Expanding on a point raised in the original post: I've had some thoughts as to
why news-site UI/UX is so abysmal from a reader standpoint. I suspect it mostly boils down to multiple perverse incentives.
Publishers are largely motivated by revenues, whether from advertising or subscriptions, each of which carries its own distortions. The problems of advertising are well known, Ezra Klein of the New York Times has touched on the distortions subscriptions focus brings, specifically. That's increasingly close to his work as his NYT podcast is now increasingly under the paper's subscription umbrella, with current content available but archives paywalled. This strikes me as unwise and I've said as much to him via email. Even noncommercial publishers (say, BBC, PBS, NPR, Deutsche Welle, etc.) heavily cross promote other content and partners (e.g., PBS/NPR over-the-air broadcast stations). All of which distract and detract from the news content itself.
Readers ... mostly don't get news from publishers' sites directly, relying instead on various social aggregators, say, Mastodon/Fedivers, HN, TikTok, Reddit, and the like. Part of this may be the more compelling nature of those services, but I can't help thinking that the annoyances presented by publishers' sites, and their design, features, and behaviours specifically, doesn't factor in strongly. I'm not sure that a text-dense site wouldn't be appreciated, though it doesn't directly address the social-sharing aspect.
RSS seems ... largely dead. CNN does have RSS links, various at <http://rss.cnn.com/rss/> (e.g., http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition_meast.rss) and <http://edition.cnn.com/> (e.g., <http://edition.cnn.com/china>), though these are very poorly advertised if at all. Searching for RSS/Atom feeds on other sites of interest is ... frustratingly slow. The actual content provided via feeds is also often sub-par, making direct site scraping the more attractive alternative.
Aggregators of course run into copyright issues. So far this is an own-work / personal project, and past the limited lede context my page offers I'm still clicking through to the parent site. But I've had significant pause to consider further plans should I want to pursue them. I'm also well aware that I'm not helping the already abysmal advertising situation at all, on which I'll point to my proposal for a government + ISP + other entities public content syndication mechanism: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...>.
(Note that "government" != "federal government". The United States, for example, has ~90,000 governmental units: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677616>.)
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