -- Europe
183 (4.13%) World -- MidEast
30 (0.68%) World -- UK
91 (2.05%) Economy
369 (8.33%) Business
1 (0.02%) Markets
85 (1.92%) Tech
2 (0.05%) Cars
11 (0.25%) Investing
79 (1.78%) Media
112 (2.53%) Science
170 (3.84%) Health
48 (1.08%) Weather
41 (0.93%) Climate
163 (3.68%) Travel
26 (0.59%) Food
3 (0.07%) Homes
496 (11.19%) Sport
405 (9.14%) Entertainment
109 (2.46%) Style
5 (0.11%) CNN 10 Minutes

That runs ~12 Dec 2024 through today, and is de-duplicated, though it's also based on when I've happened to request the latest CNN headlines, and may miss some stories. Ordering is roughly by my level of interest and/or what seems to be logical classification to me. I've picked up a few additional classifications (e.g., "CNN 10 Minutes" and "Cars") after my initial run, there is some logic to make previously unknown categories jump out.

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Notes:

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming>