It was 11 years ago today that Google killed Google Reader. The RSS reader with popular with a niche crowd, but never really expanded beyond it’s core use case. In the end it was ditched for more algorithmically driven ways to get the news such as Google News and various attempts at social networks like Google+.
I would argue the results of this shift have been sub optimal. With an RSS reader you select the news sources you trust and find worthwhile to read. This incentivizes media outlets to build trust with their readers. Whereas using algorithms and social media incentivizes going viral over getting things right.
And this trend of substituting exploratory algorithms for subscriptions is not ending. Earlier this year Google ended their podcast app, moving it’s functionality into YouTube Music. A major difference between the apps is that YouTube Music makes much more of an effort to recommend other podcasts. While you can subscribe to creators, it still goes out of its way to recommend other podcasts its algorithm thinks you might like. Which might be good for user engagement. But not so much building up relationships with creators.
This is not to say this is the only problem media outlets have today. And certainly yellow journalism existed before 2013. But Americans have record low levels of trust in mass media. In 2013 44% of Americans had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in mass media, vs 22% with “none at all”. 8 years later the later group surpassed the former. And that survey may be overestimating trust levels. If you look at the partisan breakdown, there was a huge jump in trust from Democrats in 2017. To me, that looks more like a circle the wagons defense of organizations like CNN and The New York Times against attacks by newly elected president Trump more than a legitimate growth in trust in the news media.
Again, distrust in media outlets is part of a longer term trend going back at least to the 90s. So the cause can’t be nailed down to just social media or recommendation algorithms. But it’s clear they haven’t helped. We live in a golden age of information availability. But instead of making everyone well informed, fake news and fake accusations of fake news have left Americans with no trust of anything they hear. The only way out is reestablish trusted relationships with outlets instead of getting our news from whatever is trending on social media.
So to do my part in helping address this, I’m now introducing Newsasaur.us. It’s an RSS reader I mostly wrote last year when I had some time off. I’ve been using it a lot since then and it’s a lot less stressful to doom scroll than whatever Elon Musk wants to call Twitter these days. I’m releasing it in a beta form for now. Nothing too fancy, just sign up with your email and add some news sources you trust in the feeds section. You can tag your feeds to group stories from them together. In the articles section you can filter by a particular feed or tag.
If it gets much usage I may slap an ad in there somewhere to help with the cost of serving it, but for now feel free to play around with it.