It’s been argued, pretty convincingly, that news is bad for you. I remember seeing this piece 10 years ago, and I’ve seen other things since. I’ve read about it in the excellent book Human Kind by Rutger Bregman.

The guardian article really pushes home the point, but there is a problem. I quite like the news. Since that article (though not since the book) was written, Covid happened, and I felt more prepared due to my news habit. And a habit is what it is.

My first effort was to try and move to radio. Here in the UK there’s plenty of Radio news, but I’ve felt that since Jimmy Saville was outed the bar for awfulness in news was lowered yet again. Stories of completely vile terrible things just pop in at breakfast, or during your tea. It makes me feel ill.

A solution⌗

The solution I ended up with was a techy solution, which is a local installation of Tiny Tiny RSS - you could use a commercial thing instead, like Feedreader

What it does, for those not in the know, is it allows you to pick up the news from various sources, and then it will display the headlines and some of the body to you. There is a mobile app, and you are put in control, and that’s the main thing.

So you get to program Tiny Tiny rss to look for news articles matching these criteria:

Filtering RSS

And then you get to delete them all:

Filtering RSS Actions

Other Benefits⌗

You get to see articles only once. They come up, you see them, you can skip, save for later, or read. Once the article is rejected, it’s not coming back. Which means you can get to the end.

Tiny tiny Rss comes with a default feature of “Fresh Articles” and once you’ve got through them you feel done. And you move on to the next thing.

Down sides⌗

Finding the RSS feeds is hard. The good ones anyway. I think feedreader is supposed to be particularly good at that, but with Tiny Tiny Rss I’ve struggled to find some of the RSS feeds sometimes.

Unexpected power move.⌗

Google alerts, is one of the older things that google did that hasn’t yet, surprisingly, been retired for not making it’s way. I guess some of the top nobs at google use it. It will send you an email, or, as it happens, update an RSS feed, when it finds a new page that matches any search term you give it.

So you can keep abreast of very specific things on the web too, while managing the rest of the “news” you follow.

Hosting.⌗

I keep a laptop on at home the whole time. It runs pihole to keep the boys away from the porn, and helps us keep the awful adverts away. It also runs my Tiny Tiny RSS installation. And some backup stuff. So it’s not really costing me anything extra.