I like Apple News as a nice platform for reading the news from multiple resources.
However, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by the number of ads inserted in the body of articles. I find this practice obnoxious.
Accordingly, I’m considering moving to RSS for my news. I would appreciate recommendations for an RSS Reader that does not require a subscription. I would also appreciate feed recommendations for national (U.S.) news, international news, and technology. I’m NOT interested in gaming, celebrities, pop culture and such.
Agreed, Reeder is a good choice. Also, News Explorer which, like Reeder, also syncs feeds via iCloud but unlike Reeder provides a newspaper, grid style presentation of articles. If you like the visual grid style of Apple News this is a good choice.
As for the sources, I’d suggest just using your favorite sources from Apple News… almost any publication there will have RSS available.
Another +1 for Reeder, I use both the Mac and iPad version heavily and both are great. I use it for both RS feeds and Read Later using it’s in-built iCloud sync and it’s safari extensions for snagging article to read later and to add a new RSS subscription for a site that has one. At first I subscribed to a third party RSS aggregator but with Reeder it was unnecessary.
I like Wikipedia’s Current Events (unofficial feed). Each day is an outline of major events in world news. Lots of links if you’re inclined to learn more.
The easiest way is to paste a non-RSS URL into Reeder (other clients do this, too.) It’ll crawl the page and present you with RSS feed links it finds. You click the one that looks right and hit Subscribe. If you guess wrong, no problem; just try again or try another URL and delete the old ones when you have what you want.
I got frustrated with the ads too. So I set up a subscription with NextDNS and use that on my devices with Apple News. (I blocked Apple’s ad servers.) Works a treat.
Yeah, NextDNS did the trick for hiding all the ads. But then there’s the problem of all the hidden sources showing up as “You hid this” so we’ll show you a blank thumbnail anyway. And, as someone who doesn’t subscribe to News+ having News+ articles everywhere. So, even with the ads hidden the articles I want to see are surrounded by blank thumbnails and News+ articles. I ultimately gave up on it. Seems a bit ridiculous that they don’t allow for the option to hid the + articles for people who don’t want to subscribe to those. It just degrades the whole experience.
Another vote for NetNewsWire, though the immutable keyboard shortcuts for navigating articles have screwed me more than once—particularly using “k” for “mark all as read” instead of “previous article”.
I’m currently trialing Reader by Readwise, but have used Reeder on iPad for a long time and have been happy with it. One thing I like about using a paid service like Reader or Feedbin (will work with NetNewsWire and Reeder) is that they give you a special email address to send newsletters to. A lot of people have moved towards newsletters as opposed to a blog and I like being able to get them out of my email.
Keeping in mind that I’m a bit of Econ and data nerd, I really enjoy reading Slow Boring by Matt Yglesias, Noahpinion by Noah Smith, Parentdata by Emily Oster, and Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen. You can subscribe to Substacks in RSS by attaching /feed at the end of the URL. I just read what they put out for free.
I’m currently trialing Reader by Readwise, but have used Reeder on iPad for a long time and have been happy with it. One thing I like about using a paid service like Reader or Feedbin (will work with NetNewsWire and Reeder) is that they give you a special email address to send newsletters to. A lot of people have moved towards newsletters as opposed to a blog and I like being able to get them out of my email.
I have had a good experience with Kill the Newsletter which does this for free. This means that I don’t need a separate service and I can rely on the iCloud syncing provided by Net News Wire.
Reeder (single purchase) and free subscription to Feedly (the Feedly app isn’t bad also).
As others have mentioned you can setup Reeder with iCloud so no Feedly required.
I seem to have cycled through most of the main RSS app, including NetNewsWire, Firey Feeds, Inorreader and many others, but always come back to Reeder (firey feeds is second).
