News (RSS): How It Works
An RSS reader pulls headlines from sources you choose, in the order they were published, with no algorithm deciding what you see. That single difference — chronological and self-selected rather than ranked and inferred — changes the experience of following news considerably.
What RSS actually is
A machine-readable feed of a site's recent items, published at a fixed address. A reader checks each feed periodically and shows what is new. It has been an open standard since the early 2000s, and it requires no account, no tracking and no relationship with any platform.
| RSS | Algorithmic feed | |
|---|---|---|
| Order | Chronological | Ranked by predicted engagement |
| Sources | Only what you added | Recommended and promoted content |
| Completeness | Every item published | A selected subset |
| Tracking | Minimal | Extensive |
| Advertising | None in the feed itself | Interleaved |
The trade-off is real: you see everything from sources you chose, which means no discovery and no filtering. Following forty active sites produces several hundred items a day.
Building a reading list that works
- Start with ten sources, not fifty. An overwhelming reader gets abandoned within a fortnight.
- Mix daily and slow. A few news sites for currency, plus blogs and journals that publish weekly or monthly and are worth reading properly.
- Separate by folder. Skim news; read the slow folder deliberately.
- Prune quarterly. Remove anything you consistently scroll past — the reader is only useful if you trust that everything in it is worth seeing.
- Include sources you disagree with, deliberately chosen for quality rather than for provocation.
Reading news critically
- Separate reporting from analysis and opinion. Publications label these differently and often subtly.
- Check the date. Old articles recirculate constantly and are frequently mistaken for current events.
- Follow the sourcing. 'Sources say' and 'a study found' are prompts to look for the original.
- Notice what a headline omits. Headlines are written for clicks and are often more definite than the article.
- Wait on breaking news. Early reports of any developing event are wrong at a much higher rate than later ones.
Why the format persists
RSS was widely declared dead after Google Reader closed in 2013, and it continues because it solves a problem platforms do not want solved: reading exactly what you chose, in order, without anything in between. Most news sites, blogs and podcasts still publish a feed, often without advertising it — the URL is frequently just /feed or /rss appended to the site address.
Attention and volume
The failure mode of any reader is treating unread counts as an obligation. There is no requirement to read everything, and a feed you can mark all as read without anxiety is working correctly. It is a source of things worth reading, not a queue to be cleared.