Searching For News Readers

Several recent events have prompted me to examine my news consuming process. Mainly, Google is shutting down Google Reader, which is one of the main things I read every day. Also, I was troubled that I completely missed two fairly major news events from the past week: 1) I only barely found out about the Daylight Savings change before it took effect, and 2) I had no idea that we finished electing a new pope.

All of that tells me it’s time to work on my news reader.

I consume basically two “kinds” of news sources. The first is a typical Stream of Headlines, which I glance at all throughout the day to see if anything catches my interest. These are the kinds of items I would most likely share with others or make a comment on.

The second source is a more leisurely flow of articles from sites that I know I’m going to want to read everything they say. These are most likely to be individual blogs that perhaps only update once a day or once a week, so I think of it as a Daily Update, and usually the only way I can see them is to physically go to their site or grab an RSS feed.

I suppose you could call Twitter a third source.

I think I will need a different reader for each of those sources. So I’m testing out a few options.

I put Flipboard on my iPad, and I have to say it rocks for browsing headlines and Twitter. Unfortunately it’s entirely worthless to me when I’m work, since my iPad remains at home during that time, and as far as I know, there isn’t a web version. (Flipboard on my Android phone rocks quite a bit less. It’s very slow updating, so I probably won’t use it much.)

I’m trying Feedly, but so far I’m not sold on the Chrome version.

For the River of Headlines, I’m going to try using Google+, because most of that river consists of major media brands that are on every social media platform. I could probably use Facebook as well, but that doesn’t sit right with me.Another downside of Google Reader shutting down is the inevitable loss of Google Listen, which is their Android podcatcher app.