You consider hackernews news or no?
Lastly, this is a little of a life hack, but in the mornings I tend to glance once at the top 3 HN headlines; if there's no major "news-news" (ie not tech news) in the top three slots, then it's pretty safe to say that nothing historic like September 11th happened that day. It's a pretty peaceful way of checking that the world's continuing to keep on spinning. :)
HN front-page is certainly algorithm driven, it might not be individualized, but stories that displease the algorithm are down-weighted which, in effect, is a tacit promotion of stories the algorithm chooses not to penalize.
> it pretty rarely has the "if it bleeds it leads" shock-bait type of articles that the alphabet networks do.
I don't agree. HN stories are often baity, inflammatory, and contentious, it is not uncommon to see dang warning the comment section to keep things civil. The type of stories that hit HN aren't always the type we see in the wider media, but the level of toxicity is on par with every other social media site, if only mitigated by careful and rigorous moderation.
Very inspiring