Browser’s Digest
Proof that old habits die hard (and early branding success in an emerging industry is critical), I still visit Yahoo!’s main page when I want a newsflash fix. Some eight years after I set up my first Yahoo! account, despite the fact that I’ve switched to Google for search (and within the last year, email), I keep returning to Yahoo’s homepage and find it hard not to.
So I’m on the hunt for a better alternative. My requirements for the destination are that it should have 1) fast-breaking posts, 2) pithy headlines (usually seven words or less) and 3) genuine newsworthiness (i.e., Lindsay Lohan’s desire to visit U.S. troops in Iraq should not qualify as headline material).
Nicholas Lemann’s grumpy* Wayward Press piece, “Amateur Hour” (The New Yorker 2006-08-07), turned me on (again) to a couple news aggregators that I had heard of and even visited once upon a time but which never managed to supplant Yahoo! as my principal quick-and-dirty glance at the headlines.
Namely, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media. But both of these are unsatisfactory though in different ways than Yahoo!
Yahoo! often fails on the 3rd point, but Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media both fail on the 1st and 2nd points. MSNBC and CNN and ABC News, by contrast, all have solid breaking news streams but they’re so overwhelming with all their blinking banners and color. Yahoo!, in its defense, has a clean homepage that while snoozeworthy from a design standpoint is at least on the calmer side.
So, suggestions?
* – I say “grumpy” because as Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism it seems he should have been equal to the task of a more balanced article on Internet journalism. Most of it is garbage, granted, but garbage doesn’t even merit a response. More to the purpose would have been a survey of niche aggregators like pop culture BoingBoing and various tabloid Gawker sisters, or perfectly reputable local news collections a la L.A. Observed.
weirleader said,
August 10, 2006 at 6:27 pm
I’m not sure if this will solve your problem (because I don’t know just how fast breaking this’ll be) – but I’ve been very much enjoying using Google Reader and an RSS feed to Slate.com. It seems to be pretty up-to-date and I think the headlines are plenty pithy. Furthermore, they haven’t had too many articles on Lindsay Lohan recently.
Plus, since it’s RSS, you can customize it to your tastes (for instance, I receive feeds from Scientific American and NPR:Talk of the Nation as well – though the NPR ones simply link to a brief synopsis and the option to listen to the audio)
if you’ve already seen this before, then I guess it’s not to your taste – but if you haven’t, maybe give it a try!
and if the links don’t work, let me know – I’ll e-mail them to you. For some reason, whenever I enter posts (on Pete’s site, anyway) my links remain, but the address gets removed… very strange.
weirleader said,
August 10, 2006 at 6:28 pm
btw – welcome to the blogging world!!!
N
writinwrong said,
August 11, 2006 at 6:47 am
Yeah, I do use Google Reader but find what it grabs to be none too time sensitive. Yes, it’s often the most recent articles on the sites but … that’s a little different than what I’m looking for.
Also, maybe you can tell me … how is it that I can get the entire article in that right-side window? I’d rather not have to click anything. Just scroll through articles within the window (as one would with a non-Web-browser-based reader application. There may not be a way. What I find works best (as an alternative) is to right click and open articles as new tabs, then look for a Print-able version and finally crank up the font size as a courtesy to my eyes.
Hints? Tips? Tricks?