# What are the best news sources? 6 we'd trust with any story > Most big stories reach you as rewrites of reporting from a few newsrooms. We name the 6 that do that reporting themselves, from Reuters and Bloomberg to PBS News Hour, with what each does best and how to pick 2 or 3. Source: https://informed.now/blog/best-news-sources By Kira Shishkin · October 27, 2026 · News Curation **Summary:** The best news sources report first and argue last. They keep their own reporters where the news happens, correct their mistakes in public, and keep opinion on a separate page from reporting. Reuters, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg lead our list of 6, and most readers need only 2 or 3 of them. Most of what you read about a big story started at a handful of newsrooms. A wildfire, an interest rate decision, or a ceasefire reaches your feed after one of a few organizations with a reporter on the scene filed the story and hundreds of other outlets rewrote the filing. Each rewrite between you and that first report can add an angle, a headline written for clicks, or a fresh error. So the sources worth reading directly are the few that do the original reporting. Every outlet on this list sends its own reporters, publishes its corrections, and runs its opinion pieces apart from its news. ### 1. Reuters [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com) has been reporting from London since 1851, and it's a [wire service](https://informed.now/blog/news-wire-services): It sells its stories to other newsrooms, including newsrooms that disagree with each other about almost everything. That customer base trains a particular kind of writing. A Reuters story gives the event, the numbers, and the named sources, and leaves the adjectives out. Its journalists work under the [Trust Principles](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/about-us/trust-principles), a written pledge of independence and freedom from bias that the company adopted in 1941. **Best For:** Global breaking news, written flat enough that readers on any side can use it. **Watch For:** The same flatness. Reuters tells you what happened and seldom tells you why the event matters to you. ### 2. The Associated Press The [Associated Press](https://apnews.com) is a nonprofit cooperative founded in 1846 and owned by its member newspapers and broadcasters. When a local station announces who won a US election, the call usually comes from the AP, which has declared winners in American elections since the 1800s. Its stylebook sets the rules most American newsrooms write by. **Best For:** US news, election results, and short explanations of where a story stands today. **Watch For:** Breadth over depth. The AP covers so many stories that few of them get a second week of reporting. ### 3. Bloomberg News [Bloomberg News](https://www.bloomberg.com) launched in 1990 to feed the Bloomberg Terminal, the data screen that traders and fund managers pay for, and the newsroom still writes for readers whose money moves on the next sentence. Those readers punish vagueness. A wrong figure in a Bloomberg story costs a customer real money, and that pressure keeps the reporting precise. **Best For:** Markets, companies, central banks, and any story where a number is the news. **Watch For:** A paywall, and a habit of assuming you already know what a basis point is. ### 4. The Economist [The Economist](https://www.economist.com) has published weekly since 1843 and runs its articles without bylines, so the paper speaks in a single voice and no reporter builds a personal brand on a story. It argues openly for free markets and liberal democracy. It earns a place on this list because it backs each argument with reporting from its own correspondents around the world, and we'd bet its explanation of the week's news is the best in print. **Best For:** Understanding why a story matters, once a week, in a few pages. **Watch For:** The confident house voice can make a guess sound like a settled fact. ### 5. NPR [NPR](https://www.npr.org) produces national news for a network of public radio member stations across the US, and its morning and evening programs reach listeners on their commute. Radio forces a story into plain spoken sentences, and that constraint makes NPR the clearest source on this list for anyone who'd rather listen than read. **Best For:** Keeping up with the news without a screen. **Watch For:** Critics on the right say its choice of stories leans left. ### 6. PBS News Hour [PBS News Hour](https://www.pbs.org/newshour) is a weeknight hour of news on public television. It gives a few stories each night the minutes a cable segment can't, and it lets the people in each story finish their sentences. **Best For:** The day's news, once, in the evening. **Watch For:** The schedule. A nightly broadcast runs hours behind a breaking story. ### What's wrong with a list like this? All 6 names on this list are large Western institutions, and large institutions get things wrong together. In 2002 and 2003, major American and British outlets repeated the claim that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction, and the claim was false. A wire service's reach makes the problem worse: A single wrong line in a Reuters or AP story reaches hundreds of newsrooms within minutes. That shared blind spot is real. If you read only these 6, you'll miss the stories none of them think to assign, and you'll get their mistakes along with their reporting. The alternatives share the weakness and have fewer defenses against it than these 6 do. Most independent creators and partisan sites build their posts on reporting from outlets like these, add a point of view, and publish corrections rarely or never. The fix for a shared blind spot is to read 2 sources with different owners and from different countries, and to check how each one corrects itself. Our [guide](https://informed.now/blog/unbiased-news-sources) to unbiased news sources has 5 checks that work on any outlet. ### How to pick 2 or 3 Pick a wire service for what happened: Reuters or the AP. Add an outlet for why the news matters: Bloomberg if you follow money, or The Economist if you'd rather get the week in a single sitting. Reuters, Bloomberg, and The Economist charge for full access, while the AP, NPR, and PBS News Hour are free to read. Then keep NPR or PBS News Hour for the news you'd hear on a commute or watch in the evening. Read them at a fixed time instead of whenever a headline finds you, and go to their own sites, apps, or an RSS reader. On social feeds the rewrites outrank the originals, and the original is the reason you picked these sources. ### Where does informed.now fit? We run [informed.now](https://informed.now), so we're biased in its favor. Every weekday morning we read sources like the 6 above and text a short brief of the news that changed something, and Pro readers get a link to the primary source behind each item. The brief saves you from opening 3 apps to get the wire services' facts, and the 2 or 3 sources you pick from this list give you the same facts without the brief. The best news source is the one closest to the reporting. A list like this one is a map back to the few newsrooms that file the first report, and the shortest route to the news is to read them directly.