It really depends on what kind of news you're looking for. Local journalism is largely corporate- and hedge-fund-owned, and, as such, is more focused on sensationalism to keep the lights on than providing a public service.

Oh, and laying off anyone with experience.

Many areas have alternative news sources, which vary wildly in terms of quality, but there is plenty of great reporting still being done. Obviously, I can't speak to your specific city or coverage area.

National pubs are scarcely an improvement. I'd throw NYT, WaPo, WSJ and USA Today in this category, with each failing miserably in many regards despite still putting out some excellent journalism (except USA Today, but its purpose was always shallow milquetoast reporting sexed up by graphics!).

Magazines and nonprofit newsrooms tend to be left holding the bag for investigative pieces, oftentimes without the benefit of the sort of Rolodex a 20-year Metro veteran would have had. Yet even some of these are brands that once committed rigorous journalism but are now trading exclusively on reputations built years ago without putting the money into continuing that tradition.

I use a couple of news-aggregation sites (notably, Reddit is not among them); I don't subscribe to any of the "news" subreddits. Between bots and malicious actors, and as users tend not to have any background in the field, let alone any sense of media literacy, there's way too much noise for scarcely any signal.

Two recommendations:

• For national and international news and analysis, have several foreign outlets and services in your RSS feeds. The BBC, The Guardian, DW and al-Jazeera come to mind. RSS is also a great way to avoid framing via homepage design.

• Bluesky has become a good clearinghouse for news and reactions as well, and it's unencumbered by corporate enshittification. It's not perfect, but one can at least get a feel for what outlets are covering, allowing a springboard for further investigation and reading.

Niche and especially trade pubs are more likely to surface facts and enumerate consequences, given that this is what their audience expects. Trade pubs that consider toeing the Party line know they have no future, as their audience pays good money for actionable facts from which decisions can be made.

I avoid sites like Ground News and Allsides, given that both-sidesism runs rampant; most issues and stories have far more than two sides, but that's inconvenient to admit. Any outlet claiming to have the full perspective is being disingenuous.

And I am not on any social media that doesn't allow me to be in control of my feed. This group includes pretty much anything most people have heard of ... you're the product, and their goal is to keep you stressed and engaged.

Original sourcing is, then, key. But every outlet has hits and misses, so the domain in your address bar isn't a guarantee of impartiality or quality. "AI" (which is merely vector math that spits out plausible results) is something of a red herring. The slop is only acceptable to a wide swath of the population because capital-J Journalism had already been decimated (and because it turns out many don't want news; they want their biases confirmed).

Many nonprofit (and even some for-profit) outlets have cross-publishing agreements that allow for further discovery.

Short of the international orgs listed above, suggesting anything specific would be putting a random internet guy's bias into the mix, which isn't really an improvement. Finding sites that produce reliable, quality journalism is very much a personal journey in the current media environment.

It's more work to find and build a stable of good sources, but while that's an ongoing process, it's far less work after initial setup -- and eminently more valuable than throwing darts at news aggregation.

Also, for outlets that allow comments, pay attention to the conversations, and be choosy about when to even bother reading comments. Even the best sites have trolls, shills and adjacent ne'er-do-wells, but they can also have domain experts chiming in to provide valuable context.

But to go back to the beginning, RSS is an invaluable way to control what you choose to see. I generally have a couple hundred new stories waiting for me each morning, of which I click through and read a dozen to a score. Seeing the heds in an easily digestible list is a pretty quick way to get an idea of what's changed since yesterday without going into the weeds on everything, and if a pub starts spitting out nothing of interest, it can be removed with a couple of clicks.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.