How I'm Reading News in 2025

2024 felt like the year that traditional media died and resurrected as a zombie. It's still there, it still moves, but there's no life behind its eyes. The focus on what would get enough clicks for advertising has produced services where you are the product.

X-Twitter has become too toxic to be a useful news source; Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky haven't attracted enough of a base to share local news in the way I saw previously on Twitter. I have seen news usage of Bluesky picking up recently but still nowhere near Twitter levels. TikTok seems decently good at raising citizen news reports, but it's so full of ads and creators hawking their wares that it's unusable for me personally (I uninstalled the app back at the beginning of 2024 when their big commercialization/marketplace push started).

This has led me back to smaller, independent creators. Especially those creators supported by their community, not milking their views for advertising. So where is the news I want? Much of it is in newsletters, from the Beehives, Substacks, and Ghost blogs of the world. Some of it is in RSS from a few sources. The rest is coming from recommendations in my Mastodon and Bluesky social feeds. What I needed was a way to bring all of that together in one place.

I decided that using my email client to receive newsletters was a horrible idea. It always had been a terrible idea, to be fair, but it took me a while to see my central inbox was unmanageable. Likewise, the stream from Mastodon and Bluesky aren't great for gathering news either.

Substack or Medium apps could be a separate place for newsletters content to live, but I've found both apps terrible for how I like to read and annotate. Importantly, both are also trying to create their own walled garden ecosystems and also have pretty big "you're-the-product" vibes going on as well.

I wanted my news to go into a place I could refer to it as I wanted, and not mixed into my time-sensitive content. I wanted it to be a searchable, eternal archive of my content. It needed to be programmable, and I needed my data downloadable at any time.

Readwise Reader

The most important tool in my workflow has become Readwise Reader. I was a big Instapaper user for years but had seen its development stagnant and it get increasingly buggy; especially for my use case of sending my newsletters directly to my Instapaper email. When they announced a price hike with a promise of future improvement, I looked around at other options before plopping down my next annual renewal fee.

Readwise turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It had the read-it-later extension of Instapaper, along with much better email ingestion, RSS feed reading, PDF and ePub reading, annotation, and the ability to share public links with your annotations. It also keeps all my notes together in one place for all the news and data sources I'm consuming. There's also a ton of integrations and features I'm not taking full advantage of.

Readwise Reader ($8.99/mth or $95.90/year) is my main recommendation; with a note that Instapaper ($59.99/yr) is also out there, is a little cheaper, and has become more actively developed these days as an alternative with fewer features.

I've set up a email address forwarder on my personal domain for all my newsletters, and then forwarded that email over to Readwise to make it easy for me to switch providers later if I wish. For a while, I was forwarding to both Instapaper and Readwise during the transition. You can also do this with SimpleLogin if you want to make a unique email for each newsletter.

Sill

Still (currently free in beta) is a service that lets you connect your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and will then take a daily snapshot of all your friends' shared links and send you a "top stories" summary each morning. All of this is customizable as far as when it's sent, how many links, and any filtering that matters to you.

I use this to get a daily digest sent at 8AM of all the top stories that I should check out. I'll open up the stories I care about in the morning and add them to my Readwise list to read and annotate during the day. Sill will even find and highlight gift links to articles that are behind paywalls.

Newsletters

With the tools outlined, I wanted to finish up by sharing some of my favorite newsletters for 2025. These are where I've been finding a good mix of content and detail without being overwhelming.

• Today In Tabs - Made by a Mainer (who also went on an amazing trail journey with their son), it does a great job of capturing the culture of that day outside of my technology/AI/healthcare/politics bubble.
• The Reframe - The newsletter that helps me not feel like I'm the crazy one. I know there are at least 2 crazy people, which is a massive improvement to my mental health. Everything A.R. Moxon makes is well-researched and mindful, and occasionally you get a breakdown of the little-known indie TV series LOST.
• We're Here - A delightful bit of fresh air and light from Hank and John's (John and Hank's?) inspired Nerdfighteria.
• Webworm - A great newsletter by David Farrier that has a decidedly New Zealand tilt combined with excellent writing and a tenacious journalistic-documentarian mind. I read this partly because his writing on Christian megachurches confirms my priors, and partly because it's useful to see a non-North-American perspective.
• Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At - A very spicy deep dive into Web 3, AI, Crypto, and ground zero for the thinking about the Rot Economy that's now a fairly mainstream perspective (combined with the dead internet theory).

Of course, I appreciate you staying subscribed to me and sharing my emails with your friends, enemies, and frenemies. It's a boost to my morale and a jolt to my ADHD brain when I see a new subscriber join, and keeps my typing words.

Comments can be left here, on my Mastodon, or on my Bluesky.