How to Read the News in 2026

Good comms people read the news, as do informed citizens and folks seeking to further their understanding of the world as it is today and may be tomorrow. It is a need and not a want, in my opinion — in the same category as personal/mental hygiene, nourishment, and the like. After all, one cannot comfortably and reliably carry on living without understanding how the world or their world has changed.

There's a difference between seeing the news and reading the news. One involves gleaning headlines between swipes on a social media app or in your email, often during idle time or when not expecting the news. Another involves actively seeking out the news. For over 20 years, I've spent 1-4 hours a day reading the news in a dedicated setting not because it's my job, but because I view it to be a crucial component to living.

Thanks to this tireless (and, sure, often anxiety-provoking) dedication to reading the news, I've developed an exciting career in communications, a pretty good track record for recognizing patterns (when things might happen in the news), and a decent internal authenticity detector (determining good news from bad). My ability to read the news and interpret it is why I've had such a career, yet many in my profession don't spend a minute reading the media that more or less keep them employed.

This is a simple overview for how I read the news right now. It is not to be taken as law, nor will it fully be the same a year from now — as I will always make small and large tweaks over time. Yet if you are attempting to better understand the world as a whole on a daily basis and whatever niche(s) you're interested in, this is how to make sure you can access all of it on demand, free of (most) algorithmic bias.

Everything Starts with RSS

RSS is how I consume 80% of the internet and 95% of my news. If you know what RSS is, keep reading below. If you're not familiar with RSS, I wrote this quick primer telling you pretty much everything you need to know (for now).

How I Use RSS

I subscribe to 289 RSS feeds using the app Reeder. This allows me to parse through the newest news items in a simple, single chronological timeline. Doing this takes me about a cumulative hour for every twenty-four hour period of news. I use Reeder because it also allows me to add my Bluesky timeline (noisy, but often helpful), subreddits I care about, and YouTube pages I follow without ever falling down a YouTube hole. The majority of the news I care about is centralized in this one app, which is where I spend the majority of reading. If i find something a story worth digging into, I simply read it in the app or save it for later.

Some RSS cloud services allow you to see what other users of the services are following and reading. These services also let you search for/follow keywords across both the most popular feeds and all feeds on an RSS service. This is how I consume the rest of my news, particularly for specific niches and keywords I care about. (This is also how I built and maintain Reality Defender's Deepfake News Center.)

Consider this: if millions of people are using an RSS cloud service, most of them follow feeds I'm not following. Thus, if I follow a keyword across the most popular feeds or all feeds being followed on that service, I'm able to surface content I never would have found otherwise — many from niche journals, trade publications, and other feeds that I do not wish to see everything from. (I used to parse these manually, but recently built a tool to parse them for me, which I will detail at a later date.)

By doing this, I'm not only able to stay in the loop at all times in world news, niche interests, and stories in my field; I'm also able to respond to them as they appear in my RSS timeline — instantly and often first. My fervent dedication to reading the news via RSS is why I am in the position I'm in today, full stop.

Algorithms, Signal, and Noise

You see everything with RSS. Google News, Apple News, and news via social media only show you what is algorithmically delivered to you based on your interests. This means that you will undoubtedly miss some stories in algorithm-driven news apps as the algorithms prioritized showing you one thing over another. This also means that if you're only seeing certain stories and points of view, your perception and understanding of the world will be skewed, limited, and biased in a certain direction — all in the name of appeasing you as the user. (This type of information delivery has caused great harms in society, leading to extremism, disinformation, and just plain ignorance, to put it mildly.)

By seeing everything in RSS, you will see a ton of things you will never read. This is by design. To get to what you do care to read, you must wade through all of it. You essentially skim newspapers and magazines cover to cover each day, looking only for what matters most to you. I read about 8-30 articles a day out of the ~3500 headlines, videos, and Bluesky posts I parse through. This means that, on a good day, I read close to a percent of the articles that pass through my reader. (I do skim other articles and read the first few sentences for about a hundred or so each day.)

I find this amount of noise crucial for a few reasons. Every day, I come across something new — a reporter or topic, for instance — that I wasn't particularly looking for while reading my feeds, and learn something new. By parsing every headline of the day, I'm also guaranteed to never miss a story. And by keeping on top of my feeds, I frequently catch stories as they're happening.

Reading this many headlines is a daunting daily task, especially when considering that email, messaging (Slack, personal, etc.), and all other inboxes must be tended to as well. At the same time, I wouldn't do anything differently because it greatly expands my understanding of the world, changed my career, and routinely improves who I am as a person. Few things are more important to me than the news, and if this means reading all of the news, then so be it.

The Other 5%

Aside from RSS, I also check the following sources each day:

• Newsletters that cannot be read as RSS feeds (of which most can, including all Substack newsletters)
• Ten Tabs from Firefox, Apple News newsletters, and LinkedIn News, which are manually curated and often feature interesting stories I may have skipped
• Podcasts like The Daily, Reuters World News, BBC's The Global Story, and Bloomberg's Big Take podcast, among other niche podcast news sources
• /r/popular on Reddit
• My wife, who may have seen something on Instagram. We both realize that this is often disinformation or a skewed story, but it's good to keep a pulse on these things. (I decidedly do not use Meta platforms.)

Which Feeds Do I Follow?

You can download a semi-redacted OPML — an export of the RSS feeds I follow each day — here.

App of the Week: Pandan

I'm trying to spend a lot less time on my devices this year. Yet every trick I've tried to get myself offline has yet to work.

Last week, I had the idea of providing visual feedback for how long I've spent on the computer. After asking Gemini for an app that displayed the time I've spent on my computer in Mac Menu bar, it suggested Pandan.

Pandan does exactly what I needed. As of this writing, I've spent an hour and 45 minutes on my computer. Every 30 minutes, it lets me know how long I've been on the computer with a neat and not-terrible pop-over notification in the top right. Most importantly, it's free and sandboxed so it cannot hoover up any data or sell your browsing activity, among other horrible things that free apps generally do these days.

You can download it here.