There’s so much so-called “news”, but most of it is just noise. In this situation, it seems easiest to either A) get consumed by it, trying to follow everything and reading every “he said what?”-piece posted or B) become more or less apathetic and avoid news altogether.
To be able to make proper choices and help move things in the right direction, B) is not an option, as you need to understand current events to at least a minimal level, but A) leaves you just as clueless, overflowing with useless information, with a heavily worn-down ability to be source critical, not remembering where you read any given “fact”.
So how do you keep up to date with current events? Have you found a good way? Am I mistaken in my above assessment?
I generally try to use RSS feeds, but I’ve come to realize this doesn’t really work too well with current-/world news, because it becomes a firehose that drowns my entire feed. So these days, I just have my other interests in RSS feeds and use the BBC and The Guardian front pages to quickly get a summary of current events. I also visit my local newspaper site for headlines (they put their stuff behind paywall though, so it’s just headlines).
I’ve culled my social media to Lemmy and Mastodon and I use pretty aggressive word filtering on Mastodon to get rid of topics I’m not very interested in.
It’s not perfect by no means, but I haven’t really found anything else that works. I wish I had some better way to follow European and African news and commentary, but everything (apart from manually visiting sites) seems to always result in a firehose of news that drowns all other sources.
I wonder if this could be a good use-case for an LLM: feed it that fire-hose of an RSS-feed and have it group and spit out a short and sweet summary per group with the original links. It’s something I would want from actual journalists, but while they are busy writing about Trump’s latest tweet, this might be a usable substitute?