Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.

> ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and become overwhelmed by it.

I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a positive one. There's no shortage of people reacting to things.

> Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most.

Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is akin to something like a ‘news overdose’. There’s nothing wrong with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that’s a far healthier dose.

> Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.

Or, even more difficult: Actually read the science paper, or the court ruling, or the executive order, or the proposed legislation, rather than the journalist's hot take. A lot of these journalists takes boil down to "tweets with more words."

I wish there were more news sources that enabled this. There is so much focus being first to cover a story, and dripping out information. My local newspaper had a website redesign a couple years ago, and completely eliminated the chronological story view. I literally have no idea how to browse stories older than what is currently on their main page for the day. There are some great national weekly papers but they all assume you've already heard the daily news and instead focus on supplementing it with deep dives on selected issues, and don't provide any summary that can be used as a primary news source.

Indeed, 40 years ago, if we weren't getting our news from the TV, we quite often got it via weekly news magazines and Sunday newspapers.

>Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.

This 100%. If a piece of news is truly important, then it'll be important tomorrow or even a week from now. You'll even get clarifications and corrections along the way.

I like to use Pocket to build a list of long-form articles I want to read, then EpubPress (https://epub.press/) to compile that into a weekly EPUB that I can read in-full on a distraction-free e-book reader. It's a much less stressful way of consuming media than the whole neverending drug-frenzied quick-hits world of online news.

I swore off all television news except PBS Newshour. It's way less stressful than having cable/local news on in the background all the time.

Another bonus is that you get accurate into that way. I've lost count of how many times the tweet/article gets it completely wrong.

Someone I spoke with recently mentioned that it used to be that you could read a newspaper end-to-end and feel like you were informed. Now, it's an endless stream of information. I would posit that our brains weren't intended to consume that much information, but I'll leave that as uninformed speculation.

I've implemented this into my life via the "In the news" section of the Wikipedia start page. It served me well the last couple of months.

Am I on the wrong page or were there only 4 articles on North America for all of January?

This is the one I like to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

If that could somehow be automated that would be cool

I think one of the fundamental problems is that "news" fundamentally doesn't tell you very much about what's happening.

A perfect example is a plane crash- you hear right away that a plane has crashed. It is reported on because it is an exceptional event. But, the "real" effects, the ones that actually affect you personally, or the world systemically, won't play out until months later. (for example the Boeing MCAS 777-max thing). How much good does it really do you to know about the plane crash now vs. informing yourself about the context of the plane crash 3--6 months later?

you mean like Time magazine or LA Weekly?

"used to be"? when? I had an L.A. Times subscription in high school and there was no way, even with 2 hours of bus ride a day plus lunch and breaks to finish that paper.

I think a lot of discourse is colored by the midwest. The midwest influenced movies (what does a US neighborhood look like? are there hills/trees/snow?), TV, radio, and literature. I imagine midwest newspapers to be like southern newspapers, 2-3 broadsheets per section if that.

I wonder how many words i can write on this subject

I meant a curated list of interesting articles for me sent as an epub to my kindle weekly...

I looked into that recently, and Calibre with this plugin is a viable option. https://github.com/mmagnus/Pocket-Plus-Calibre-Plugin

You can schedule periodic content pulls in Calibre, and I believe you can also automate sending the resulting EPUB to an email address (like the Kindle's send-to-email feature). I would use this, but I prefer EpubPress's formatting and I'm too lazy to tweak Calibre's.

>Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles

Alternatively I glance at Google News occasionally. Normally the headlines are dull enough not to read the article.

>I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it.

we can't always act on it the way we want to. The Treasury is 3000 miles away. I know complaining at my rep isn't the solution people want, but it's all I can do.

Yes. And pay for the news sources that prove valuable to you. Professional journalism is essential.

> it used to be that you could read a newspaper end-to-end and feel like you were informed

Of course, the downside of that approach is that the people who control the (relatively few) major newspapers effectively get to define what "informed" means - and, most importantly, what it does _not_ include.

You mean like what happens if you subscribe to TIME on your kindle?

To add, find the source itself; submissions to HN are sometimes guilty of this (and often get corrected), posting an article about an article instead of the article itself, the meta-article telling you how to feel and think about the source instead of the source sticking to the facts. And the headline on HN itself priming you as well (but there's the policy that titles on HN should not be editoralised).

It's why I like kinda "boring" news outlets like Reuters. I don't know for sure but our national news thing (NOS) feels fair as well, it doesn't have an overt political alignment and will often report on both sides - even if I'm very much inclined to dismiss one side, but I won't claim to be unbiased.

For a billionaire perspective curated list yes:

> Since 2018, Time has been owned by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who acquired it from Meredith Corporation. Benioff currently publishes the magazine through the company Time USA, LLC.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(magazine)

Shrug. If you want something curated that's always going to mean someone is curating it.

If you have a Kobo, it has built in Pocket integration and sync out of the box