The Latest Learning Curve

I spend a portion of my work day finding, summarizing, and linking news stories for Rational Review News Digest, the Internet's oldest daily email news and commentary roundup for libertarians.

Among the tools I use to do my niche aggregation/curation are the RSS feeds of a number of newspapers, and non-niche aggregation/curation sites like Google News and Bing News.

And on that latter front, one thing I notice is that those big services seem to operate an ongoing "if it ain't broke, fix it anyway" imperative.

Until fairly recently, Bing News's "World" section offered breakdowns by region (Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, etc.). They stopped doing that (now it's just "World," all mixed together) about the time they switched to a format of photos with headlines instead of lists of headlines. So now it's harder both to narrow down where the news is at, and to scan the page for interesting stuff.

Now Google is switching to a "fresh look, brand-new briefing, & customized topics." The "customized topics" are the same topics they've always offered, but you can drop some of them and re-order their display. And, as with Bing, now you see one version of a story with a graphic from Google's chosen source, instead of a list of stories and an obvious "full coverage" link to show all the stories on the topic. There is, however, a little button that takes you to a "full coverage" area -- also with lots of graphics making it harder to see the damn list.

The new Google News is optional ... for now. But presumably all users will be forced onto the new -- and, from my perspective, less rather than more usable/useful -- format over time. So I guess I'll start futzing with it now. And starting to look for some better news portals to use for what I do.