Gimme News!

Before we dig into today’s topic, I want to highlight my NotebookLM notebook. It has access to all of my newsletters. You can ask it questions like “what are passkeys” or “what can I do to help me remember things.” If you’re interested it’s at https://go.ttot.link/TonysNotebook. You’ll need a Google account to access it and, when you visit, you’ll be given your own NotebookLM notebook.

I think most of us are interested in what’s happening around us. And our interests vary from things happening in our local area to global events. The question is, how do we stay informed about those things we care about? Sure, we can visit half a dozen sites and pick and choose to read the things that interest us but surely there must be a better way? Why, I believe there is, yes! News aggregators gather together stories from diverse sources and present them to you. The better ones let you pick your interest areas and some even let you choose your preferred sources. They then tailor what they present to you based on your declared interests. And the really good ones pay attention to what you read and even let you fine tune your interests while reading.

Of course, I have my favorites. I don’t like to discuss tools that I don’t have personal experience with so I’ll be discussing a few of them. I do not mean to imply that these are the only ones, or the best ones. They are a few that I’ve become comfortable with. I would also like to refer you to my article on RSS (check my NotebookLM for access). RSS readers let you aggregate all sorts of sites. The information gathered is stored by the RSS reader so you can read at your leisure.

I’ll present my favorite news aggregators in alphabetical order: Google News, SmartNews, and sumi.news.

Google News

Some people don’t like Google News but I enjoy it for its wide range of sources. You can access it on the web at https://news.google.com and you can use their app on Android and iOS. You can specify topics and sources that are of particular interest to you and it will tailor its “For You” tab to include them. There are also Headlines, Local, World, Business, etc. And you can dive deeper into some stories with “Full Coverage of this story.” The more you use it, the better it will know what to present to you. Some folks don’t like that, especially from Google, but if you want news that is tailored to your interests, while still giving you other important stories, that’s pretty much the only way that can happen. You can set it up so that you will be notified of important new stories and those notifications are saved in the app so you can go back through them in case you missed a notification. The Following section shows you stories from the sites and topics you’ve chosen to follow. Newsstand shows you various sources. You can view stories from them and, if the source really catches your interest, you can follow that source. Additionally, Newsstand offers stories the editors think are newsworthy.

SmartNews

I’m really partial to SmartNews because it will create tabs for each of the interest areas you’ve declared, like Local, World, Politics, Technology, Food, etc. When you open the app you start out in Top News which shows stories from all your sources and interest areas. Like Google News you can tailor notifications and it will remember the notifications it’s sent so you can go back and review them. It also keeps track of stories you’ve recently read. If I’m short on time, I open a story and close it, knowing I can return to it later.

If you create an account SmartNews will sync all your interests across all instances so you know you’re getting the same information everywhere. There are apps for Android and Apple but there is no web version.

sumi.news

sumi.news, at https://sumi.news/, is a bit different. It’s web only and the default view just shows headlines from all of its sources organized by topic (World News, Science, Culture, Environment, etc.) Clicking on a headline takes you to that story. The number of headlines shown for each topic really depends on what’s making news at the time you display the page. You can switch the display to only show headlines from a particular topic as opposed to showing all headlines grouped by topic. If you have a free account you can’t customize the feed, but for $22/year you get a number of options including following a search term (for instance, you could search for OpenAI and you will have a new category for those search results). You can reorder your categories and add or delete them. The site doesn’t learn from what you read; it’s really just a headline aggregator. If you want raw headlines, I suggest you try sumi.news.

That’s all for this time

I hope you’ve gotten the idea behind news aggregators and will maybe try out a few. There are many more than the three I’ve discussed here so do some searches and try some out. Feel free to write to me if you have questions!

As always, my intent is to help you understand the basics and equip you to search for more detailed information.

Please feel free to email me with questions, comments, suggestions, requests for future columns, to sign up for my newsletter, or whatever at [email protected] or just drop me a quick note and say HI!

If you like, you can read my most recent newsletter in the Hillsboro Times Gazette at https://go.ttot.link/TG-Column - I should have that link updated shortly after this edition of the newsletter appears in the online version of the newspaper.