Where Do You Get Your News?

If you heard about the last big story from someone on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, you’re in good company. This year, for the first time, social media and video platforms became the most common way people get news online, across dozens of countries, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report. The same report found that only a quarter of Americans trust the news most of the time, and that one in ten people across those countries now use AI chatbots for news, up from 7% a year earlier.

Put those together and you get what I think is the biggest story in news right now, which isn’t any single story, but the trip the news takes to get to you.

That trip used to be a short one. You got the news from the morning paper, the evening news, a website or a blog, and that was more or less it. Now there’s almost always something in the middle, whether it’s an algorithm deciding what you see, a creator deciding how you should feel about it, or a chatbot deciding which three sentences you need the most.

Postfeed is about examining the whole route: who makes the news, who moves it, who ranks it, who pays for it, and what form it takes by the time it ends up in front of you.

Where I'm coming from

Postfeed is a Zetfeed blog. What is Zetfeed? Zetfeed is a feed reader I built to deliver news straight from the source, without the middleman.

I believe the best way to get the news is straight from the people who report it, and everything that sits between you and it should be examined and curated by none other than you. That doesn’t mean doing it all yourself, since a good editor or curator is worth a great deal, but a lot of what stands in the middle today is there because it’s good at holding your attention, not because it’s good at telling you what happened.

What you'll read here

Most of what we write here will come back to one of a few threads.

The first is the people in the middle. At some point, a lot of us stopped hearing about the news from the people who report it and started hearing about it from someone reacting to it, often from a parked car with their phone propped on the dashboard. Some of those people might be great at explaining things, and some of them barely read the headline themselves. I want to understand how that happened, and why so many people would now rather hear the news from them than from whoever actually broke it.

Then there’s AI, which has gotten remarkably good at telling you what a story says without ever sending you to read it. That’s convenient right up until you start to wonder who will keep paying for the reporting the chatbot is summarizing, or what happens the day it gets something wrong with total confidence.

Finally, there’s the open web, which is the part I’m least neutral about, since I built a feed reader. Feeds, podcasts, newsletters and Bluesky all rest on the idea that you should be able to follow the people you like without a platform deciding who gets in. That idea has been declared dead about as often as the McRib, and somehow it keeps coming back. Meanwhile, the platforms that became the front door to the news keep closing doors of their own. X killed its free API,  Facebook shut down its News tab, Google ran a “test” that hid California news sites from people searching in California, and Reddit turns off its RSS feeds on November 13, 2026.

Postfeed starts with Reddit, where the feeds going dark is the smallest part of what’s changed since the company went public. We’ll attempt to explore all of it.

How it works

Everything here is researched, and wherever a primary source exists, that’s where we go: a company’s own announcements, its filings, the published studies. Every post links to them, so you never have to take our word for anything and you’re always welcome to check the work.

Being fair matters just as much. When we disagree with a company, you’ll get its side of the story, in its own words, while we make our case. Our goal is for the people and companies we write about to read a post and come away thinking “that’s fair,” even when they disagree with every word of it.