Gimme an R, gimme an S – Gimme an RSS feed

Note: the following should be read with as-seen-on-tv announcer voice. Think Shamwow or Flexseal.

“Are you tired of wading through pages of adds to get to your news? Are you sick of algorithms deciding what news you want to read? Do you hate having to go from page to page to page to find you content? Then I have the solution for you! It’s time to get yourself an RSS feed!”

Okay, enough of that. It is making my head hurt just writing in that tone. But, yeah, you should consider curating an RSS feed. If you, like me not too long ago, have no idea what that is forge ahead. But I am here to tell you, if you’re even an above average net info/news consumer it will change your internet life. I have a pretty hefty news diet – okay, if news and media were food I could replace Brendan Fraser in “The Whale” – and it was unwieldy at best. My “news” bookmark folder had like eleven different sites and I wasn’t even getting to some of the other places I like to visit because going to a site – like NPR News – led to it’s own little rabbit warren which made the larger time sink even bigger. Semi-retired or not, I needed a way to curb my own voracious habits before sitting down with coffee to “read the news” turned into not moving from under my laptop until noon. My RSS feed allows me to sample the banquet without filling my plate. To torture the food metaphors, it is like charcuterie. You can survey the board, see what looks good, take lots of little tastes and then choose to eat more of what you wish. To be fair, it is still quite possible to eat waaaay too much as any charcuterie fan can attest. I would happily eat charcuterie every day if allowed and look out Brendan Fraser. But what are the nuts and bolts?

RSS stands fo Really Simple Syndication and is a way to access protocols without relying on platforms. Instead of using twitter or substack or whatever other privacy-stealing, click-driven, algorithm-controlled, capitalist-bound “service” you rely on, you can essentially create an curate your own newspaper. I knew a little bit about RSS – it is essentially what the podcast industry runs on – but had no idea it had been a backbone of the pre-enshittified net for decades. (While podcasts are incredibly dangerous in unscrupulous hands – do Hannity and Carlson ring a bell? – they are are at least clinging to some semblance of independence and actual creativity.) It is fun to find out that most websites have an RSS feed if you go looking for it. Not only does this sometimes, amazingly enough, give you access to a lot of content that is behind the paywall on their site, but it also often allows you to read the entire content without ever going there. Many of them also have subfeeds that filter their content for you, e.g. NPR has feeds for movies, science, international news and so on. You can set up feeds with searches to get news on topics (that one scares me a little), you can follow newsletters and even social media feeds, allowing you to read people you like without using a platform. I honestly have not even begun to get good at this and my feed desperately needs some curating, but boy do I love it. Here is a great article explaining this way better than I just tried to.

I use Inoreader, and while I enjoyed the free trail of the pro version, I am for now perfectly content with the free version. If you are curious, this is what currently hits my feed. I sort them into folders.

News

– Epoch Times – US features

– Al Jazeera English – if you aren’t using Al Jazeera you should be

– BBC News – love the Beeb

– New York Times, including lots of sub feeds – the Gray Lady is a dit tarnished and not infrequently makes me crazy, but still the newspaper of record

– NPR News – you remember them, the great journalism being gutted by Asshat?

– Washington Post Breaking News – love WAPO but can’t handle both them and NYT

– Vox

Journalism (I know, it’s either redundant or contradictory, but it makes sense to me)

– Rachel Maddow Show – I get this as an email newsletter but when it comes to Rachel I take no chances. HUGE shout out to Steve Benen, who runs her blog and newsletter. Superstar.

– Ezra Klein, both his show and his NYT column – I think he is one of the very best working and one smart motherfucker

– Public Notice

– The Bulwark – theoretically right leaning, but they do good work, and we have to be bubble aware

– Columbia Journalism Review – an ivy clad bastion of journalism education

– The Atlantic, master feed and newsletters – my favorite magazine of all time but just too damned expensive to actually subscribe to

– Why is This Happening – Chris Hayes, see above comment about Klein (I also tape and watch “All In” every day

Science – a work in progress

– NYT sub feed

– Popular Science

– Popular Mechanics

– Ars Technica

Softer news

– Fresh Air

– Boing Boing

– Cory Doctorow’s Craphound – great literature review from one of my heroes

– The Verge

Stuff

– CNET

– New Atlas

Culture

– Indiewire

– /Film

– Movie subfeeds from NYT and NPR

– TedTalks

Orgs

– Electronic Frontier Foundation

– Freedom From Religion

– Deeplinks

Other

– 99PI – 99% Invisible is awesome, great podcast and site – cannot recommend highly enough

– Burning Man – natch

– Pluralistic Links from Cory Doctorow – this doesn’t need to be in my feed because I go there everyday regardless, but yeah

– the Far Side Daily Dose – Gary Larson is a national treasure and one of the truly weirdest humans ever

Yikes. I told you it needed curating! Don’t you judge me. In fact, it is proof of concept that I could never manage all that without an RSS feed. And it was really simple to set up. Try it, you’ll like it.