SkimNews

The pitch is easy to dismiss as another AI news summarizer until you notice what SkimNews refuses to do. There is no recommendation model choosing what you see — it says so outright — and stories are cross-referenced and deduplicated rather than scraped into a firehose. That combination is why we'd reach for it as a morning layer instead of a homepage replacement. Pick it when your news habit is 15 minutes of scrolling one outlet and you want the same ground covered in a five-minute skim with angles from BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera and The Guardian in the same card. The three-bullet structure — what happened, why it matters, other takes — is consistent enough to build a daily rhythm around, and the personalized feed does actually shift with your interests over time. Where it bites: this is not a breaking-news service. If you're watching a market move or a live crisis, a 30-second pre-computed summary is the wrong tool, and there are no push alerts to rescue you. Long-form readers will find the summaries a jumping-off point, not a destination, and anyone hunting stock tips is in the wrong place entirely. The closest comparison is Ground News, which shares the multi-perspective premise but leans harder on bias ratings and a heavier interface. SkimNews is lighter and free; Ground News gives you more metadata about who's slanting what. Feedly is the other fork in the road — if controlling your own sources and integrations matters more than editorial synthesis, take Feedly and skip this. One caveat worth stating plainly: SkimNews publishes its own stats (119+ sources, 564+ articles this week), so treat those as self-reported. The mechanism is verifiable on the page — links back to originals and a public corrections log — but the scale numbers are the vendor's own count.