There’s so much so-called “news”, but most of it is just noise. In this situation, it seems easiest to either A) get consumed by it, trying to follow everything and reading every “he said what?”-piece posted or B) become more or less apathetic and avoid news altogether.
To be able to make proper choices and help move things in the right direction, B) is not an option, as you need to understand current events to at least a minimal level, but A) leaves you just as clueless, overflowing with useless information, with a heavily worn-down ability to be source critical, not remembering where you read any given “fact”.
So how do you keep up to date with current events? Have you found a good way? Am I mistaken in my above assessment?
My answer: I’m leaning more towards A), getting increasingly desperate to find a better way. I’ve tried for some time to use RSS-feeds to avoid scrolling the front pages of the newspapers I follow. This makes the situation much better (the constant headlines updating is better), but it is still overwhelming. Ideally I would want to have a mixture of daily and weekly digests of the most important news (with descriptive headlines), made by knowledge and trusted teams, with sensible analyses and links to longer reads if I were so inclined. That way I could spend 5-15 minutes a day catching up, and then diving in deeper if I needed that. I just don’t know where to find these. I would also ideally like to be able to follow important events in other regions than my own, such as Africa and Asia. I’ve tried following AfricaNews for events in Africa, which gives me at least a sense of things going on there that I never hear of in domestic news outlets, but have not found similar for Asia or South-America for instance.