I have Express VPN. I did not realize it killed ads. I’m going to give that a try!
What a great tip. I’m been testing it and it works great. In fact, it even strips ads out of my local weather app! Thanks for the tip.
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Won’t bore anyone who has seen my response to the ethics of killing ads by repeating myself in this thread but here’s the link to it VPNs, Battery Life, Stripping Ads & Ethical Quandary - #8 by Glimfeather
+1 for NetNewsWire.
Also for the “page button”, you can set different sites to load that way automatically. It takes some tweaking. Some sites actually do better without that setting on. And some individual articles seem to be better one way or another.
But most of the sites I subscribe to are tech blogs, so they behave quite well.
It may be that the app experience is preferable, but it looks like both the Atlantic and WSJ do provide RSS feeds.
I think some papers provide authenticated feeds that they don’t make publicly available. Others may just provide a limited feed and not the full text, even if you are a subscriber. I’m not sure about these two in particular.
Because of this I just subscribed to Express VPN. Thank you. 
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There is a free tier to Feedly. Sounds like if you want to follow over 100 feeds you may have an issue but if you’re looking to get started it’s a great service and I recommend not following that many feeds in the first place. I’ve been pretty liberal with adding feeds and then only removing them after sometime of not getting anything from it and I’m at 75 right now.
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Wikipedia reports that RSS has been declining in popularity and that “several major sites… have reduced or removed support.” Empirically, that seems to be true. I never see the orange radio-wave RSS icons that used to be common on web sites. Perhaps advertisers are refusing to support sites that support RSS.
Once again it appears that I’m late to the party.
I’ve never used RSS but my new-found interest in it is not to avoid ads but to stem the flow of email newsletters into my inbox by redirecting the ones I still deem worth reading to RSS.
What I conclude from the conversation here is that I will need an aggregator (Feedly gets good marks) and a reader. I started using GoodLinks a few days ago and two of the RSS readers recommended here (Reeder Classic and Unread) are said to work well with GoodLinks. And the prerequisite being that the sites of interest support RSS, which means they are set up to convert content from html to XML.
Is that about right?
There may be defectors here and there but my newsfeeds are overflowing - with no shortage of sources.
Many RSS sources are a function of the host software even if not explicitly. For example, you can convert most Discourse pages into an RSS feed by just adding .rss to the end.
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Like Mark Twain, I suspect reports of RSS’s oncoming death are exaggerated. I remember being told it was dying and old-fashioned to use over 10 years ago, and yet it’s still here and the social media apps that were going to replace it are the ones that are dying. Whilst some tech bros likely think there’s a cooler way to get website updates (probably in the app they design that they want you to pay for), the reality is that many users just need feeds pulling into one place that they can sort themselves.
Reeder Classic doesn’t need you to seek the rss feed yourself, you can just paste the url of the website and it will check itself if there is an rss feed.
I mostly operate by a “if there’s no rss feed, I won’t be getting updates from that website” rule. Life is too short, and chances are if that website doesn’t run rss, there’s another one on the same topic that does.
RSS is also largely essential for academia and journalism, so even if it never goes mainstream, I can’t see it disappearing just yet.
However, to the main point of this thread, I haven’t seen web ads for years and didn’t realise how bad it is. I’ve been running the same ad blockers for nearly 15 years on my devices and rarely have issues. (On iOS I’ve been running AdGuard Pro for almost 20 years. I’m not on my Mac right now but I think it’s only running Ghostery, and has been for over a decade. In the last couple of years I’ve added Vinegar specifically for YouTube ads as they were starting to get through the blockers. Vinegar has cut out all those ads, both on iOS and MacOS, both the ones at the beginning of videos and the ones in the middle.)