keeping up with the news

The Kyiv Independent suggests Five ways to keep Ukraine in your news feed. Discoverability is an acute problem for a Ukrainian site, because of all the pro-Putin content out there that’s being actively pushed by people who are good at beating The Algorithms. So in order to find decent coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and related issues, you have to take steps to avoid the filter bubbles.

Some of the same problems apply for other news topics. We certainly have international troll operations messing with political content on social media here, too. It looks like they have a similar problem in Romania: Băieții care fac „România frumoasă” The Kyiv Independent suggests:

• Subscribe to email newsletters. The Kyiv Independent has daily and weekly general newsletters, along with topic-specific newsletters. Newsletters are a classic way to beat the algorithms, promoted by many sites, so the big risk here is that Gmail starts sending them somewhere other than the inbox.

• Use the Google News “preferred sources” feature. (They recommend going straight to the page for the Kyiv Independent on there, probably because Google’s Preferred Sources Tool Is Jammed With Spam.)

• Follow the Kyiv Independent on social media (not “X”, the former Twitter, though. They’re already tweaking their system to boost pro-Putin accounts, because reasons.) The Kyiv Independent also suggest feeding the algorithms by watching videos to the end, scrolling to the end of articles, and the usual don’t forget to like and subscribe stuff.

One more: The Kyiv Independent RSS feed is really helpful for those who have or want to form the RSS habit. RSS is under-rated but it still looks possible for sites to justify it by claiming it’s likely to reach people who are connectors, or highly online. The kind of people who would post a link to Reddit or whatever. Aram Zucker-Scharff has a way to do RSS analytics that looks promising. It’s not going to get all the RSS users, since a lot of tools consume RSS in a lot of different ways, but it’s a start.

Related

The traffic and revenue crisis for news is a symptom of Big Tech’s economy-wide trust collapse – RJI by me.

Bonus links

Swiss government says give M365, and all SaaS, a miss as it lacks E2EE by Simon Sharwood. (This is unrelated to the big issue for SaaS firms based in the USA: the companies are more interested in buttering up the administration here than in keeping European customers. A lot of European customers could end up getting cut off with little notice. Political risk is less manageable for IT decision-makers than technical or organizational risks. Related: Europe Can’t Defend Democracy on US Servers by Ben Werdmuller.)

Shadow Fleet Crisis Deepens: Third Tanker Incident off Senegal Follows Black Sea Drone Strikes by Mike Schuler. (More security costs of fossil fuels. Directly betting on war maps is new, but trading oil futures based on anticipated strikes on oil tankers could easily become a thing.)

Journalist.net: The platform enabling any publisher to draw on global newsroom by Freddy Mayhew. In an age of falling foreign news budgets, a tech platform has been set up which enables any publisher to draw on a thousands-strong global newsroom….Publishers pay a single monthly invoice for all the freelances they’ve worked with on the platform, streamlining and simplifying the payment process.

Rust Belt cities may have shrinking populations, but their newspapers have a big traffic edge over Sun Belt peers by Joshua Benton. These Sun Belt giants have booming populations, but all those new arrivals likely feel less connected to local news than multi-generation residents in the Rust Belt.