Troppodillians will know that I organise a discount Crikey subscription every year. But this year I’m also supporting Inkl, a new Australian start-up with great aspirations. In lengthy negotiations between our lawyers, comms division and strategists and theirs, we negotiated a 20 percent discount for those wishing to sign up.
It is exactly what I’ve wanted for years – a serious news aggregator. And it does it extremely well as far as I can see. I recommend it highly – and I’m pretty stingy at signing up to subscriptions. My only other ones are the FT and the NYT (Until I can get around to unsubscribing for their disgraceful doxing of Scott Alexander and the onrush of brain scrambling identity politics that seems to be underway).
If you haven’t already got a version of this in your email intray, and you’re interested in either subscription, please email me on ngruen AT gmail if you want to be part of either exercise and please tell me which subscription(s) you’re interested in the subject heading.
I checked out the Inkl site, but they dont tell me who they are, why I should believe they are good aggregators of interesting news, or how their agreement with the newspapers they take articles from go. Very much ‘trust us, we are great’, complete with nauseating testimonials. Now, I too like the idea of a good aggregator and I’d be willing to pay a bit, but please give a bit more motivation before I go to the effort of a 7-day ‘free trial’ which I then have to remember to stop if I dont like it (and god knows what financial information I have to tell them to even enter that trial).
+1 “and the NYT (Until I can get around to unsubscribing for their disgraceful doxing of Scott Alexander and the onrush of brain scrambling identity politics that seems to be underway).”
Who owns Inkl? And therefore my data?
+1 “I checked out the Inkl site, but they dont tell me who they are, why I should believe they are good aggregators of interesting news, or how their agreement with the newspapers they take articles from go.”
Gee, you guys are more sensitive than me on your ‘data’ and knowing who inkl are or whether their service is any good. The free trial should help clear up the last question. The ‘data’ they get from you is your name and your credit card for payment (though you might be able to keep more to yourself by using PayPal. If they were a dark and sinister force, I doubt they’d think inkl would be the royal road to making the world a worse place.
I’ve just looked them up and they seem to be owned by Gautam Mishra. And since they’ve been at it since 2014 and Gautam e-mailed me himself, I’m thinking we’re not dealing with the next Mark Zuckerberg.
I signed up with my email and a password. I did not give any financial information and I seem to be seeing the site. What did I miss?
no idea what you missed.
More importantly, what do you think: is this a good aggregator?
I have not spent much time on it yet. The weekend is my catch up time. At the very least, it has lots of articles from good outlets organised under headings. Some of the outlets would normally be paywalled. From that point of view, it is better than just taking the commercial newsfeeds.
Not sure about any ideological slant at this point but the range of views does not seem wide. For isntance, on deaths in custody there was not a single article that seemed to counter the dominant narrative that (a) aborigines are being killed by being imprisoned (b) so we have to put them in prison less and there will be no unintended consequences (c) the whole problem of indigenous crime is caused by dispossession.
I would say that they are taking articles from centrist MSM which have a very narrow political lens. So I will still have to go to the trouble of seeking out heterodox sources to stress test the standard orthodox stuff you read in the MSM.
I think that’s about right.
I have had more of a look and it is strongly left leaning. For instance, I scroll down the Politics sections and the sources are The Conversation, NYT, Politico, Salon, Guardian UK, ABC and Independent UK. Nothing at all from the OZ, or WSJ let alone Quillette. For some reason the South China Morning Post (HK newspaper) is prominent in the Worldnews feed. Still, it is useful for reasons I mentioned above.
I wonder if there is any aggregator that deliberately presents diverse views organised by topic or general area, as I suggested that FB should be forced to do in my post last month.