

Ask HN: News Website without the 'Silly News'? - ComputerGuru

I'm looking for a "normal" website (i.e. not the drudge report) with normal news, minus all the sensationalist headlines.<p>I'm sick of the "common man's" approach on CNN and BBC, which are my primary two sources. I'm tired of polls asking "Do you agree with the racist decision by xxx?" and 8-month old news recycled as a news video taking up the headline spot.<p>Anyone know of a good, real, hard-core news site? It needs to be "mass marketable" because this'll be going to some non-geeks.
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bhrgunatha
Try the English version of Al Jazeera - <http://english.aljazeera.net> I'm
sure it won't be your primary source but it's usually worth a look.

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pg
On paper, it was always _The Economist._

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ComputerGuru
I keep track of The Economist online, but the problem is, it's not a general
news service.

You don't find news in real-time (with the breaking bar, etc.) and it's more
geared towards discovering the effect of a particular story rather than
learning about the story itself for the first time.

e.g. You wouldn't find news about a shooting in a school in real-time on The
Economist.. nor would you hear about foreign stories until they've had time to
be analyzed and stripped down. It's pretty much The Economist paper edition in
online form, and ergo it suffers much the same as traditional media on the
front of news discovery.

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pg
Disconcerting that school shootings are now a recognized category of news.
That was not true when I was growing up.

But I would argue that it's not a coincidence that the more serious news
source is a weekly. News that happens suddenly seems more likely to be fluff.
Plus if anything really important happened, friends would tell you.

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tokenadult
What has been your experience with customizing Google News? Google will never
have the fastest coverage of a breaking story like the balloon boy, because it
is aggregating other people's content with a time lag, but I have tweaked my
preferences a lot on Google News to where I can rely on it for a lot of
international news and very little news that shows up on local TV. (I do have
a Google News customization that shows me local news from my town, but not
most of the silly stuff.)

I agree with the endorsements of The Economist (especially), BBC, and the New
Yorker already posted, but what I like about Google News is the even broader
reach of sources and stories.

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kierank
I was thinking about starting a site like this (perhaps based on this source
code). The only issue I thought of was that people would just have to accept
that I was going to be the dictator in what goes in and what doesn't. With
topics like politics that can cause a problem and also if I don't know enough
about a given topic (say local US politics) to know if it's a recycled story
or not.

I still might do this though so if anybody wants to help out or has any ideas
please chime in.

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ComputerGuru
BTW, my fallback is global.NYTimes.com - it doesn't have as much "news" as
CNN/BBC but it does update fairly quickly and with less Bull.

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jacquesm
Tell me when you've found it.

Seriously. I'd love a site like that.

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known
I like <http://www.democracynow.org/>

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Mz
I"m guessing you likely won't get any suggestions and that this is one of
those cases where, if someone wants to act on it, this might be a good
business idea because the solution probably doesn't already exist.

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Mz
I have yet to see anything listed that fits the exact criteria listed, so I
don't see why my thought on it should be downvoted. I'm also amused that my
remark is the second remark and the one before it was the one indicating they
would love to see something like this. In other words, suggestions for things
that met part of the criteria didn't begin appearing until I remarked that I
didn't expect to see any suggestions. I see that kind of thing a lot and I
think it's not mere coincidence. In some sense, it appears to be a sort of
"rebuttal" of my observation. But it doesn't change the fact that I still have
not seen a website link listed that meets the full criteria listed. Listings
include: print versions, radio versions, a tv show, once-weekly RSS feeds and
a foreign publication, all of which are listed with provisos concerning what
portion of the criteria they likely won't satisfy.

