I look at the website RawStory for breaking news and some original stories often once every hour. The website has staff who find news items of interest to a progressive readership published elsewhere with summaries. They are written and posted so quickly I find myself finding typos which I send to their corrections email address and get a “thank you” response in minutes saying they would correct it immediately.
I find RawStory more useful than Google News for breaking stories although I use both since the former uses real people while the later uses algorithms to find relevant stories.
As I write this the top story is “Fox News staffers seethe after network mulls giving 'big lie' promoter Maria Bartiromo a primetime slot”. I don’t care enough about this to even glance at the article, however my point is where else would I find any article about Fox News if I was interested? Somebody at RawStory has the dirty job of keeping up on what is happening at Fox News in case I am interested.
Update: I had to look at this story: Fox & Friends host: No one can deny that Trump works hard because 'he watches every show'… yikes!
They often publish summaries of stories from other sources which are behind a paywall so this comes in handy if I don’t have a subscription. Nowadays so many websites count the number of clicks, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, for example, or are behind paywalls from The NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal to even The Daily Beast for most of their stories, that you’d have to pay a tidy sum to subscribe to all of them you might want to read.
RawStory also published stories in their entirety from Salon so if you like you can click on a link to read them there if you prefer their format.
RawStory has ads in the sidebar like many websites but they also have numerous ads in the body of the story placed between every three or four paragraphs. I find this annoying, so when possible if it is a long article and I am interested in the subject I go to the website where the story originated.
You can go ad free on RawStory for $9.99 a month.
RawStory publishes articles from two sources that format their articles in a much more readable way. One is The History News Network. This is published by George Washington University and with the exception of some links in the sidebar reading stories are distraction free. Here’s an example of the same story from each website:
I find the second version far more readable. It is true of course that I would never have found this story had I not looked at RawStory first, but as for reading it I much preferred to read it without the distraction of ads.
There is another benefit from going to the original source. You will find other stories that don’t end up on websites you generally look at.
RawStory also publishes articles from Agence France-Presse, an international news agency. They don’t even have ads. For example: When Democracy Stumbles.
You might want to add The History News Network and Agence France-Presse to your daily or occasional web browsing. Each offers a different variety of stories. As the name suggests The History News Network puts the news in a historical perspective and many of the articles are written by historians. For example “Confronting ‘Who We Are’” which is about racism is by Syracuse University’s Dr. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson who works in political philosophy and contemporary European philosophy, with a special interest in critical theory and genealogy. She is the author of Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (Columbia University Press, 2018). She regularly teaches courses in philosophy of law.
On Agence France-Press you will find a stories like “‘Our’ Iraqi refugee family’s odyssey to freedom” which is illustrated with powerful photographs.