Here I am, writing another blog post about media consumption. Well, why not? It’s weird out there, and I’m just trying to keep my head on straight.
I’m still thinking about signing up for Apple News+, which I’d likely do by upgrading from Apple One Individual to Premier. So that’s be an increase from $20/month to $38. I also pay $1/month for extra iCloud storage, so I’d be able to cancel that, so the total increase in cost would be $17.
Apple News+ alone would be $13/month, so if I’m going to do it, I might as well go with Apple One Premier and get the 2 TB of iCloud and Apple Fitness+ too.
I made a list of pros & cons for Apple News+. On the “pro” side, it gets me access to a bunch of news sites all under one subscription. There’s lots of variety, and it includes local news from a few NJ sites.
On the “con” side:
- It doesn’t work on Windows. (Or directly through a web browser.)
- It doesn’t seem to work with Instapaper. (I’ve read some mixed reports about how it works with read-it-later services, but it generally doesn’t seem to work.)
- There’s no way to send an article to my Kindle or Kobo to read on an eInk device.
- The service has ads, and they’re not easily blocked.
I’ve also been considering a “why not both?” option, where I use Apple News+ for some stuff, but continue subscribing to individual publications, where it makes sense to do so.
On a related topic, I’ve been playing around with my RSS tools recently. Right now, I use The Old Reader as my “back-end” service. For a front-end, on Windows, I generally just use The Old Reader web site. On iPhone and iPad, I use Reeder Classic. On my Mac, I sometimes use Reeder and sometimes the web site.
I’ve been trying out NetNewsWire as a replacement for Reeder. I think I may switch over to it. The design works better for me. It’s a pretty vanilla design, but that’s what I want. It’s black text on a white background, easy to read. Reeder is black on a kind of off-white background, which is harder for me.
On the back-end, I’m kind of interested in looking at stuff that does a bit more with the feeds. I might want to try a product that lets me send email newsletters into it, so I can get those out of my email. I’m not really sure if I need or want that though. I also like the idea of being about to do something interesting with the data, like putting together a custom “front page” for me. I haven’t gotten very far with any of that.
Of course, if I start using Apple News+, I might spend less time with my RSS feeds.
One more topic: Unfortunately, it looks like NJ PBS is shutting down next year. (Here’s an article about it from CBS News.) Hopefully, NJ Spotlight News will continue. (They say they will, but who knows?) The way things are going right now, it feels like a lot of good things are going to disappear in the near future. (And, of course, some already have.)
Well, that’s a downer to go out on. I wanted to find a quick positive thing to put at the end here, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Sigh.