5 Ways to Better Digest Online News

Distraction-free journalism is hard to come by these days.

Some sites do a decent job at streamlining your reading experience, but most don’t. Why? They need to divert your eyeballs to ads to make money.

You might be familiar with the consequences of that…

Pop up ads freeze the page as you scroll.

Text is never the right size.

The stuff telling you to hit subscribe or click on sponsored content is overwhelming.

But there are a few tricks you can use to turn online news into that deep, distraction-free reading experience that we used to find in newspapers and books.

1. Go fullscreen. It’ll remove the tabs on your browser so you don’t get the all-too-common feeling to jump to something else you opened.
2. Zoom in on the text. Most of the time, this will cut out the banner ads on your screen.
3. Don’t jump into the hyperlinks. Opening links mid-read distracts you from the main piece. Open them on new tabs as you read and check them out after you finish the original piece.
4. Don’t read the comments first. Most comments on online articles are laughably ignorant, irrelevant, or confusing. If you want to check them out, look after you finish the article so you can judge them based off what the writer said.
5. Read more independent media. Some of the best content out there right now is done by boutique publications or donor-sponsored journalists and video essayists on YouTube. Get out there and explore.