I want to stay "informed", but how so?
My information ecosystem is ... scattered to say the least. I scroll YouTube and click on things that are interesting. I look up articles on issues I'm especially interested in. I fact check things that seem off. And I use an AllSides RSS feed for my general national coverage.
I don't read much about campaigning or drama stuff because I care about policy. I want to vote based on policy, and I need to know what policies are being proposed, which ones are being passed. I need to know about laws in my country, which includes local ordinances, state legislation, state supreme court cases, and u.s. supreme court cases. My district court and appellate court cases probably aren't significant enough to pay much attention to most the time.
ugh i hate this its too much. It's so hard to discern what is "important". And even when I've decided what's important, it's so hard to actually curate my sources. And to make it worse, none of my local news outlets support RSS. What the fuck? One of them has it but actively breaks it when I try to use it. It used to work, but I can't even get a feed now.
Summary of news I want:
- U.S. Supreme Court Rulings
- Landmark State Supreme Court Rulings
- Policy-related legislation for state & fed (There are a lot of bills that just recognize somebody's accomplishments or somebody who died. I don't need to keep up on that stuff)
- Local crime statistics
- Local economic statistics (jobs, consumer activity? poverty rates? idk)
- Activity my city council & county board are up to
- What my school board's up to
...
but then what about my health department, or the FTC or CDC or the ambassador to the UN or rulings from the international court of justice or newsletters from my representatives or ...
its too much.
i dont know how to handle it.
so I just muck around in the slop ... for the most part.
I do keep up with my AllSides RSS Feed, though its actually from open rss.
For those interested in national U.S. news, I recommend this feed:
https://openrss.org/www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
There are a ton of articles I skip, but its nice to see the headlines and have a sense of what bullshit the media culture machine cares about this week. But I definitely don't need the details of the drama. I need to know about policy and major events.