It was my composition teacher who taught me to appreciate the news. “My darlings,” she said. “You have to keep your eyes open.” I think that right now, as the United States undergoes a soft coup, we need to keep our eyes open more than ever. I know the news can be overwhelming. My high school education—and even my university classes—failed to prepare me for the flood of information, disinformation, and misinformation that sits about the internet. They did not teach me where to look for news, only what databases to use for a literature search or where to search for a catalog number. I present here the results of a few years of experimentation and intense media consumption. In short:

1. Identify a small set of trusted reporters. That means they cite sources, and that the sources actually mean what the reporters say they mean. This is the most time-consuming part.
2. Set up a method to get information from those reporters. I recommend RSS as a means of keeping up, since it can pull together posts and articles from across the internet into a single place.

This blog will focus on the latter, and provide a little “starter-kit” for the former, accompanied by a little diatribe about the virtues of RSS.

Why RSS?

I don’t so much go on the internet as I get the internet mailed to me daily. I already know what I want from the internet: faithful journalism, solid science, cool DIY stuff, tabletop game discussion, and well-written prose. So I spent some time looking for it and put that all into my feed list.

For the uninitiated, RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication or maybe Rich Site Summary or a million other things) is a formatted “feed” for a website that tracks articles, blog posts, or other content updates to the website. A computer can access this feed and “ask” the website about what it has on display, and then deliver that to you, the reader. This in and of itself is great—I read a lot of infrequently-updating webcomics and blogs, but I can always count on their RSS feeds to notify me when they make something new.

The true power of RSS comes when you follow a lot of different people who write about a lot of different things. Feeds can be grouped into a single list and then queried very quickly, almost all at once. I check my feed inbox daily, and it delivers to me everything that I want from the internet. Nothing more than I ask for, and nothing less. Instead of checking every website individually, I get a list of things that are new, and I can read them in plaintext format—or visit the website if I’m so inclined.

There are exactly two algorithms that I trust to give me good things: my exact instructions, or what my friends and family send to me. So RSS is enough for me. With RSS, you are in control of everything. RSS is the ultimate way of fighting back against the enshittified web. You can make your own algorithm and recommendations, and if you don’t like the feed reader, you can just export your feed list as an OPML file and take your reading elsewhere.

Set Up an RSS Reader

There’s a million articles about how to get started with RSS readers, so I’ll toss another onto the pile.

1. Start by setting up a feed reader.
   • If you’re using an apple device, I recommend NetNewsWire because it’s free and fantastic.
   • If you’re using an android device, Feeder is open-source and available on the Google Play store.
   • Other good alternatives (on any platform) are Feedly and InoReader. I’ve used both and been happy with the free tiers.
2. Once you’ve got your feed reader of choice, it’s time to load in some feeds.
   • Generally, you can copy and paste a link from most news websites (or blogs, youtube channels, and even podcasts) into your feed reader, and it will find the relevant information and save it to your account as a feed.
   • Once a feed is saved, you’ll get new articles, posts, episodes, or whatever delivered right into your feed reader—which you can peruse at your leisure.
3. Read the news! You can do this either in the feed reader or on the original website—you can navigate there by clicking the headlines.

Feeds Starter Kit

I personally get my internet delivered to me by an armada of over 200 RSS feeds, but that firehose isn’t exactly fit for people who want to do things that aren’t read random stuff from the internet. I’ve pared down my feeds to the five that I consider essential for keeping up with the news:

• Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson. Discusses the history of today’s politics, as well as the actual politics themselves. Updates with written content daily. Long, but well worth the read. If you have to pick one, I recommend this one.
• The Present Age by Parker Molloy. A “media criticism, culture, and politics newsletter” that discusses the press and current events. Molloy offers thoughtful criticism and commentary on corporate ownership and media misconduct.
• Abortion, Every Day by Jessica Valenti. News on legislation and action that affects abortion access, providers, and people who have had/are seeking providers for/may yet choose to have an abortion.
• Erin in the Morning by Erin Reed. Reed covers legislation targeting transgender people and their rights—which is a scary amount of the legislation right now. Many newspapers don’t seem to headline the same things that she writes about, so I’ve learned a lot through her newsletter.
• Your Local Epidemiologist by Dr. Katelyin Jetelina. Perhaps the best coverage of COVID, flu, and RSV that I’ve seen (though do let me know if there are more like this!). Jetelina is a fantastic science communicator who discusses current events in public health and policy.

RSS for Research

Bonus: If you’re interested in what’s going on in science and medicine (say, perhaps you are a student or researcher in the sciences) I have a few tips that might be very useful for keeping up with papers and resources.

1. Every journal has its own RSS feed that mirrors its table of contents. Some journals publish content as it is accepted, while other journals publish to the RSS feed when they release a new print issue. If there’s a specific journal for your field that’s absolutely awesome, then add its RSS feed to your list! However, skimming every journal for interesting is onerous, so instead you can…
2. Use google scholar and PubMed alerts! With these, you can create a search query and get the results sent to you as an email or—what luck!—via RSS. Basically, you can create your own “mini-journal” about a specific topic. This will pull in papers even from obscure journals that you may not otherwise follow.