Minimalist News

Every site here loads in under a second and shows you headlines. No autoplay video, no cookie wall stacked on a newsletter modal, no sidebar of things designed to make you angry. That was the only test, and it eliminates almost every mainstream news homepage, including the ones belonging to the organisations whose text-only versions are on this list.

There are two kinds here. Some are official lite front pages run by the newsrooms themselves, originally built for low bandwidth and disaster coverage, and quietly the best way to read those outlets. The rest are independent aggregators that pull from many sources, some ranked by significance, some condensed from Wikipedia's daily record, some just a wall of links with the styling removed.

What they share isn't only speed. It's a refusal to optimise for time-on-site. Several update once a day on purpose, which turns out to be the actual fix if the problem is that you check the news eleven times before lunch. I re-check these every few months, mostly for the independent ones, small projects like these tend to go quiet rather than go down.

Good starting point if you've been meaning to stop doom-scrolling but still want to know what happened, or if you're on a slow connection, an old machine, or a work network that makes normal news sites unusable.