My Current News Diet

This hardly is meant as prescriptive. It’s just that I’ve noticed that changes already underway in my own news consumption have increased since the pandemic began, and I thought it would help to describe how it works for me these days.

Almost all of my breaking or important news comes from Winno, the closest thing I’ve ever found to the late, great Breaking News app. iOS notifications for Winno are turned on. I still get tidbits Winno missed from people I follow on Twitter, although my follows now are down to a mere 95 accounts and for the vast majority of those, retweets are turned off (as are all iOS notifications for Twitter).

The full spread of RSS feeds (read via Feedbin) and newsletters (read via Stoop) to which I subscribe often provides in-depth looks at specific aspects of specific news events. I did recently add subscriptions to newsletters from local (print and radio) news outlets.

(For what it’s worth, I generally save items from all these various sources to Safari’s native Reading List, and then read from there. This is also when and where particular items get saved to my Link Log.)

All of which has combined to reduce my television news intake effectively to zero, which in some ways is the biggest change. I don’t especially miss it, even though I still believe there’s still some value there.