Smartnews is a free, lightweight, mobile app for iOS and Android. It presents the top news stories in different categories and is updated frequently. You can add your favorite news sites to it, too. When I want to find out what’s going on, it’s the first place I go. — MF

I’ve come to appreciate blogs more and more. They are reliable sources of informed enthusiasm and news that stays new. I’ve been surprised how few people use a RSS reader to subscribe to their select choices of blogs because a great RSS reader like Feedly is a tool I use every day. With Feedly, I can read the newest posts of any blog I subscribe to on my laptop or phone in a smooth, intelligent form. It is MUCH easier to read a blog on RSS than it is to go to the website, and it also strips away all ads and other marginalia, so I only see the core text and images. Feedly isn’t the only RSS reader, but it’s stable and highly evolved and I love it. — KK 

More people should know about Nuzzel. It’s the sane and efficient way I consume social media without having to read it. Nuzzel displays the six most recommended links each day among all the people I follow on social media. So instead of reading those endless feeds, I read my one page Nuzzel digest and get the six best articles that are most read by my friends. — KK

Every day I get the entire internet compressed into a single page. My first stop is Hvper, which is a super aggregator that collects the top headlines of every news source out there into ONE single page. I see what’s at the top of mind in the both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, plus HuffPo and Fox News, plus Al Jazeera and the Drudge Report. Plus Reddit, Digg, BuzzNews, Twitter, CNN, ABC, Verge, Wired, and on and on. All of it! The whole news media landscape in a one-page dashboard. Each headline is clickable directly to the source. It is fast, clean (no ads!), free and magical. Must read. — KK