How do you follow the news without it following you?

Summary: You follow the news when you decide the time, the sources, and the stopping point. The news follows you when a feed or an alert decides all three for you. Taking those three decisions back is the whole method, and it works with a newspaper, a radio, or a phone.

Who is following whom?

Following the news is an act with a start and an end. Being followed by the news has neither, and most people have switched from the first to the second without noticing that the verb flipped.

Twenty years ago "following the news" meant something you did: You bought the paper, you turned on the evening broadcast, you opened a bookmarked front page. The act had a beginning and an end, and the gap between acts was yours.

Today the verb runs backwards. The news arrives as a notification while you're cooking, as a clip between two friends' photos, as a headline on a lock screen at 2 AM. You never went to it, so you never decide when you're done with it. Nobody reads the news all day on purpose; People get read to all day, in pieces, because the pieces come to them.

The distinction sounds like wordplay until you look at where people get news. The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, covering 48 markets, found that 54% of Americans now name social and video networks as a main source of news, ahead of television (50%) and news websites or apps (48%) for the first time. A feed is a place where the news finds you. A website is a place where you find the news. The United States just crossed from the second kind to the first.

A feed costs you three things

A feed costs you three things, and each one feels too small to count.

The first is the gap. When the news came at fixed times, the hours between were free of it, and your attention could settle on whatever you were doing. A feed has no between. The same 2025 Reuters Institute report found that 79% of people across its markets have either never received news alerts or have switched them off, mostly because the alerts came too often or didn't matter to them. That's a majority voting against being followed, one phone setting at a time.

The second is the mix. A newspaper front page was ordered by editors who had to decide what mattered most. A feed is ordered by what holds you, and what holds you and what matters overlap only sometimes. The piece that makes you angry ranks above the piece that changes your week.

The third is the end. A paper ends on the back page, a broadcast ends at the credits, and a feed ends never. The 2025 News Platform Fact Sheet from Pew Research Center puts the share of American adults who often get news from a digital device at 56%, with 27% often getting it from news websites or apps and 21% from social media. Pew's 2025 Social Media and News fact sheet adds that 53% of American adults get news from social media at least sometimes, a share that has held roughly steady for several years. The device is the same in every case; The difference is whether the thing on it has a bottom.

We'd bet that most of what people call news fatigue is the missing bottom. The Reuters Institute's 2025 report found 40% of people across its markets now sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. Readers are quitting a form of information that has no off switch, and the only exit they're offered is the whole thing.

The case for being followed is real

The strongest argument for the feed is coverage. A feed shows you things you'd never have searched for: The earthquake in a country you can't place, the court ruling in a field you don't work in, the local vote you'd forgotten was happening. A fixed sitting with three sources would miss some of that, and we'll concede the loss is real. No reading schedule reproduces that kind of luck.

The second argument is speed. If a tornado warning is issued for your county, you want the alert, you want it now, and a 7 AM sitting is useless at 4 PM.

Both arguments are true, and both apply to a narrower slice of news than they seem to. Emergency alerts for your own area travel on a separate channel from news alerts, and they can stay on while every news app goes quiet. The earthquake, the ruling, and the vote will all still exist at your next sitting. Almost nothing you learn at 2 PM instead of 7 AM changes what you do at 2 PM. The feed sells immediacy, and what it mostly delivers is interruption with the same facts attached.

How to follow the news on purpose

The method takes three decisions, each made once.

Pick the time. One sitting a day is enough for most people, two if your work depends on it. Attach the sitting to something that already happens at a fixed hour: Coffee, the train, lunch. Give it a length you'd defend to yourself; Ten to twenty minutes covers a day for nearly everyone, and our post on five-minute news covers the short end of that range.

Pick the sources. Two or three, chosen by you, each with a plain job: One national source built on wire reporting, one local source for the place you live, and, if you want it, one for your field. Go to them, and don't let them come to you. A bookmark, a printed paper, a radio station at a fixed hour, and an RSS reader all work, and they share the property a feed lacks: You open them, and they stay shut until you do.

Pick the stop. This is the decision people skip, and it decides whether the habit holds. The stop can be physical (the last page), timed (a kitchen timer), or built in (a digest that ends). What it can't be is "when I feel caught up," because a feed is built so that you never do.

Then turn off every news alert on your phone and leave on the ones from your county or city emergency service. Keep social feeds for the people in them. When a friend's post points to a real piece of news, note it for the next sitting instead of chasing it now.

A sitting built this way covers roughly the same facts as a day of feed exposure, with the gaps restored and the anger ranked out. Our post on reading the news in ten minutes goes through the reading part in detail, and the case for reading less covers why the gaps matter.

One way to make the three decisions

informed.now is one version of all three decisions made for you. We send a single text each morning with the day's news researched and written down to what you need, and then we stop. There's no feed behind the text and no second message. Readers who prefer a paper, a radio hour, or three bookmarks get the same result from the same three decisions; The text is only the shape we chose.

The verb matters

To follow something is to move toward it. The news stopped waiting for us to move about a decade ago, and we've been calling the result "keeping up" when it's closer to being kept. Pick the time, pick the sources, pick the stop, and the verb runs the right way again: You follow the news, and it waits where you left it until tomorrow.