RSS feeds are more important than ever



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Substack is now an important part of my routine. Paul Krugman is on Substack now, as well as The Contrarian, started by Jennifer Rubin and Norm Ornstein. And of course Ken is there. No doubt there will be more people I will follow on Substack, as news sites such as the New York Times and the Washington Post become increasingly obedient to the Trump regime. Paul Krugman posted today, at the Contrarian, about why he left the New York Times.

However, even one Substack subscription, whether paid or free, becomes a pain in the neck. The default way of getting new articles is having them mailed to you. That quickly causes a lot of spamlike clutter and disorganization. The Contrarian obviously got a lot of complaints about that, because today they announced that they would send only two emails a day, morning and evening.

But there’s a better way than email, and that’s to use an RSS reader. RSS has been around for years. It stands for “really simple syndication.” It’s an app that runs on your computer (or phone). It checks every 10 minutes or so for new posts from all your “subscriptions.” Everything is all in one place. For Mac, I use NetNewsWire, which is free, reliable, and open source. There are RSS apps for Windows, of course. Just Google for some suggestions and try them out.

This blog has an RSS feed. It’s at https://acornabbey.com/blog/?feed=rss2. Note that, to comment, or to read comments, you’d still need to visit the blog the usual way.

As I have said here before, the mainstream media’s reporting on politics can no longer be trusted, especially their coverage of the Trump administration. What we need to do now is follow the largest possible set of specialists with no conflicts of interest and no intention of trying to write for “both sides.” They are historians, such as Heather Cox Richardson; economists, such as Paul Krugman; and principled journalists, such as Jennifer Rubin. I still check many newspapers every day, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, but I am wary of their political reporting. I’ve also noticed that the “conservative” commentary at the Times and the Post has become increasingly extreme, indistinguishable from the stuff in the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London.

Most publications have RSS feeds. I’ve learned, though, to use RSS only for a few high-value feeds. If there are too many RSS feeds, then it becomes just another source of clutter.

2 thoughts on “RSS feeds are more important than ever”

  1. Hi Chenda: Yes. When we heard that Krugman was leaving the Times, my fear of course was that they were trying to squelch him. That turns out to be true. We’re way better off now with Krugman on his own rather than at the Times. His Times column was twice a week, and now he posts pretty much every day.

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