How to read the news in ten minutes and remember it

Summary: Reading the news well fits in about ten minutes: Choose a source that ends, read past the headline, put each number next to another number, check one claim outside the story, and say each story back in a sentence. Each step answers a finding about how readers misremember headlines, misjudge how common events are, and forget what they read.

Most news advice is about sources: Which outlets to trust, which to drop, and how many to follow. Far less covers what happens once the page is open, and that part decides what a reader remembers and what they get wrong. Research on memory, headlines, and professional fact-checkers points to a handful of habits that fit inside ten minutes and work on any source.

Why reading the news is harder than it looks

Headlines stick, even when the story says something else. In 2014, psychologists Ullrich Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, and colleagues gave people accurate news articles under headlines that played up a secondary detail. The misleading headlines changed what readers remembered, how they reasoned about the story, and what they said they'd do, because people struggle to update a first impression once the body of the story corrects it.

Vivid events feel common. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed in 1973 that people judge how often something happens by how easily examples come to mind. News is built from rare, vivid events, so a heavy reader's sense of how often plane crashes, shark attacks, or kidnappings happen can drift upward unless something pulls it back.

Rereading feels like learning. Psychologists Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students study prose passages and then either reread them or try to recall them without looking. On tests two days and a week later, the students who practiced recalling the passages remembered substantially more, even though rereading made students more confident they'd remember.

Experts leave the page. Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew of Stanford watched 10 historians, 10 professional fact-checkers, and 25 Stanford undergraduates judge live websites. The historians and students stayed on the page and fell for official-looking logos and domain names. The fact-checkers left the site after a quick scan, opened new tabs to see what others said about it, and reached better-supported conclusions in a fraction of the time.

A ten-minute method for reading the news

These steps work with a newspaper, a newsletter, a broadcast, or a brief.

1. Pick a source that ends, before you open anything. Choose one window a day and a source with a last story. A feed has no last story, so it can't fit in ten minutes. Our news diet plan covers how to set the windows.

2. Scan every headline first, for about a minute. Read the whole list before opening a story, then pick the three that change something for you or the people around you. The rest can wait or go.

3. Read each story past the headline, about two minutes each. Keep going until you know what's new, who says so, and how they know. If the body and the headline disagree, the body is the story, and the headline is the part you'd otherwise remember.

4. Put every number next to another number. A count needs last year's count, and a percentage needs to say what it's a percentage of. When a story gives a number alone, ask what it's compared with before deciding it's big.

5. Check one claim outside the story, for about a minute. Pick the claim the story rests on, open a new tab, and search the claim or the person making it. What other sources say about it tells you more than the story's own confidence.

6. Say each story back in one sentence. Close the story and say or write what happened in your own words. If the sentence won't come, you skimmed, and a second look now costs less than a wrong memory later.

When the three stories are done, stop. The method ends because the source did.

Isn't ten minutes too little to understand the news?

For some stories, yes. Ten minutes gets you the update on a war, a court case, or a recession, and understanding any of them takes explainers, long reads, and sometimes books. People whose work depends on a beat need far more than ten minutes, and this method doesn't replace that reading.

We'll also concede the evidence is borrowed. The memory study used students and prose passages, the fact-checker study used websites, and we don't know of a study that tests these six steps as a package on daily news readers. Each habit rests on a finding about how people read in general.

Those findings still apply to the news, because the news is reading under the conditions where they bite hardest: Short sessions, vivid events, and first impressions that rarely get revisited. The ten minutes are a daily floor. Depth goes on top, one story a week chosen for a long read, and the same habits make the long read stick too.

Where informed.now fits

informed.now is a news research company, and our weekday morning brief handles the first step: It ends after the last story. Each story cites the strongest source behind it, usually the primary document, so the claim check in step five starts one tap away. Our methodology explains how we choose the source. The headline scan, the reading, and the one-sentence recall are still yours.

Reading as a skill

Reading the news is a skill, and the habits inside the ten minutes do the work: Reading past the first line, checking one claim, and saying each story back. A reader who does that every morning ends the week knowing what happened and remembering it, which is the reason to read the news at all.