I get most of my daily news from ... <i>Teletext</i> [1]. I'm lucky to be in a country that still has it.<p>I much prefer that format over news sites on the web: Headlines are often laid out in a list one entry below the other, which is easy to read through without having to scroll.
Because pages are limited to 40 columns × 24 rows, every article is short and to the point.<p>I don't usually read it on TV though but on a web-site [2] which has transformed page numbers into hyperlinks, and given multi-pages a tab-like interface.
There are still no images, no ads ... and especially no auto-playing videos. Perfect!<p>Recently though, I've spent a lot of time in a hospital bed and it has been easier for me then to use the TV remote with one hand to check teletext than to use the tablet or smartphone.<p>[1] <<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext</a>><p>[2] <<a href="https://texttv.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://texttv.nu/</a>> (Swedish SVT Text)
Check out <a href="https://markets.sh" rel="nofollow">https://markets.sh</a> news. They are actually text only, from many different sources, clustered and summarized. It is really good to get a gist of what’s currently important without having to “read news” with the known nuisances that come with it.<p>Edit, thank you for the feedback. Some clarifications:<p>- we launched the news feature literally yesterday, it is MVP level so expect inaccuracies especially in the summaries. We are using our own models and are in the process of tuning and refining them.
Clicking on the cluster will give you the actual headline, titles and sources for each cluster.<p>- the ordering of the feed is super simple right now. We will improve the weighting based on recency, magnitude of the story, coverage, parties involved etc.<p>- This is not text-only like text.npr.org but in the sense of not being stuffed with ads, autoplay videos and images. Both a real text-only statically rendered page and RSS feed are in the works.
For sports, ESPN does have <a href="http://www.espn.com/nba/lite/scoreboard" rel="nofollow">http://www.espn.com/nba/lite/scoreboard</a>, but most of the links go back to the normal website. It may have been been more robust in the past, but I don't imagine anyone works on it anymore. It seems like the developer listed in the credits (<a href="http://www.espn.com/espn/lite/credits" rel="nofollow">http://www.espn.com/espn/lite/credits</a>) last worked there in 2002!!<p>So if you're looking for a sports alternative, <a href="https://plaintextsports.com" rel="nofollow">https://plaintextsports.com</a> (which I made) works great! All the scores, play-by-play, box scores, standings, and schedules, but just no news stories. Blazing fast.<p>(No, it's not technically "Content-Type: text/plain", it uses HTML and CSS. Yes, I know it's not necessarily easier to read; it's an aesthetic. Yes, this is shameless self-promotion.)
I too was using text-only versions of sites like CNN, Reuters, or Christian Science Monitor[1], and they were fine. But what I really wanted was to turn any news website into a text-only website.<p>So I build NewsWaffle, which for any website:<p><a href="https://github.com/acidus99/NewsWaffle">https://github.com/acidus99/NewsWaffle</a><p>* Automatically builds a list of news stores, separate from the navigational hyperlinks.<p>* Detects RSS/Atom feeds to provide a more accurate list of news stories.<p>* Uses Readability to show only article content on article pages.<p>* Uses meta data like OpenGraph or Twitter cards to provide richer formatting, and to determine page type.<p>It regularly converts 900 KB home pages or 1.2 MB news articles into into 3KB for links to news stories and 5K of text<p>It does this by:<p>* Using semantic tags like <header>, <footer>, and <nav> to determines which hyperlinks are navigational and which ones are likely links to news articles.<p>* OpenGraph meta data to determine page type news stories and extra metadata.<p>* A Aggressive HTML parser that strips out a ton of tags, CSS, JS, etc<p>* Readability library to extract out the text of news articles<p>I built this as a service in Gemini, so if you have a gemini browser you can try it. Otherwise, here is a HTTP-to-gemini proxy showing you what a NYT article looks like:<p>Gemini link: gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/<p>NYT Homepage: <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links%3Fhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F" rel="nofollow">https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/li...</a><p>NYT Article: <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/article%3Fhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2023%252F03%252F25%252Fworld%252Fasia%252Fasia-china-military-war.html" rel="nofollow">https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/ar...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/text_edition" rel="nofollow">https://www.csmonitor.com/text_edition</a>
Someone on here shared <a href="https://brutalist.report/" rel="nofollow">https://brutalist.report/</a> a few months back and I’ve been using that. Dead simple, no bullshit.
> If you’re a Facebook user…<p>> mbasic.facebook.com<p>> Ideal if you’re the kind of person who just quickly needs to check the feed and go away again. There’s no javascript so it feels (and definitely is) faster and less bloated. The design is nicely old fashioned.<p>I've been using this site for years but it's increasingly bit rotting and regularly serves broken links.
Until a few days ago the best solution for text only + no ads + offline reading was a kindle subscription to whichever periodical you fancy. This is gone now.<p>Nook still has a newstand store (for now?) but I haven't used it so can't comment on the formatting and UX.
I'm surprised this didn't mention Wikipedia's Current Events Portal <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events</a><p>I also use teddit.net which is essentially a plaintext reddit <a href="https://teddit.net/r/worldnews" rel="nofollow">https://teddit.net/r/worldnews</a>
Question:<p>When reading programming tutorials or a write up about a tech concept do you prefer if the article has a hero image or not? This would be an image loaded at the top which sums up the title of the post visually.<p>On a related note, personally if someone has 500 blog posts I'd like to see them in a condensed bullet list so I can scan the titles super fast. I don't want to see images and have 10 loaded per page. It turns something from a 2 minute effortless quick scan to dozens of clicks and potentially 20 minutes.<p>However, in practice having images for each post seems to get more engagement (ie. people clicking things and beginning to read your article). I never understood why in the context of programming. I understand pictures are useful for hardware or if you need to make a diagram. I'm mainly talking about the hero image here.
I run an experimental service to turn web articles into plain text (No HTML) by prefixing the URL with 'txtifiy.it/'.<p>Doesn't work on all articles: <a href="https://txtify.it" rel="nofollow">https://txtify.it</a>
Lynx web/gopher browser and if you tweak it a little, you can open the linked images with sxiv for instance:<p><pre><code> - gopher://magical.fish
- gopher://gopherddit.com
- gopher://mozz.us
- gopher://gophernews.net</code></pre>
<a href="https://lite.cnn.com" rel="nofollow">https://lite.cnn.com</a> is my go to source. Extremely minimal and can look at all headlines so quickly.
There's also <a href="https://neuters.de" rel="nofollow">https://neuters.de</a>, a Nitter-like alternative frontend for Reuters.
Whilst it's headlines only, FreshNews.org still exists (and after a scare last year has been updated to function with today's site engineering), and provides a dense presentation of (mostly tech-related) stories from 33 sites (default, customisable with a log-in):<p><<a href="https://freshnews.org/" rel="nofollow">https://freshnews.org/</a>>
I love RMS's daily news, his PoV is very close to my one so the link [1] is a great source of political news.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.stallman.org/archives/2023-jan-apr.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.stallman.org/archives/2023-jan-apr.html</a>
axios.com has almost only text, other than that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events</a> is really good
If you are in the US, this weather and news broadcast application is a good resource: <a href="https://www.locserendipity.com/Start.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.locserendipity.com/Start.html</a>
(2020) !!<p>.. and already dated wrt <i>Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust</i> link ( news.trust.org ) which is now archived and replaced by<p><a href="https://www.context.news/" rel="nofollow">https://www.context.news/</a>
Text-based news pages are better because they allow readers to quickly scan through and absorb information, without being distracted by flashy graphics or autoplay videos.
Not sure of the premise behind this, so maybe I’m missing the point, but why not curate quality news sources and access them via an rss news reader like NetNewsWire?
What we need are more Gemini[1] sites.
[1](<a href="https://geminiquickst.art/" rel="nofollow">https://geminiquickst.art/</a>)
i made an automated news site that keeps an eye out for "happenings". it starts by showing the last 6 links found and automatically adds to the list if something new is found.<p><a href="https://news.coffee" rel="nofollow">https://news.coffee</a>
not necessarily native text, but a flowing list of news links:<p>irc.libera.chat has<p><pre><code> ##hntop - updated as hacker news item cream rises to the top
##news - common interest international stuff
##alerts - earthquakes, electricity, ...
</code></pre>
maybe others
One issue is that news sites article content is written to maximise ad impressions. Ads inject between paragraphs typically so you need lots of paragraphs. You start with perhaps two paragraphs of actual information, then break it down into 4 or more and add more information about related topics. Add some opinions, maybe weave in links to related articles on your site, and you end up with 10 or so paragraphs insterspersed with ads and pictures. You can remove the ads and pictures but you can't remove the bullshit. We need a good AI tldr machine.