How to Follow the News with RSS - A Beginner's Guide

What is RSS?

RSS is a simple format that most news sites publish automatically - a plain, machine-readable list of their latest articles. An RSS reader checks those lists for you and shows every new story in one tidy timeline. No account with the publisher, no ads, no ranking algorithm: just the sources you picked, newest first.

How to set up an RSS reader

Choose a reader app and add your sources. Popular free options include Feedly and Inoreader (both work in any browser), and NetNewsWire for Apple devices. Sign up once, then paste in the sites you want to follow.

Finding a site's feed

Most newsrooms have a feed at an obvious address - try adding /rss, /feed or /rss.xml to the site's URL, or search "[site name] RSS". Better still, most readers let you paste the site's normal homepage URL and will find the feed for you. Add a mix of a general news source and a few topic feeds.

Or skip the setup with an aggregator

RSS is powerful, but building and pruning a feed list takes effort. A news aggregator does the RSS gathering for you: it already subscribes to hundreds of publishers and merges their feeds into ready-made pages. VaaWaa.com is built on exactly this - it pulls world, technology, crypto, business, sports and health feeds from 200+ sources into one clean, ad-free page, refreshed hourly, with per-country and per-topic pages. Use it as your front page, and RSS for the few niche sources you want to follow yourself.

Why RSS still wins

No algorithm decides what you see, there are no ads or trackers in the feed, and nothing is hidden behind a login. For following the news deliberately - rather than being fed it - RSS and a good aggregator are still the best combination there is.