
Show HN: 22 top US newspapers in an RSS OPML list - newman8r
https://www.quod.us/article/rss-feeds-for-major-us-newspapers
======
__bee
I found RSS feeds to be better alternative to read the news beyond the
filtering bubble that our social media platforms create.

There was an interesting tool to monitor RSS list of newspapers[1] on HN
sometime ago. I wish that this tool [2] is hosted somewhere to easily get
notification on my slack without setting it up or managing it. With load of
information we face everyday, the idea of monitoring RSS feeds through Slack
interface is very interesting.

[1]
[https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/wren/config/rss_fe...](https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/wren/config/rss_feeds.yml)

[2] [https://github.com/tzano/wren](https://github.com/tzano/wren)

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mindcrime
Upvoted just for mentioning OPML! I can't remember the last time I saw an OPML
reference on HN. Hopefully there will be more RSS, Atom, OPML, ActivityPub,
ActivityStrea.ms, FOAF, SIOC, etc. related work showing up here in the future.

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adamdrake
For those interested, this might be a good place to mention Newsbeuter, but
Mutt of feed readers! It can be pretty efficient to do feed reading and
management via CLI.

[https://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html](https://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html)

~~~
upofadown
Then this would also be a good place to mention the currently maintained fork
of newsbeuter; newsboat[1].

[1] [https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/)

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kristianc
I would be interested to know if the OP has actually attempted to use this,
and if so how they have avoided feeling completely overwhelmed.

The challenge with RSS isn’t finding the feeds - they are for the most part
readily available. It’s having a feed that doesn’t completely overwhelm.

That’s the problem that social, for all the concerns about filter bubbles and
tracking, does actually do a good job at solving.

~~~
writeslowly
I've experimented with using clustering algorithms to rank stories from about
a dozen different RSS feeds to get results based on media coverage. I have
some basic output set up here, it could use a lot of improvements but it seems
like a decent way to sort national/international news without needing social
media data:
[https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/](https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/)

~~~
jpfed
I've wanted to do this as well. How does your site rank stories within a
cluster? I had always imagined that if I were to do this, I would order them
by centrality, where the distance metric is Euclidean distance between the
word histograms.

~~~
writeslowly
I'm doing graph clustering, where stories are connected by shared terms, so
I'm ranking based on the weight of the edges to a story inside the cluster.
The terms are weighted by frequency over all the stories in the system with
the intention of prioritizing articles contain a lot of specific terms that
look like they're related to the story.

------
pasbesoin
For those hitting the JS-disabled/blank-page syndrome, the referenced Github
resource:

[https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-
opml/blob/master/u...](https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-
opml/blob/master/us-newspapers.opml)

------
newman8r
A lot of people have been interested in cnn's lite version, but unfortunately
it seems like most other sites don't offer one. RSS is essentially that
though, so even if you don't use an RSS reader you can bookmark the RSS
versions and browse them individually.

~~~
ravenstine
There's a little project I made some time ago that takes either the text-only
or AMP version of news stories and displays them in sandboxed iframes, which
disables all scripts leaving one with just text.

[https://stripped.news/](https://stripped.news/)

And there's an RSS feed(headlines only):

[https://stripped.news/feed.rss](https://stripped.news/feed.rss)

I think Washington Post is broken though, but everything else is working fine.
Sadly, it appears both the Atlantic and Reuters have added some annoying
elements to the top of their AMP pages that take up a lot of space; that
wasn't how it was when I first made this project.

~~~
forgotmypw
Keep doing what you're doing.

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dionidium
"Hey, where's the St. Louis Post-Dispatch," I thought to myself.

Ugh, it's now the 26th largest by circulation [0]. How the mighty have fallen.
They do have RSS feeds, if you want to add them:

[https://www.stltoday.com/rss/](https://www.stltoday.com/rss/)

However, like most other smaller dailies on this list, they no longer do much
national reporting (it's all from the wire services). So, unless you're really
into hearing about local politics in various mid-sized U.S. cities -- which
I'm not disparaging, because I actually am! -- a lot of these are going to be
pretty useless for you.

[0] [https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-
and...](https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-and-
magazines/top-100-newspapers-united-states)

------
celadevra_
I am not sure this helps people get into the habit of paying attention to news
instead of hovering over social media sites, other than raising awareness.
Every one of the feeds can flood your RSS inbox in a few hours, and a normal
person simply don't have time to catch up with all of them. I remember this
was how I abandoned RSS the first 5 times.

You may want to pick only a few of them, maybe one for each political leaning,
and look at their site to see if they provide feeds by section, then pick the
section you are interested in, instead of importing the OPML whole.

~~~
newman8r
Yeah I can see how that might bog down a newcomer, that's not bad advice. You
could also import the 22 feeds and delete any that seem to be posting too
often for your taste.

A rough estimate is that these 22 feeds would generate about 300-600 stories a
day.

~~~
krick
By my experience, you don't even need all 22 to feel overwhelmed. I still
haven't found one news agency with a feed that would feel like "important
news". Actually, all the news are simply the worst, and getting worse still.
All the most prominent media resources manage lately to combine in a news feed
tell-you-nothing headlines, lengthy writing style of the newyorker w/o a
summary, and still not including a recap/timeline of previous events when
following up on something that's ongoing for the last 2 months. Plus, I do
understand that importance is somewhat a matter of perspective, but they still
manage to post some nonsence every 2 minutes, while not covering really
impactful business news/economic events.

~~~
namibj
I considered creating a service that you subscribe to and that gives you
reasonably detailed content filtering. With configurable classes to sort news
between e.g. newsletters and chatbot interfaces, based on how time-critical
they are. There are meta-agreggators like GDELT [0] that supply machine-
readable classifications that should somehow allow filtering useless stuff out
based on what they contain. Do you think there is significant demand for this,
possibly even in a way that you pay a (small) amount for the service?

It seems like a (comparably) sane idea to pursue, but pre-implementation
market validation is a strong motivator to prioritize work on it without
direct financial pressure.

[0]: [https://www.gdeltproject.org/](https://www.gdeltproject.org/)

