Maybe it's better to focus on what's important and what you have some influence over, like the well-being of your family and friends, self improvement and your future goals.
Also, depends on where you live - there is a big difference between USA and, say, eastern parts of EU.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rol...
The end result is a daily (or weekly) email that gets sent out. It's digestible in thirty seconds, contains only important news, and has been fact checked by thousands of people to ensure accuracy. No agenda, no celebrity gossip, just facts and sources.
I would be honored if you would check it out.
How do I do that? It's March and all I can see is that text.
Just drop your email in the field and we'll send out an email tomorrow that you're in.
How (if at all) do you ensure that your platform won't become a hostile, self-preserving, lowest common denominator mind/meat ball? (E.g. like HN.)
From my experience controversial views require a strong form of protection from the violent inertia of the masses, because otherwise sharing individual ideas becomes numbingly difficult.
On the other hand, a single party can not be allowed to force their minority view onto the the common mass. E.g. discourage brute forcing a view.
I have witnessed various forms of view-exchange-models:
* "mostly unguided": The 4chan/b model. Pros include shelter from censorship and diverse views, cons are brute forcing views onto the forum is easy.
* "strictly moderated": E.g. wikipedia or stackoverflow. Won't talk much about these, in case of wikipedia it makes sense, but generally for a discussion platform this is the worst case as it defeats the whole purpose.
* "naive (or incompetent) governing": E.g. HN, turn view visibility into popularity contest for instance. Many ways of getting it wrong, each with different motivations and results but generally: Turns community against itself, creates a hostile and violent environment, monoculture, perpetual dishonesty. This is another really bad approach. I believe it was popularized because it seems to work as long as only your best friends use the platform. Ergo the "community degraded" excuse.
* "sensible governing": ???. Find good ways to compile a fairly selected subset of a possibly large amount of views to be able to be consumed by a single person.
I had one idea that I quite liked: Have a pool of volunteering peers for review. Randomly divide incoming submissions among pool for review. E.g. send a submission to a random subset of reviewers. I think the smaller the subset the better. E.g. if you have 128 peers, send it to three random peers. If any one of those peers "likes" the submission, include it in the "newspaper". Possibly send it to more people for review to establish prominence in the newspaper.
Ideals I wanted to implement: Minority views shouldn't have to compete with a horde of people who like cat pictures. It should be difficult to game the system. The process should be transparent, it is good to know that "everybody found X important and somebody found Y important".
One final note:
> "Introducing the Internet's missing newsroom"
This discourages me a ton. Please don't over impose yourself a the missing link or your only savior. The most you can hope for is to be a viable addition to my sources. If you don't realize that then you are incompetent to be a viable source.
Those in positions of power are so good at manipulating the news agenda too. Everyone from the government to the British Royal Family to Beyoncé to ISIS are at it; essentially pitching stories to news editors in the hope they get picked up.
Personally, I try to avoid it. I find news uses fear and outrage too much as a way to keep you watching, and it engenders a sense of hopelessness. Come election time I do some research and vote accordingly, the rest of the time I avoid it.
However you don't want to get overwhelmed and there's a lot of sensationalist journalism out there that seeks to stimulate your reptilian brain. On the other hand theres' also good (aka rational/analytical) journalism that helps making a sane narrative out of it without getting you stuck in the rabbit hole.
Stay close to those whatever side of the political spectrum you find yourself and you'll save a lot of time.
But to answer your direct question I listen to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 (6-9am). The reporting is as terrible as any other major news network but has just enough info to keep you in touch with what is happening so you don't feel lost in conversations at the pub.
http://www.trust.org/humanitarian/
Edit: curious that this got downvoted so rapidly when OP specifically mentions wanting to keep track of things like wars, which these sites all cover, while discarding flavor-of-the-week scandals, which again these sites avoid.
May I add: The Intercept is nice.
I've not found anything as good in English, but presumably it's out there somewhere.
Otherwise, I find it useful to read through archives. The Guardian does a good job of tagging everything. The New York Times is good for world news by country -- e.g. if you want to know what's been going on in Poland lately, start at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesan...
Also, Spiegel Online put up some of their best articles in English, though they can be frustratingly pompous and long-winded.
For a few pages of quick summaries of all the big political, international, and business news, check out the opening pages of The Economist.
That's why I ignore the general news. Long-form journalism on the other hand is what I read.
The news is a collection of stories. The big ones last a long time. If you want to sound like an informed world citizen, you should keep up on the big stories. It's not always easy to tell which stories will be big, but if you start following them early, it's easy to keep up with them.
People have forgotten MH370 already save for that one guy who came up with a wild conspiracy theory about MH370 landing in Kazakhstan.
I'm referring to general news that is talked about on a daily basis. Most of them are quickly forgotten.
Since I saw you mentioned wanting to be able to talk about whatever other people are bringing up in conversation or just having a basic awareness of what's going on in the world, you might want to try thebrowser.com. It usually links to a handful of high quality articles each day about topics related to what's going on in the world.
I have found http://everything2.com/ to be an amazing source of general thought food.
In an era where power is increasingly concentrated, centralized and opaque, we need responsible citizens to become more engaged. A prerequisite for this is that people take an active interest in what's going on in the world, even at the expense of their immediate personal interests.
You can't avoid politics; if you ignore it you're just deferring to other people who'll make decisions for you. Cynicism is the enemy of a decent society.
It explains why so many people were surprised by Snowden leaks even though we'd had similar reports for years before Snowden.
For Tech News, HN has been my main source so far, but I'm adding Techmeme to the mix as well.
Edit: Yahoo's News Digest app is fantastic as well. Twice a day, it sends me a few top articles that are making the news. And it's beautifully designed. I highly recommend it.
The Economist has the same thing, I think, but they're more expensive, and probably somewhat overlapping the NYT service.
And HN. In fact you could use HN as in the old saw, "If it's important, the waiter will mention it." I first heard about the black and blue dress on HN.
I tried to follow newspapers and the Economist, but it was wasted time brushing up on trivia that doesn't affect 99% of my life (edit: and that I have no reasonable chance of changing).
Disclaimer: I work on the back end services for the app.
CBC News
Guardian
just about covers it for me
