As so many immigrants expats around the world, I like to follow the news regarding what's happening back in my home country. But getting complete, reliable information has been getting more and more difficult every year, and 2020 is the year in which I finally ran out of news sources.

Unlike my parent's generation, I don't consider newspapers a reasonable source of reliable information. The problem is that, following the example set by Fox News, the largest newspapers at home have substituted fact for opinions, extremely biased articles, and outrage has replaced objectivity as the main selling point. All of this seasoned with local celebrity gossip, of course.

If despite my best judgment I decide to check what's going on based on newspapers, I currently start with the biggest newspaper (which is very right-leaning) and then compensate with their main opposition (which is, as expected, very left-leaning). I then figure out which news are common to both, and decide which version is more likely to be true - one newspaper's fair trial is the other newspaper's witch hunt, and one newspaper's smart move is the other newspaper's national betrayal. Finally, I check which news have been mentioned in only one of them, and decide on a reasonable narrative for why only one of them is talking about it. Suffice to say, doing this in the morning on my phone takes a lot of effort.

In my case, this was one problem (probably the only one) solved by the news aggregator Reddit. The sub-reddit for my country used to be relatively good at highlighting the main issues in the public conscience, and reading the main posts used to be enough to get a good, updated picture. But not anymore: extremely lax moderation and general apathy have turned the forum into a meme-laden wasteland where all information has been replaced by bad jokes, political outrage, and the occasional "kill all poors" post. So I quit it for good, and haven't looked back.

Which leads me to today. I have not yet found any source of news that I can trust to inform me. Sure, I can easily get distracted, entertained, outraged, tricked, and lied to, but informed? Good luck with that. I have remained uninformed for a couple months now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Being a programmer who has spent a bit of time toying around with NLP, I have been working on a solution - a small news aggregator where I can get a proper sense of what's going on. But it hasn't been easy: news agencies no longer offer RSS feeds, important data is locked behind proprietary formats made intentionally hard to read, and there is barely any corpora around in Spanish that I could use to train models.

I don't have a deeper point. I can't promise that my solution will work, because it's entirely possible that it never makes it out of vaporware. I don't have a website to recommend, because websites are getting bad faster than good ones are propping up. And I'm not going to talk about the cesspool that are unmoderated forums because we all know about that already.

I just wanted to say: I am very unhappy with this situation.