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Broadsheet

The amount of news that's being generated has become overwhelming, regardless of how you feel about current events. We've all become "doom scrollers," incessantly skipping from one story to the next like unrepentant information addicts. There aren't many good solutions to this problem. The curated content that you find in magazines like this can help, especially if that means also getting away from the screen. Subscribing to an RSS feed is another possible solution because it lets you purposefully follow updates from a specific source and filter those updates from your own client. But RSS has been in decline for years, and many general news sources have a vested interest in not supporting it – making you visit their sites, create accounts, and even subscribe.

Broadsheet, a new option in an early stage of development, could bridge the gap between too much news via your usual channels and the lack of support for less distracting methods. It's a command-line tool that outputs a very RSS-like synopsis of news stories, along with links to read the full story in a browser. Command-line arguments can be used to limit stories to a specific domain, country, or search results, and it works brilliantly. Because you're on the command line, clicking on a link is harder and less of a temptation than it might be in a browser. The only downside: Broadsheet requires a subscription to a news aggregation service, http://newsapi.org, which provides an API key to use within the configuration file. It's currently reasonable to use the free developer tier, but this will change when Broadsheet becomes stable. Hopefully by then the developer will have added the proposed RSS support, resulting in the best of both worlds.

Project Website

https://github.com/i-am-the-gabe/Broadsheet

While Broadsheet only currently works with a subscription-based news API, the developer hopes to add RSS support in the future.

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