Cam Murphy

Senior Cloud Engineer. I live in Chicago with my girlfriend and our cats. For work I do a little bit of networking, security, and programming.

Staying informed in 2026 without being overwhelmed is a daunting task. I have tried many methods from RSS readers to fully going print media. However, I recently found an imperfect flow that let me read the news on my Kobo, and it is my favorite solution so far.

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Starting with RSS

I tried both Inoreader and Feedly, through them I subscribed to news sources and tech blogs. This worked pretty well. I could keep up to date with local, national, and tech news in one place! However, the feed became overwhelming, I lost track or articles, and I wanted to get away from staring at a screen. This coincided with a wanting to be more offline, so I subscribed to print magazines and newspapers.

Switching to Print

I subscribed to the Chicago Sun-Times, The Economist, and Wired Magazine. I stuck with this for a while, but then a few issues started emerging:

  1. I read less tech blogs or independent media that can only be found online.
  2. Reading paper magazine or newspapers in public is inconvenient.
  3. I would fall behind the latest news, and collected a large backlog of magazines and newspapers.

I did not entirely give this up. I kept and renewed my Chicago Sun-Times paper subscription, because I like getting the newspaper in the morning.

Instapaper

Ironically, I found out about Instapaper because it emerged as a replacement after the death of Pocket. I saw that Kobo started supporting an Instapaper account integration. I setup an Instapaper account and started saving articles via the browser extension and through the Instapaper app, and they seamlessly appeared on my Kobo.

Inoreader -> Instapaper -> Kobo

So here it goes! Throughout the day, I’ll scroll through Inoreader (that has blogs and news accounts I subscribe to), read news.ycombinator.com, or receive a shared article from a friend and I will save that to my Instapaper account. Then when I have some downtime, I’ll sync my Kobo and scroll through and read the articles at my leisure. It is a more sane way to consume the news and easier on the eyes.

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