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+---
+title: US News
+---
+# US News Wiki
+## Intro
+
+The goal of U.S. News is to be part of your news diet. As with food, a single source will never provide everything you need.
+
+News-aggregation sites and media homepages are the equivalent of highly processed foods, providing enough of what you want to feel satiated, even if a lot of it is filler.
+
+The goal here is to mediate the signal-to-noise ratio and provide stories that you may not have run into elsewhere but could be useful for context in the future. And then, of course, discuss the details and ramifications.
+
+## Balanced news diet
+
+This is probably where the most people are going to feel friction with our approach. We're not going to be where you turn for breaking news, and as there's no intent to scale to that activity point, that's an unreasonable stretch goal that also teaches zero skills.
+
+Don't get too hung up on the word "teaches." I'm not here to espouse or impose anything; my goal is that regardless of what else you have in your news diet, this community will augment your factual knowledge.
+
+If you already have everything else you need, great! Welcome, and be sure to share links that stand out for discussion as you browse original sources.
+
+If you've, say, recently left a larger site hoping for a recreation of a firehose, Beehaw is overall not where to seek that out, and moreover, Lemmy is the wrong platform for that firehose from a technology perspective. If you want links to original sources in real time, you want open-standard RSS feeds, not Reddit.
+
+I originally had my list of hard-news RSS feeds all nicely formatted below, but as I was removing the rest, I was left with very little. RSS feeds are invaluable, but major media sites aren't where they shine for the aforementioned signal-to-noise problem. Some allow you to subscribe only to a certain section of the publication, and this is the jackpot: just what you're interested in from a source you trust.
+
+That's the end of the teaching (unless someone wants to writeup or link an intro to RSS). 
+
+## Scope and aspirations
+
+Beehaw's primary purpose is to be a community, so it follows that news aggregation must be in furtherance of that goal.
+
+Communities engage in generous, detailed, informed ways when they self-select by interest. This sort of analysis brings in relevant data the story didn't cover that will be of interest to people in that community, but of less interest to those just curious about the story. For this reason, the best Beehaw experience sees stories posted where their intended audiences are.
+
+If this sounds gatekeepy and going against everybody being exposed to what they need to know, it isn't.
+
+Being an informed community member inherently means some level of participation, even if it's just scrolling. Beehaw's base is small, so subscribing to any communty you'd like to see news in can be done without a fresh wall of text every five minutes.
+
+You don't have to click on anything; just seeing the titles will mean that when a story that interests you pops up, today, tomorrow, in a week, you might remember that you've heard about a detail before. I'm a news junkie and a mod, and across platforms, I interact with very little news proportionally. I read far more heds than actual stories, so there is absolutely nothing wrong with passive news consumption given quality sources.
+
+If you like science news, it's absurd to subscribe to U.S. News for it. The same holds true for each community here.
+
+Additionally, the conversations may be above your level of understanding within a community, but part of the purpose of comments is getting explanations in layman's terms. For self-evident reasons, the closer you are to the source, the less distilled your news is. You want to be on the line of what you already understand, not seeking out content geared to an audience beneath where you are.
+
+## Framing and perceived bias
+
+One of my first removals was one that I'd provided no warning on, so it bears mentioning here.
+
+The story was about a new law about Virginia requiring ID for porn sites, and the URL was not immediately suspect. Open opening the link, 90% of my browser window was a giant graphic with "STRANGER DANGER" in a damaged-looking font over a dramatic stylized background.
+
+There could have been Pulitzer-winning coverage under that lead art, and it still would have been removed.
+
+A lot of news judgment revolves around what readers don't see. It's not that they're ignorant or disinterested, they just don't have training to see the ways the copy is not the only thing being sold. How the context can be designed to evoke emotion even if the story itself is objective, useful, and in no way backs the framing.
+
+As requested, the user submitted a new post, and it's live right now. There was no problem with the topic; there may have been no issue with the story. But I will not countenance links that are so blatantly framed that no reasonable reader could enter the story with an objective perspective.