Three Time Saving Ways to Read the News

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I love staying in touch with what is going on. I don’t have six hours per day to dedicate to reading news, watching news, listening to news and discussing news.

So, I’ve have been searching for a way to make the news take less time out of my day since I discovered USA Today had a website back in 1995. So far, I’ve got the “news drill” down to about 15-20 minutes using two time tested tools:

Newsmap presents news in color coded boxes. The bigger the box, the bigger the story. Mouseover a story and it gives you details and a link to the full story.

For Mass Media News: Newsmap.JP

World news by category (news, sports, tech, business, lifestyle) in a format you can consume in minutes. Big stores are represented by big boxes. Little stories are represented by little boxes… It’s hard to explain, but I’ve been using Newsmap.jp for about five or six years, and it’s still the best way to see what is going on in the mass media.

For Industry News and Blogs: Akregator

While Newsmap.jp is great for mass media stories, there are blogs and industry news that are not ever going to be covered by the mass media. For that, it’s hard to beat an RSS reader. It’s harder to beat an RSS reader that retrieves articles and stores them (for a length of time that you define), so you can read them on the go, or after the publisher deletes them. Best of all, you can organize your feeds into folders (I have folders for Django & Python Development, Credit Card Industry News, Tech and Sports that all contain my favorite blogs) and read by category. Old school, but it does save a lot of time. As a bonus, you can tag articles to be saved forever when you find one you want to refer back to. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Akregator has it’s own lightning fast search built in. 

Recently, I was turned on to a new tool that holds great promise:

The Experiment: Ctrl-News

I was recently turned on to Ctrl-News by someone’s LinkedIn status update. It’s a tool where you follow headlines and rate articles and Ctrl-News uses “semantic discovery tools” to find news that is relavent to you. Usually when people throw around the word “semantic” and “relevent” it usually adds up to “suck”. In this case, Ctrl-News actually is learning what I like and it’s email updates are becoming useful. We’ll see if this is the case in six months. If so, then I can fire Newsmap.jp and Akregator and spend 10 minutes instead of 15 on news.