Let’s talk about Kharkiv news. But not about events in our glorious city—about Internet news services. Since I rarely get to watch TV the window into Hell, I subscribed to several online news feeds. Let’s go through each of them.

  • Media Group “Objective” The quality of the news is lights-out bad. Some stories are written by journalists right from the office, from scraps of some phrases on the Internet. They don’t have the ability to go out for every story, so for many news items they just stick in pic-relateds from a photo bank. But reading the comments is a treat. Especially when an ultra-radical straight-A schoolkid bursts into the thread and starts correcting the women journalists’ spelling, punctuation, stylistic, and factual errors for them. Also, they usually don’t write on Saturdays and Sundays. So on Monday you can easily get a three-day-old story from them. One of the significant drawbacks is that they cut the story off in the feed. So if you want to read it to the end, you have to click and go to the site. The headlines have a tabloid whiff. Sometimes you can’t tell what it’s about. Posts per week: 279. Subscribers: 180.

  • MediaPort News Agency The quality of the news is normal. Though we did once write about a funny case where the agency twisted the facts all sideways while describing one of Metalist’s games. There are comments on the news, but they’re somewhere deep in the bowels of the forum, so usually nobody reads them. Sometimes news items slip through in the feed with the phrase at the end: “Advertorial.” In principle that’s OK; it can be useful. “Mediaport” also cuts off the body of the story. Posts per week: 141. Subscribers: 12.

  • Newspaper “Evening Kharkiv” I subscribed to this channel recently. I haven’t really formed an opinion yet. Sometimes what slips through isn’t news, just lawyers’ consultations in the style of “How to sue your neighbor for his plot of land.” There are few comments on the news. So they’re not as interesting as the comments on “Objective.” The news in the feed is cut off. Posts per week: 292. Subscribers: 55.

  • Kharkiv Regional State Administration A primary source of news. An excellent site for getting news. First, the news items in the feed come in full. Second, many stories are supplied with a quality photo shoot. Also, on this site the feed sends advance notices about various official events in Kharkiv. There are, of course, no comments on the news at all. It’s surprising that such a solid site has so few subscribers. The official mouthpiece of Mykhailo Markovych Dobkin. Number of posts per week: 117. Subscribers: 4.

  • Kharkiv City Council A primary source of news. An excellent site for getting news. Just like in the regional council’s feed, the news items come in full. Also, some stories are accompanied by quality photo shoots. The similarity in how the city council’s and regional council’s news is organized is obvious, but it says the sites were made by different companies. Again, the site has an undeservedly small number of subscribers. The official mouthpiece of Hennadiy Adolfovych Kernes. Posts per week: 76. Subscribers: 16.

  • Television Agency “News” I added this news source only today; I haven’t formed an opinion. The news in the feed is chopped up. There are comments on the site. You can write anonymously. Posts per week: 256. Subscribers: 86.

I’d also read UNIAN through a feed by the “Kharkiv” tag, but I didn’t find such a feed on their site.

I use Google Reader because it sucks in and stores all the news on its end, not just the last 20 like desktop readers do. Obviously, a lot more news than that can pile up in a day, and a desktop reader will miss something. But Google remembers everything. It also caches the bodies of news items. So if someone publishes kompromat somewhere and the ruling party confiscates the server, I’ll still be able to read it all from Google’s cache. Another mega-feature is full-text search through the news over a long time span. It finds prehistoric facts very easily. This is what the feeds look like in this reader’s tree:

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By default, I browse the list of news from old to new. This is what the consolidated flow of information looks like in Google Reader:

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It comes out to about 1,160 posts a week. That is, 165 per day. Clearly, in our little city all the news sources write about the same thing. So news items repeat in the feed. Usually I don’t read them in full; I read only the headlines. If it’s interesting, I expand the body and look at another couple of sentences. I do this for roughly every tenth story. And only select postings are granted the honor of being read by me right on the site. Going through the news takes me 20 to 30 minutes a day.

Strictly speaking, I’m much less interested in the next Maidan in Kyiv than in our mayor planting trees somewhere in Saltivka. So I’m not subscribed to any nationwide Ukrainian or world news. If a nuclear power plant blows up somewhere nearby, I’ll learn about it from the panicking crowd in the street. As for events on a smaller scale, nobody cares.

What I really lack is a news feed for the Rohan residential district and a feed for the university where I work. After all, it’s always more interesting to read about what’s happening around the corner than about events somewhere in someone else’s city, let alone on another continent.

Bloggers, what news do you read? What can you recommend? Maybe there’s some blogger who does photo reports about Kharkiv? Who should I be reading? And if you’re not from Kharkiv, then just share how you’ve organized reading your favorite news.