Here’s Jon, the default English voice, reading that paragraph:

And if you’re reading this in NewsBlur, you can press Listen right now and have the rest of this post read to you.

This one launched everywhere on the same day. The web, the iOS and Mac apps, and the Android app all got Listen together, with its interface translated into the same 21 languages from last week’s language launch. If you already play podcasts in NewsBlur’s media player, Listen turns any story into one more thing to queue up.

Press Listen

On the web, Listen sits with the other story buttons, and the y key does the same thing. On iPhone, iPad, and Android it’s in the row of buttons at the end of each story. On the Mac it’s in the Story menu, also on Y, with a play and pause button in the toolbar.

On the web, stories play in the sidebar, in the same mini player that handles podcasts and YouTube. On iPhone, iPad, and Android, a mini player sits above the bottom bar. Tap it to open Now Playing, with a scrubber, 15 seconds back, 30 seconds forward, speed, and a button to skip to the next story.

Follow along

While a story plays, the paragraph being read is highlighted and the story scrolls gently to keep it in view. If you scroll away to look at something, it waits a few seconds before following again. Click or tap any paragraph to jump straight to it, which is also the quickest way past a long intro.

Listen reads the headline, then the article’s paragraphs, headings, lists, and quotes. It skips what doesn’t work out loud: images, captions, code blocks, tables, and embeds. And if a feed only publishes a summary, Listen fetches the full article from the site and reads that, so you hear the whole story and not just the first two sentences.

Up Next

Next to Listen is a small + that adds the story to Up Next. Queue a few stories while you read, press play, and walk away. Drag to reorder, and swipe or tap × to remove one.

When Up Next runs out, Listen keeps going with the next unread stories in whatever feed or folder you’re in. Each story is marked read when it finishes, and the reader follows along to the next one. If you’d rather it stop after each story, turn off Auto-continue.

Up Next is the same queue your podcasts use, and it’s saved to your account. Queue a story on your phone and it’s waiting in Up Next on the web.

Pick a voice

The voices come from ElevenLabs. Each language has ten recommended voices, and you can search the rest of the ElevenLabs library by gender, age, accent, and style. Every voice has a play button so you can hear it before you choose.

Delivery sets how much emotion goes into the reading: Steady, Natural, or Expressive. Fine-tune voice opens up the stability, similarity, and style settings behind those three if you want to tinker.

Speed goes from 0.5× to 3×, with presets and a slider for anything in between. The pitch stays put at any speed, so 1.5× sounds like a fast talker and not a chipmunk.

Every language gets its own voice

Listen works out what language each story is written in and reads it with your voice for that language. Jon reads my English stories, and when a French story comes through, Victoria picks it up. Choose a different voice for any language from the menu at the top of the voice list. These are the defaults:

Keeps playing with the screen off

On iPhone, iPad, and Android, Listen keeps going when you lock your phone or switch apps. It shows up on the lock screen, in Control Center, and in Android’s media controls, with the same 15 and 30 second skips, and headphone buttons play and pause.

On the Mac

The Mac app has Listen and Add to Up Next in the Story menu, and a play and pause button in the toolbar so you can stop a story without hunting for the player. Now Playing opens as a sheet over the reader, with the same Up Next list as everywhere else.

Try it for 30 seconds

Listen is part of Premium Archive and Premium Pro. On a free or Premium account you can still try it: Listen plays a 30 second preview of a few stories a day. Voice previews in the picker work too, so you can find a voice you like first.

How it works

Reading every story in everyone’s feeds ahead of time would be a huge waste, so Listen makes the audio on demand. When you press play, NewsBlur splits the story into short segments, usually a paragraph each, and asks ElevenLabs for the first one. The audio streams to you while it’s still being generated, so it starts quickly, and the next segment is fetched while the current one plays. Each segment is sent along with the text around it so the voice keeps its rhythm across paragraph breaks.

Once a segment has been read in a voice, it’s saved. The next person who listens to that story with the same voice gets it right away, and if you stop halfway through a story, the rest of it never gets made at all.

Availability

Listen is available today on the web, in NewsBlur for iPhone, iPad, and Mac on the App Store, and in NewsBlur for Android on Google Play. If you don’t want the button, you can hide it, along with any other story button, in Preferences on the web and in the apps, and that choice syncs between them.

I’d love to hear which voice you picked and how Listen handles your feeds. Let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

The list now grows to show every folder you have, as many as your window has room for, with the same icons you see in your sidebar. It opens scrolled to the folder the site is in now, and the text follows your sidebar’s text size.

Click a folder’s name and the site moves there. The old folder unchecks itself, and the button at the top reads Move to Tech, so you know exactly what’s about to happen. If you keep a site in more than one folder, click the circles beside the folders instead. Each circle adds or removes just that folder, and the button reads Save 2 folders.

Type to find a folder

There’s a filter box at the top of the picker, ready for typing as soon as it opens. Type a few letters and the list narrows to the folders that match, with their parent folders kept in place. The arrow keys move between matches, Enter picks one, and Enter again moves the site. So moving a site from Newsletters into Cooking can be a right click, a few letters, and two presses of Enter.

The new folder picker is available now on the web. If something about it doesn’t feel right, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

Put together, they give you a way to follow the news while you work. Headlines from the folders you care about sit one swipe away, and new stories from the handful of sites you never want to miss show up in the corner of your screen. You don’t have to pick up your phone to check, and you don’t have to open a reader and lose twenty minutes in it.

A dashboard made of widgets

Every NewsBlur widget now has its own source. Add one for All Site Stories, another for your Tech folder, and another for a single site you follow closely. Each one shows its own newest unread stories. Stack them in Notification Center or put them on your desktop, and you’ve got the NewsBlur dashboard living right in macOS.

Widgets come in two sizes. Medium shows three stories and large shows six. They follow your training, so stories you’ve trained away stay out of them. Click a story and it opens right in the Mac app.

Setting up a widget

Click the date and time in the menu bar to open Notification Center, then click Edit Widgets at the bottom. Search for NewsBlur, pick a size, and add it. If you’d rather have it on your desktop, right click the desktop and choose Edit Widgets instead.

New widgets start with All Site Stories. To change that, right click the widget, choose Edit Widget, and pick a folder or site. Folders are listed first, then every site you subscribe to, and there’s a search field if your list is long. Each widget keeps its own choice, so you can add as many as you want.

If you already had a NewsBlur widget, remove it and add it again to get the new version.

Notifications from the sites you pick

Widgets are for glancing. Notifications are for the stories you don’t want to wait on. NewsBlur can send a native Mac notification for new stories on any site, and clicking one takes you straight to that story in the app.

To turn them on, open a site and choose Site > Notifications… from the menu bar. Pick whether you want every unread story or only Focus stories, and turn on iOS, which covers both your iPhone and the Mac app. File > Notifications (Command Shift N) lists every site you’ve set up, so you can adjust them all in one place.

Focus is what keeps this from getting noisy. If you’ve trained a site, only the stories you like will reach you. And if a busy site only matters when it mentions a certain topic or author, per-classifier notifications let you get pinged for just those stories. Those are available on Premium Archive and Premium Pro.

The workflow

Here’s a setup that works well. Put a large widget at the top of Notification Center for the folder you read most, and a couple of medium widgets below it for folders you check less often. Turn on notifications for only the few sites where timing matters, set to Focus. Then get back to work.

When you want a break, swipe in from the right edge of your trackpad with two fingers and the whole dashboard is there. When something you care about is published, it comes to you. Either way your phone stays face down on the desk.

Everything else in NewsBlur 16 for Mac

• NewsBlur for Mac now speaks 21 languages. Choose one from the NewsBlur menu, or follow your Mac’s language settings. Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, and your stories stay exactly as published. More about that in NewsBlur in your language.
• Clicking a story slides to it in the right direction.
• The sidebar has more balanced spacing and compact filters, with Add Site and Settings kept separate.
• Command W closes the window while NewsBlur keeps running. Click the Dock icon to bring it back, or press Command Q to quit.
• Keyboard shortcuts work while the story list has focus, and N opens the first unread story.
• Space pages down through a story, and when you reach the bottom it opens the next unread story, just like on the web. Shift Space pages back up and opens the previous story at the top. You can set how far each press scrolls in Preferences or in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.

NewsBlur 16 is available now on the Mac App Store. If you’ve found a widget setup you like, or something isn’t working the way you’d expect, I’d love to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.

Your stories stay exactly as they were published. NewsBlur translates its own interface, not the feeds you read. Feed titles, story text, comments, and usernames all stay in their original language. The screenshot above is NewsBlur in Japanese, reading an English article from Ars Technica.

Picked up automatically

You don’t need to do anything to switch. On the web, NewsBlur uses your browser’s language. On iOS and Android, it uses your phone’s language list. If your language isn’t one of the 21, everything stays in English.

Because a new language can be a surprise, NewsBlur tells you which one it picked the first time you open it. The dialog shows the same message side by side, in the language it detected and in English. One button keeps it, the other switches back to English. That way you can always get back, even if NewsBlur guessed wrong because you’re traveling, living abroad, or using a VPN.

If NewsBlur picked English, you’ll see a shorter version with every language listed in its own script, in case you’d rather read in another one. New accounts get the same choice as the very first step of setup.

Choose your language on the web

You can change your language anytime in Preferences, right at the top under Language. Automatic follows your browser, or you can pick any language. If you’re signed out, there’s a language menu at the top of the home page, so the sign in and sign up forms are in your language before you even have an account.

Choose your language on iOS

On iPhone and iPad, open Preferences and choose Language at the top. Pick a language and the app switches right away, no restart needed.

Everything follows along, from your feed list to the story controls.

Choose your language on Android

On Android, it’s the first row in Settings. The app switches as soon as you choose, and Android also lets you set NewsBlur’s language from the system’s per-app language settings.

Menus and numbers follow your language too.

One language, everywhere you read

When you pick a language, it’s saved to your account, so your phone and the web stay in sync. If you leave it on Automatic, each device follows its own language settings. That’s handy if your laptop is in English and your phone is in Spanish.

Here are all 21 languages:

• English
• Español
• Français
• Deutsch
• Português (Brasil)
• Italiano
• Nederlands
• Polski
• Türkçe
• Русский
• Українська
• العربية
• עברית
• हिन्दी
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Tiếng Việt
• ไทย
• 日本語
• 한국어
• 简体中文
• 繁體中文

Arabic and Hebrew switch the whole interface to read right to left.

Help me get the words right

If you read NewsBlur in one of these languages, I’d love your help. If a button reads awkwardly, a term sounds wrong, or a phrase doesn’t fit, tell me on the NewsBlur forum. Mention the language, where you saw it, and what it should say, and I’ll get it fixed.

Native language support is available now on the web and coming in the next iOS and Android updates.

Apple and Google sign-in on the web

The welcome page, login page, and signup page now have Apple and Google buttons above the usual username and password fields. Choose either provider to sign in or create a NewsBlur account. For a new account, you’ll choose a NewsBlur username so you still have your own name when sharing stories and commenting.

If you already have a NewsBlur account, you can connect it instead of starting over. Choose Connect an existing account and enter your NewsBlur username and password. If you try to create an account with a username that’s already taken, NewsBlur brings you to that connection step and explains what to do.

You only need to confirm your NewsBlur password when making that connection. Afterward, the Apple or Google button takes you back to the same feeds, saved stories, and subscription.

Different email addresses, one NewsBlur account

Your Apple email doesn’t have to match your Google email, and neither has to match your NewsBlur email. You can connect a personal Apple account and a work Google account to the same NewsBlur username. Connecting them leaves your NewsBlur email address unchanged.

Open Manage > Account on the web and look under your email address. The new Connected accounts section lists each connected Apple or Google account and its email. Use Connect Apple or Connect Google to add another, or the little × beside a connection to remove it.

An Apple or Google account can belong to one NewsBlur account at a time. To move it, disconnect it from the old account first. NewsBlur also makes sure you keep a way to sign in before removing your last connection.

Sign in on iOS

The iPhone and iPad apps get the same Apple and Google sign-in choices. You can also create an account with an email, username, and password right on the welcome screen.

Sign in on Android

Android gets both provider buttons as well, including Sign in with Apple. The account connection works across platforms: connect a provider on the web and use it to sign into that same NewsBlur account on your phone.

For new readers, both mobile apps also have a new first-time experience that helps you choose your first feeds and get reading.

Apple and Google sign-in are available now on the web and coming in the next iOS and Android updates. If you have feedback, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

I’ve rebuilt the first-time experience on iOS and Android around exploring interests, previewing feeds, and choosing what goes into your reader. You can put together a few folders of things you care about, or bring your existing collection from another app with an OPML import.

Explore your interests on iOS

After creating your account, the iPhone and iPad apps open a setup screen with Explore interests. Browse categories such as science, books, cooking, and technology, or search for a topic. A little of everything gives you a starting point if you’d rather sample a mix.

Each category opens a bundle of feeds. You can see what the sites actually publish through recent story previews, rather than choosing from names alone. Deselect feeds you don’t want, give the folder a name, and add the ones you like.

You can keep exploring and add another bundle before heading into the reader. The idea is to make those first subscriptions your own, with enough context to decide whether a feed belongs in your daily reading.

Build your first folders on Android

Android gets the same interest-based setup. Browse or search the catalog, open a bundle, and look through its feeds before subscribing. The import option is right at the top if you’re coming from another reader.

Feed cards show recent stories, how often a site publishes, and when it last updated. Choose the feeds you want and name the folder they’ll go into. A science folder, a cooking folder, and a handful of personal blogs can give you plenty to read without having to assemble every subscription one at a time.

The final setup step shows what you’ve added. Tap Start reading to head into your reader with your folders ready.

Bring your feeds, or come back for more

On both platforms, Import OPML brings your feeds and folders from another reader. Export an OPML file from your old app, save it somewhere your phone can access, and select it during setup.

You don’t need a new account to use the bundles. Existing readers can open Import or upload sites from the iOS menu or Import and feed bundles from the Android menu. It’s a way to explore a new interest whenever you want to add something to your reading.

The new setup experience is coming in the next iOS and Android updates, alongside Sign in with Apple and Google. I’d love to hear how the first few minutes feel, whether you’re starting fresh or helping someone else get into RSS. Let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

Faster story lists

Loading the next page of a folder used to reload the entire list. Now new stories are added in place. Favicons, thumbnails, and story text get prepared in the background ahead of time instead of while you’re scrolling. Opening a feed shows its cached stories immediately while fresh ones load, and articles appear fully laid out instead of flashing blank first.

Opening All Site Stories went from 1.1s to 0.2s. A single feed went from 0.7s to 0.2s. Loading another page into a list of 5,000 stories went from 0.7s to 0.02s.

A glass toolbar

The story list toolbar is now a floating glass bar at the bottom of the screen on iPhone and iPad, and your stories scroll right behind it. Related Sites, story order, and search are on the left. Add and Mark as read are on the right. If you’d rather keep it at the top, you can move it back in Preferences. In the reader, the controls hide as you scroll down and come back when you scroll up.

Images

Tap an image in a story and it opens full screen, zooming out from its spot in the article. Pinch or double tap to zoom, drag to look around, and swipe to go back. On iPad the viewer covers all three columns, and you land right back where you were in the story.

Long press an image to see its hover text above it, which is where comics like xkcd hide the punchline. Copy Image, Save Image, and Share Image are right there with it.

Add + Discover Sites

The + button opens a Quick Add sheet. Paste an address or search for a site, pick a folder, and add it. Below that are shortcuts into every discovery source: Search, Web Feed, Popular, YouTube, Reddit, Newsletters, Podcasts, and Google News. You can swipe between them like pages. It’s the same Add + Discover Sites catalog from the web, rebuilt natively for iOS.

Each site shows its latest stories with an image and a short excerpt, along with how recently it published. Tap a story to read it, or tap Try to browse the site without subscribing. When you come back, you’re in the same spot with that story highlighted. On iPad, Try keeps all three columns, so you can browse a new site and read its stories side by side. Related Sites uses the same cards.

Offline storage that cleans up after itself

A reader on the forum noticed NewsBlur using 4.2 GB on their iPhone with no unread stories. Digging in turned up three bugs in the offline cache. Cleanup skipped pruning whenever you were all caught up, it never cleared cached article text, and it compacted the database before deleting anything, so no space ever came back.

All three are fixed. Cleanup now keeps storage within your Stories to store limit, and Delete offline stories in Preferences actually gives you the space back. Your subscriptions and any pending read or save changes are kept.

Everything else

• Long press any feed, folder, or story for a native menu.
• Mark newer as read and Mark older as read update your unread counts right away, even inside collapsed folders and while offline.
• Feed and story gestures each have their own settings.
• The Mac app gets the new discovery screen, image viewer, menus, and offline cleanup too.
• Tapping a notification opens the story instead of sometimes getting stuck.
• Reading positions are restored correctly.

NewsBlur 15 is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The Android release got a lot of the same work. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it on the NewsBlur forum.

It’s faster

Most of the slowness came from the app doing more work than it needed to. Marking a story read rebuilt its entire row. Background syncs could pile up on top of each other. The feed list waited on the sync service before showing anything, and the reader waited for the article to finish rendering before it appeared at all.

All of that is fixed. Janky frames while scrolling the feed list dropped from 32% to 15%, and from 14% to 7% in the story list. Opening a story you’ve read before went from 0.9s to 0.2s. Your feeds now load straight from the local cache, so they show up right away, even offline.

Controls that float

The story list controls now float at the bottom of the screen, so your stories scroll right behind them. Search, display options, and settings are all within reach of your thumb. If you’d rather have them at the top, there’s a setting for that in Preferences. In the reader, the controls tuck away as you scroll down and come back as soon as you scroll up.

Built for tablets

On a tablet or an unfolded foldable, NewsBlur now shows your story list and the story you’re reading side by side. Your feeds slide in over the top when you need them and slide back out when you pick one, and the list stays right where it is while the new stories fill in. Tap another story and the reader pages over to it, the same way it does when you swipe. It works in both portrait and landscape.

A better look at images

Tap any image in a story to open it full screen. Pinch or double tap to zoom, and swipe it away to go right back to the story.

Long press an image and you get the same viewer with a little more. The image’s hover text shows up above it, which is where comics like xkcd keep the punchline. Below it are Copy Image, Save Image, and Share Image. Saving keeps the original file, so a GIF stays animated, and it lands in your Pictures folder. If the image is a link, there’s an Open Link button too.

Find your next favorite site

The + button opens a small Add Site sheet. Paste an address and pick a folder, or tap one of the shortcuts into discovery: Web Feed, Popular, Trending, YouTube, Reddit, Newsletters, Podcasts, and Google News. It’s the same Add + Discover Sites catalog from the web, built right into the app. Web Feed can even turn a site without RSS into a feed.

Every site shows its latest stories with images and excerpts, along with how recently it published. Tap a story to read it, or tap Try to browse the whole site before you subscribe. When you come back, discovery is right where you left it. Related Sites uses the same cards, so you can explore outward from a site you already like.

Everything else

• Gestures are configurable. In Preferences you can choose what swiping left and right does on feeds and on stories, and what a long press does.
• Long press a feed or a story for a grouped menu that includes Mark newer as read and Mark older as read.
• Nested folders show up as an indented tree.
• The Previous button no longer gets stuck disabled.
• Jumping to the next folder no longer loops forever when nothing is unread.

NewsBlur 15 for Android is available on Google Play. The iOS and Mac release got a lot of the same work. If something doesn’t feel right, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

Now every tag, author, and URL on a story has a small button next to it: View matching stories. Click it and the story list turns into a view of every story on that site that carries that exact value. Not just unread stories, read ones too, so you get the whole picture. It’s the fastest way I’ve found to answer “what else is like this?”

From a story

Open any story and look at the author and tags under the title. Each one now has a small stories icon beside it. Click it and the list filters down to every story that matches that one author or tag. The URL line gets the same button, so you can pull up every story that shares a path segment, which turns out to be a great way to find a series or a podcast on a site that doesn’t tag its posts.

The matching text is highlighted on every row of the filtered list. An author filter marks the author on each story, a title filter marks the words it matched, and a text filter marks the phrase in the preview.

A URL filter is a little different, since the link isn’t normally part of the story list. When one is active, each row grows a URL line with the matched segment highlighted, so you can see exactly why the story is there.

The filter rides along in the URL, so reload, back and forward, and bookmarks all do what you’d expect. I have a few of these bookmarked now for authors I check in on every couple of weeks.

From the trainer

The same button lives in the Intelligence Trainer on every tag, author, title, URL, and text classifier you’ve saved. This is the part I’ve wanted for years. You trained “sponsored” as hidden a long time ago and have a nagging feeling it’s swallowing something it shouldn’t. Click the magnifying glass on that classifier, the trainer closes, and you’re looking at exactly the stories it hides. A Back to trainer link in the banner takes you back to where you were.

Regex classifiers and natural language classifiers don’t get the button, since neither one matches a single exact value.

The banner

At the top of every filtered list is a banner that names the filter and gives you three things to do with it.

Filter stories widens the list from this site to the whole folder or to all of your sites. Site scope is available to everyone. Folder and All follow the same rule as folder and global classifiers, so they need Premium Archive. On Archive, a folder or all-sites tag filter runs against the story search index rather than a window of recent stories, so a tag that appears on a dozen stories spread across forty sites turns up all twelve.

Train is Like, Dislike, or Hide (the super dislike). It saves the same classifier the trainer would, and the list recomputes in place: the score flips on each row, the unread counts in the sidebar update, and stories you just trained down stay in the list so you can see what you did instead of watching rows vanish out from under you.

Notify on is Email, Web, iOS, and Android. These are the per-classifier notifications from earlier this year, now reachable from the same banner. You find a tag, confirm it matches what you think it matches, and turn on a notification for it without ever opening the trainer.

One detail worth knowing: the Filter stories toggle only changes what you’re looking at. Training and notifications still write to the classifier’s own scope. Browsing a tag across a folder doesn’t quietly turn a site classifier into a folder classifier.

A few ways I’ve been using it

• Deciding whether to follow an author. A group blog has a new writer. Click the button beside their name, read three of their stories, then Like them from the banner.
• Auditing a hidden tag. Open the trainer, click the magnifying glass on a red tag, and check that it’s hiding what you meant it to hide.
• Pulling up a series. Click the button on the URL line of a story with /podcast/ in the link and every episode on the site lines up.
• Setting up a notification with confidence. Widen a tag to a folder, see that it matches the right kind of story, and turn on the iOS notification right there.

Availability

Matching Stories is available now on the web for everyone. Site scope, training, and highlighting work on every account. Folder and All scopes and the Notify on controls follow the existing rules for Premium Archive and Premium Pro.

If you find a tag or author that should match and doesn’t, or have an idea for where else this button belongs, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

Redesigned Global Shared Stories

Global Shared Stories has been in the sidebar for years, and for years it worked in a way I never liked. It was not the shares of everybody on NewsBlur. It was the shares of the accounts that the @popular account happened to follow, a list I put together by hand a long time ago and rarely touched. If you were on that list and you shared a lot, you decided what everybody else saw. If you shared one story a month and wrote a paragraph about why it mattered, you were drowned out by someone who shared thirty without a word.

So I rebuilt it. Every hour, NewsBlur now gathers every story shared across the whole site in the last few hours, caps each person at three so nobody can flood the pool, drops private blurblogs, and then picks a few worth reading. The picks accumulate, so the river stays deep enough to scroll back through.

The picking is done by Claude Haiku, once an hour, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do. It does not go looking for stories. It does not write anything. It only ranks stories that NewsBlur readers already chose to share, and the thing it weighs most heavily is the comment the sharer wrote, because a share with a few sentences attached is a share somebody thought about. It is allowed to pick nothing at all in a quiet hour, and in testing it regularly passes on half of what it is offered. If the API is ever unreachable, a plain heuristic takes over and the river keeps flowing.

Good Reads

The new feed in the sidebar is Good Reads, and it asks a question the other feeds do not: which stories did somebody finish and then do something about?

A story lands in Good Reads when at least two people read it closely, thirty seconds or more, and at least one of them then saved it, shared it, or trained it up. Finishing is not enough. Somebody has to have bothered to act. On top of that, the score is tilted toward feeds with few subscribers, so a story from a site with forty readers can beat a story from a site with forty thousand. That tilt is the whole point. The big sites do not need help getting seen.

Four feeds, four questions

There are now four curated rivers sitting together in the sidebar, and the reason there are four and not one is that they each answer a different question.

Global Shared Stories asks what people chose to hand to someone else. It runs on sharing, a deliberate human act.

Widely Read Stories asks what held the most attention across NewsBlur. It runs on reading time, not clicks, so a headline nobody read cannot buy its way in.

Long Reads asks what was worth an afternoon. Features and essays that readers gave real time to, rather than skimmed.

Good Reads asks what somebody finished and then kept, and leans toward the small sites you have probably never heard of.

Widely Read Stories and Long Reads have been around since April, and I wrote about how they work when they launched. None of the four ranks by clicks, and none of them is trying to keep you scrolling. They are all built out of what NewsBlur readers actually did with their time.

Because it was never obvious from looking at them which was which, each of the four now explains itself in a line at the top of its story list. It scrolls away with the stories, so it is there when you arrive and gone once you are reading.

Your classifiers still apply to all four. If you have trained a tag, an author, or a site, those green and red scores carry through, including on stories from feeds you do not subscribe to. And all four work as dashboard rivers, so you can park any of them next to your regular feeds.

Good Reads and the rebuilt Global Shared Stories are available now on the web. If a story shows up in one of these feeds that clearly should not have, I want to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.

There are 12 color flavors: Sunrise Gold, Ember Orange, Coral Rose, Ruby Red, Plum Berry, Lavender Iris, Atlantic Blue, Arctic Cyan, Teal Mint, Meadow Sage, Slate Gray, and Sepia Cocoa. Every flavor comes in a light and a dark variant, so there are 24 icons to pick from. Match a bright home screen, match a dark one, or just pick the color you like best.

To change yours, open Preferences and find the App Icon section, then tap Choose Icon. The chooser shows a live preview of every flavor, and the new icon takes effect right away.

Custom app icons are available now on the latest iOS, Mac, and Android apps for any premium subscriber. If you have an idea for a flavor that’s missing, or anything else, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.

Premium Pro is the new top tier. It includes everything in Premium Archive and adds two things that matter when speed is the priority: high-frequency fetching and a 10,000 site limit. And when you pair that with Premium Archive features like classifier-driven notifications, Pro becomes a real-time monitoring system.

Every feed fetched every 5 minutes

This is the headline feature. When you’re on Pro, every single feed in your account is checked every 5 minutes. This isn’t based on how often the feed publishes or how popular it is. It’s every feed, every time, regardless.

For context, most RSS readers check feeds every hour or two. Even NewsBlur’s Premium tier updates feeds up to 5x more often than standard, but Pro goes further. If a CVE drops, a competitor publishes a press release, or a regulatory filing appears, you’ll see it in minutes, not hours.

Notifications that actually keep up

Fast fetching only matters if you find out about new stories quickly. NewsBlur has a full notification system that pairs perfectly with Pro’s 5-minute polling. You can enable notifications per feed and choose whether to be notified about all unread stories or only Focus stories that match your intelligence training.

Notifications go to every platform at once: iOS push notifications, Android push notifications, browser notifications on the web, Mac notifications, and email. Set up a few critical feeds with notifications enabled and you have a real-time alerting pipeline built on RSS.

Classifier-driven notifications, supercharged by Pro

Premium Archive recently added the ability to attach notifications directly to individual classifiers. Train a tag, author, title keyword, or phrase, and turn on notifications for that specific classifier. Track a specific author across a folder of feeds. Watch for a tag like “layoffs” or “acquisition” across your entire account. Get pinged the moment a story about a competitor shows up anywhere in your subscriptions. Classifier notifications work at every scope: per-feed, per-folder, or global across all your feeds.

These classifiers now come in three flavors. Standard classifiers match exact tags, authors, and keywords. Regex classifiers let you write patterns like \bCVE-\d{4}-\d+\b to catch any CVE identifier, or iPhone|iPad|MacBook to track multiple products in a single classifier. And natural language classifiers let you describe what you’re looking for in plain English, like “stories about startup funding rounds over $50M” or “any mention of regulatory action against tech companies.” All three types can have notifications attached.

On their own, classifier notifications are already useful. But on Pro, where every feed is checked every 5 minutes, they become something else entirely. Create a natural language classifier for exactly the kind of story you’re watching for, attach a notification, and within minutes of that story appearing in any of your feeds, you have a push notification on your phone. That’s the difference between knowing about something the same day and knowing about it the same hour. If you’re already using classifier notifications on Premium Archive, Pro is what makes them fast enough for real monitoring.

Follow up to 10,000 sites

Pro raises the feed limit to 10,000. Premium supports 1,024 sites, Premium Archive supports 4,096, and Pro takes it to 10,000. If you need comprehensive coverage across industries, beats, competitors, or research domains, this is the ceiling you’ve been looking for.

Everything in Archive, included

Pro includes the full Premium Archive feature set. That means every story archived and searchable forever, Ask AI for answering questions about stories, full-text content training, global and folder-scoped intelligence training, per-feed auto-mark-read timers, and more. Pro adds speed and precision on top of that foundation.

You also get priority support, so when you need help, you’re at the front of the line.

Pricing

Premium Pro is $29/month. It’s monthly rather than yearly because the high-frequency fetching infrastructure costs more to operate. You’re paying for dedicated polling of up to 10,000 feeds every 5 minutes. If your work depends on being the first to know, Pro pays for itself.

You can upgrade from the Premium page on the web. If you have feedback or ideas for Pro, I’d love to hear them on the NewsBlur forum.

Two new feeds in the sidebar answer those questions: Widely Read Stories and Long Reads. Both are ranked by actual reading time rather than clicks or social shares.

Widely Read Stories

This feed collects stories that three or more NewsBlur readers have spent meaningful time with over the past week. “Meaningful time” means at least 3 seconds of actual reading, so quick scrolls and accidental opens don’t count. The list is refreshed every hour and stories are sorted by publish date, so you see the latest widely read articles first.

Think of it as a window into what the NewsBlur community is reading right now. It’s not an algorithm trying to maximize engagement. It’s just the stories that real people are spending their time on.

Long Reads

The Long Reads feed takes a different angle. Instead of counting readers, it ranks stories by average time spent per reader. A story that five people each read for four minutes ranks higher than a story that fifty people glanced at for thirty seconds. This naturally surfaces longer, deeper articles that reward sustained attention.

Your classifiers apply here too

These aren’t just raw lists of stories. When you open Widely Read Stories or Long Reads, your trained classifiers run against every story. Tags, authors, titles, and text classifiers all apply, so stories from feeds you’ve trained show up with the same green and red intelligence scoring you see everywhere else in NewsBlur. If you’ve trained a tag as interesting or an author as disliked, those scores carry through into the trending feeds.

Dashboard support

Both feeds are available as dashboard river options. Open your dashboard settings, pick “Widely Read Stories” or “Long Reads” from the river dropdown, and the feed appears as a panel alongside your other dashboard rivers.

Availability

Widely Read Stories and Long Reads are available now on the web. Look for them in the sidebar below Global Shared Stories. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

How it works

Select text in any story and a popover appears with the usual options: Highlight, Train, and Search. There’s now a new option: Quote. Click it, and the share dialog opens with your selected text rendered as a blockquote above the comment field.

Add your own comment below the quote, or just share the quote by itself. The share button updates to say “Share with comment” when there’s a quote or comment present. If you change your mind, click the × on the blockquote to remove it.

Once shared, the blockquote renders with a left border and italic styling in the comment thread, so other readers can see exactly what caught your eye before reading your take on it.

The quote feature works anywhere text selection is available: the story detail view, highlighted text, and search results. It’s available now on the web. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Natural language classifiers let you describe what you want in plain English. Instead of matching keywords, NewsBlur sends your description and each story to an AI model that understands what you mean. Write “stories about practical cooking techniques, not restaurant reviews” and it just works. Write “product launch announcements” and it finds them regardless of how each site phrases it. And with image classifiers, you can filter on what’s actually shown in a story’s photos, not just what’s written in the text.

Text classifiers

Open the Intelligence Trainer on any feed and you’ll see a new section: Natural Language Text Classifier. Type a description of what you want to focus on or hide, and press Enter. Not sure if your prompt will catch the right stories? Click Test on this story to see how the classifier would score it before you save, so you can refine your wording.

Your prompt is saved as a classifier pill, just like title and author classifiers. Toggle it between focus (green) and hidden (red) to control whether matching stories are promoted or suppressed. You can add multiple prompts per feed, and each one works independently.

When you save a new prompt, NewsBlur immediately classifies your recent stories against it. Within a few seconds, you’ll see stories re-sort as the classifications come in. From then on, every new story is classified as it arrives.

The classifier sends each story’s title and content to the AI model along with your description. The model decides whether the story matches, doesn’t match, or is clearly the opposite of what you described. That three-way classification means a “focus” prompt can also actively hide stories that are the antithesis of your interest.

When a text classifier matches, you’ll see a colored pill in the story header showing which prompt matched.

Image classifiers

Image classifiers work the same way, but they look at the photos in each story instead of the text. Describe what you want to see (or hide) visually, and the AI model examines each image to decide if it matches.

Some examples:

• “Charts and data visualizations” — Focus on stories with graphs, tables, or infographics
• “Screenshots of user interfaces” — Find product announcements that include actual UI screenshots
• “Nature and landscape photography” — Surface photography posts in mixed-content feeds
• “Memes” — Hide (or focus on) image macros and memes

The image classifier is strict about what counts as a match. It only triggers when the subject is literally visible as the main focus of the image, not when something is vaguely related or appears in a logo or watermark. “Food photos” matches a photo of a plate of pasta, not a restaurant storefront.

Image classifier matches also show as pills in the story header, just like text classifiers.

Combining with classifier notifications

Natural language classifiers become even more powerful when paired with per-classifier notifications. Set up a text classifier like “breaking news about AI regulation” on a high-volume news feed, then attach a notification to that classifier pill. You’ll get a push notification or email only when a story matches your natural language description, not every time the feed publishes.

This turns NewsBlur into a semantic alert system. Instead of monitoring keywords, you’re monitoring concepts. A classifier for “security vulnerabilities in open source libraries” will catch stories whether they say “CVE,” “zero-day,” “supply chain attack,” or any other phrasing. Add a notification and you have a monitoring pipeline that understands what you care about.

Scoping

Like all classifiers in NewsBlur, natural language classifiers support three scope levels:

• Per site — Applies only to the feed you’re training (default)
• Per folder — Applies to every feed in the folder
• Global — Applies to every feed you subscribe to

A global text classifier like “sponsored content” can hide promotional stories across your entire feed list with a single prompt.

Usage-based billing

Natural language classifiers use AI models to evaluate every story, which means there’s a real cost per classification. Rather than bundling this into a fixed subscription tier, NewsBlur uses usage-based billing so you only pay for what you use.

Text classifications cost roughly a tenth of a cent per story. Image classifications cost more because they process image data, roughly half a cent per story. The actual cost depends on story length and image count, but for a typical feed publishing 30 stories a month with one text classifier, you’d pay about 5 cents a month.

You can set a monthly spending limit to cap your costs. If you hit the limit, classification pauses until the next billing cycle. Your existing cached results still show, but new stories won’t be classified until the limit resets.

Availability

Natural language text and image classifiers are available now on the web for Premium subscribers with usage-based billing enabled. Enable it from Manage > Account to get started.

If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Quickstart

CLI tool — install and log in:

uv pip install newsblur-cli
newsblur auth login

AI skill — install into Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or any Skills-compatible tool:

npx skills add samuelclay/newsblur-cli-skill

MCP server — connect from Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, or any MCP client:

claude mcp add --transport http newsblur https://newsblur.com/mcp/

All three require a Premium Archive or Premium Pro subscription. On first use, a browser window opens for OAuth authorization. Your token is stored locally and you can revoke access at any time.

CLI tool

Everything you do in NewsBlur, from your terminal. Full documentation is on the CLI feature page.

Read stories from feeds, folders, or everything at once:

newsblur stories list                          # unread stories
newsblur stories list --folder Tech --limit 5  # filter by folder
newsblur stories search "machine learning"     # full-text search
newsblur stories saved --tag research          # saved stories by tag
newsblur stories infrequent                    # rarely-publishing feeds
newsblur stories original 123:abc456           # fetch full article text

Get your daily briefing with AI-curated summaries:

newsblur briefing                              # today's briefing
newsblur briefing --limit 1                    # just the latest
newsblur briefing --json                       # structured output

Manage feeds and folders:

newsblur feeds list                            # all subscriptions
newsblur feeds folders                         # folder tree with counts
newsblur feeds add https://example.com         # subscribe
newsblur feeds add https://blog.com -f Tech    # subscribe into a folder
newsblur feeds remove 42                       # unsubscribe
newsblur feeds organize move_feed --feed-id 42 --from News --to Tech

Take actions on stories:

newsblur save 123:abc --tag ai --tag research  # save with tags
newsblur unsave 123:abc                        # remove from saved
newsblur read --feed 42                        # mark feed as read
newsblur share 123:abc --comment "Worth reading"

Train your intelligence classifiers:

newsblur train show --feed 42                  # view current training
newsblur train like --feed 42 --author "Name"  # train a like
newsblur train dislike --feed 42 --tag sponsor # train a dislike

Discover new feeds:

newsblur discover search "machine learning"    # search by topic
newsblur discover similar --feed 42            # find similar feeds
newsblur discover trending                     # trending feeds

Every command supports --json for structured output you can pipe to jq or use in scripts, and --raw for unformatted text. There’s also a global --server flag for self-hosted NewsBlur instances:

newsblur --server https://my-newsblur.example.com auth login
newsblur briefing --json | jq '.items[0].section_summaries'

AI skill

The CLI is great on its own, but it’s even better when your AI agent knows every command. The NewsBlur CLI skill teaches your agent the full command reference: every subcommand, every flag, every output format. Install it with one command and your agent can read feeds, search stories, train classifiers, and manage subscriptions on your behalf.

npx skills add samuelclay/newsblur-cli-skill

The npx skills add command works with any tool that supports the Skills standard: Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and dozens more.

The skill has a major advantage over the MCP server for agents that support it: context efficiency. The MCP server returns raw JSON that lands in your agent’s context window. Ask for your saved ESP32 stories and you’ll burn through nearly 40,000 tokens on a single response. The skill runs the CLI instead, which returns clean, formatted text. Same query, same results, about a third of the tokens. In testing, the MCP server used 39,553 tokens for a saved stories query. The same query through the skill used 11,735.

If your tool supports skills, use the skill. If it only supports MCP, use the MCP server. If you just want to script your NewsBlur from the terminal, use the CLI directly.

MCP server

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to external tools and data. With the NewsBlur MCP server, Claude, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and any other MCP-compatible agent can read your feeds, manage your stories, train your classifiers, and organize your subscriptions.

The server exposes 22 tools that cover everything you do in NewsBlur:

Reading — List feeds and folders with unread counts. Load stories from any feed, folder, or all subscriptions at once. Filter by unread, focus, or starred. Search across your entire archive with full-text search. Pull the original article text from the source. Get your AI daily briefing. Browse stories from your rarely-publishing infrequent feeds.

Actions — Mark stories as read by hash, by feed, or by folder. Save stories with tags, notes, and highlights. Subscribe and unsubscribe. Move feeds between folders. Rename feeds and folders. Share stories to your Blurblog.

Intelligence — View your trained classifiers across all feeds. Train new likes and dislikes by author, tag, title, or text content. The full range of training levels is available, including the new super dislike that overrides all other positive scores.

Discovery — Search for new feeds by topic. Find feeds similar to ones you already follow. Browse trending feeds.

For Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http newsblur https://newsblur.com/mcp/

For Claude Desktop, add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "newsblur": {
    "type": "http",
    "url": "https://newsblur.com/mcp/"
  }
}

Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf each have their own config format. Setup instructions for all of them are on the MCP Server feature page.

Readonly mode

Giving an AI agent access to your NewsBlur is powerful, but maybe you want to start with guardrails. The CLI has a readonly mode that blocks all write operations: no saving, no sharing, no training, no subscribing, no marking as read. Your agent can read your feeds and search your stories, but it cannot change anything.

newsblur auth readonly --on

With readonly on, any write command returns an error instead of executing. The agent sees your data but cannot touch it.

The important part is what happens when you turn it off. Disabling readonly mode logs you out and requires you to re-authenticate in the browser:

newsblur auth readonly --off
# "You have been logged out and must re-authenticate."
newsblur auth login

This is deliberate. An AI agent cannot silently toggle readonly off and start making changes. Only a human sitting at a browser can re-authorize write access. If you hand the CLI to an agent and want to be sure it stays read-only, it will.

Availability

The CLI, AI skill, and MCP server are available now for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. See the MCP Server and CLI Tool feature pages for full documentation.

If you have ideas for new tools, workflows, or improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Here’s what’s new.

Ask AI

Ask AI brings the same AI-powered Q&A from the web and iOS to Android. Open any story, tap Ask AI, and ask questions about it. Summarize a long article, get background on a developing situation, or fact-check a claim. Pick your preferred AI model and keep the conversation going with follow-ups. The Ask AI sheet matches your current theme and slides up as a bottom sheet, consistent with the share and trainer dialogs.

Discover related sites

Discover Related Sites lets you find new feeds related to any feed you’re already subscribed to. Tap the Discover button in the story list header bar, browse what’s available, and preview a feed before subscribing. Duplicate feeds are filtered out so you only see new options.

Daily Briefing

The Daily Briefing generates a personalized summary of your news, organized into sections like Top Stories, Based on Your Interests, and Long Reads. It uses native Android story rows, so it feels like a regular feed rather than a bolted-on feature. Configure your briefing frequency, writing style, and sections from the briefing view in your sidebar.

Sepia theme and refined dark themes

A new Sepia theme brings warmer tones for comfortable long reading sessions. The Dark theme has been lightened to match the iOS gray/medium palette, and the Black theme now uses true absolute black backgrounds for feed and story cells, making it ideal for OLED screens.

Story list header bar

The top of the story list now has a header bar with quick access to Discover, search, display options, and settings. The display and settings controls are split into separate menus so you can change the view without wading through unrelated options.

Redesigned reading experience

The reading view has been rethought from top to bottom. Story traversal buttons are lifted above the bottom edge for easier thumb access. A new traverse bar with refined icons shows your position and unread count. Story actions are hidden until the story finishes rendering, so you never tap a button before the content is ready. Opening a story from the list now animates smoothly into the reader, and swiping back uses an interactive gesture that tracks your finger.

Redesigned preferences and menus

Preferences have been rebuilt as a modern settings screen with inline segments instead of separate dialog pickers. The feed list menu, reading menu, and folder menus have all been redesigned with cleaner styling and better organization. Menus now scale with your device font size, so they stay readable at any accessibility setting.

Premium Archive and Pro subscriptions

You can now subscribe to Premium Archive and Premium Pro directly from the Android app. An upgrade banner appears in the story list when you’re on a lower tier, showing what you’d unlock by upgrading.

Everything else

Beyond the headline features, this release includes a long list of improvements and fixes.

Improvements

• Interactive swipe-back gesture in both the story list and reading view with predictive back support on Android 14+.
• Feed list aligned with iOS styling, with new collapse-all and expand-all toggles.
• Story header pills with compact layout and title case formatting.
• Active reading time tracking per story, synced to your account.
• Full text and regex classifiers for the Intelligence Trainer.
• Feed search field themed to match your current theme with autofill disabled.
• Sync done pill delayed until feeds actually render, so you see the update happen.
• Story thumbnails enlarged for small sizes and cropping fixed.
• Status banners at the top of the story list for loading and error states.
• Mute Sites redesigned with upgrade card and progress bar.
• Custom folder and feed icon support.

Fixes

• Fixed TransactionTooLargeException crash in the reading pager.
• Fixed database version mismatch crash on launch.
• Fixed ItemListMenuPopup crash on small and split-screen displays.
• Fixed login autofill and app switching losing input.
• Fixed story row thumbnail cropping.
• Fixed search pill text vanishing.
• Fixed story list edge back gesture interference.
• Brightened story feed titles for better readability.

Coming up next: v14.2 will bring story clustering to Android, so duplicate stories across your feeds get grouped together automatically, just like on the web.

NewsBlur v14 for Android is available now on the Google Play Store. If you have feedback or run into issues, I’d love to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.

Today I’m shipping two features that give the Intelligence Trainer more teeth: super dislikes that override any number of likes, and per-classifier notifications that ping you only when specific classifiers match.

Super dislikes are available to all users – free, Premium, Premium Archive, and Premium Pro. Folder and global scoping requires Premium Archive. Per-classifier notifications are exclusive to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers.

Super dislikes

A super dislike is a new third state for classifiers. The regular thumbs down hides a story unless a thumbs up overrides it. The super dislike – shown as a double thumbs-down icon – overrides everything. If a story matches a super-disliked classifier, it’s hidden no matter how many positive classifiers it also matches.

The priority order is now: natural language prompt classifiers > super dislike > thumbs up > thumbs down > feed score. This means super dislikes are the strongest manual signal you can set, second only to natural language classifiers.

How to use it

In the Intelligence Trainer, every classifier pill now has three clickable icons on the right side: thumbs up, thumbs down, and the double thumbs-down for super dislike. Click the double thumbs-down to super-dislike a classifier. Click it again to remove the super dislike.

An explainer banner at the top of the trainer shows the priority chain so you always know how scoring works:

• Thumbs up beats any number of thumbs down
• Super thumbs down beats any number of thumbs up

Visual highlighting

Super-disliked classifiers are highlighted in a deeper crimson color, distinct from the regular red of a normal dislike. When you’re reading stories, you’ll see the same color treatment on matched titles, authors, tags, and text, with a small double thumbs-down icon inline so you can tell at a glance why a story was scored the way it was.

Works with scopes

Super dislikes work with all scope levels. Set a global super dislike on a topic like “sponsored” and it’s hidden across every feed. Set a folder-scoped super dislike on an author and they’re hidden in that folder regardless of positive training elsewhere. The same scoping rules from regular classifiers apply.

Per-classifier notifications

NewsBlur’s notifications have always been per-feed: turn them on and you get pinged on every new story. That’s fine for low-volume feeds, but not great for a high-volume feed where you only care about specific topics or authors. You end up choosing between too many notifications or none at all.

Now you can set notifications on individual classifiers. Every classifier pill in the Intelligence Trainer has a small bell icon. Hover over it and a popover appears with four channel toggles: Email, Web, iOS, and Android. Choose any combination, and when a new story matches that specific classifier, you get notified. Everything else in the feed stays quiet.

The bell icon lights up on classifiers with active notifications, so you can see at a glance which ones will ping you.

Works with scopes and regex

Classifier notifications respect the scope system. A notification on a global “breaking news” classifier fires when any feed publishes a matching story. A notification on a folder-scoped “earnings” classifier fires only for feeds in that folder.

Regex classifiers work too. If you have a regex title or text classifier, the notification evaluates the pattern with timeout protection on every new story.

Smart deduplication

If a story already triggered a feed-level notification on a channel, the classifier notification won’t duplicate it. Each story is sent once per channel, regardless of how many classifiers or feed rules it matches. There’s also a cap of 3 stories per classifier per update cycle, so a burst of matching stories won’t flood you.

Real-world examples

Breaking news alerts. Train “breaking” as a global title classifier, set it to notify via iOS and Email. You get a push notification whenever any feed publishes a story with “breaking” in the title.

Author tracking. Follow a journalist across multiple outlets. Train their name as a global author classifier with notifications, and you’ll know the moment they publish regardless of which feed it’s in.

Keyword monitoring. Use a regex classifier for a product name or company, scoped to your industry folder. Get an email when a matching story appears, without turning on notifications for every feed in that folder.

Availability

Super dislikes are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. Per-classifier notifications are available on the web for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers – all users can see the bell icon and popover, but toggling channels requires an Archive or Pro subscription.

If you have feedback or ideas for how to make these features better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

To make that more rewarding, I’m launching two new features today: referrals and gift subscriptions.

Earn free premium by referring friends

Every NewsBlur user now has a personal referral link. Share it with someone, and if they sign up and subscribe, you earn free time on your current tier. There’s no cap. Your next billing date gets pushed forward automatically, so you won’t be charged while you have referral credit.

Open the Refer & Gift modal from the Manage menu to find your link. Copy it and share it however you’d like. The modal also shows your referral stats: how many people have signed up through your link, how many have subscribed, and how many years of premium you’ve earned.

The credit scales proportionally based on your tier and what your referral subscribes to. If they subscribe to your tier or higher, you get a full free year. If they subscribe to a lower tier, you get proportional credit:

• Premium subscribers earn a full free year for every referral, regardless of what tier the referred person picks
• Premium Archive subscribers earn a free year when the referral subscribes to Archive or Pro, or 4 free months for a Premium referral
• Premium Pro subscribers earn 4 free months for an Archive referral, 2 free months for Premium, or 1 free month for Pro

The higher your tier, the more it pays to refer people to higher tiers. When a referral converts, you’ll get an email confirming your credit, and your subscription renewal date adjusts automatically. No action needed on your part.

Gift a subscription to anyone

The Gift tab lets you buy a NewsBlur subscription for someone else. Pick a tier, check out through Stripe, and you’ll get a shareable gift link. The recipient clicks the link, signs up or logs in, and their premium activates instantly.

Three tiers are available as gifts:

• Premium at $36/year
• Premium Archive at $99/year
• Premium Pro at $29/month

If the gift isn’t redeemed within 90 days, you get a full refund automatically. No need to contact support or remember to follow up.

How to access it

Open the Manage menu (the gear icon at the bottom of the feed list) and choose Refer & Gift. The modal has two tabs: Refer for your referral link and stats, and Gift for purchasing gift subscriptions.

Referrals and gift subscriptions are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

That’s the Daily Briefing. It reads your feeds, scores every story, and writes a personalized summary organized into sections that make sense for the way you read. It shows up as a feed in your sidebar, and you can have it emailed to you on a schedule you control.

How it works

Click “Daily Briefing” in your sidebar to open the briefing view. The first time, you’ll see an onboarding screen where you configure your preferences. Hit generate and NewsBlur does the rest: it scores your stories using a mix of trending read time, feed engagement, how often you read each feed, your classifier training, and recency, then generates a written summary of the top stories.

Each briefing is organized into sections:

• Top stories — The most important stories from your feeds, ranked by a weighted score of trending engagement, how often you read each feed, your classifier training, and recency
• From infrequent sites — Stories from feeds that rarely publish, so they don’t get buried under higher-volume feeds
• Long reads for later — Longer articles worth setting time aside for, detected by word count
• Based on your interests — Stories matching your trained topics, authors, and tags, with green classifier pills showing exactly why each story was selected
• Follow-ups — New posts from feeds where you recently read other stories
• Widely covered — Stories that appear across 3 or more of your feeds, using NewsBlur’s story clustering to group duplicates

You can enable or disable any of these sections, and drag to reorder them so your briefing is organized the way you want. If you only care about top stories and classifier matches, turn off the rest.

Custom keyword sections

On top of the built-in sections, you can add up to five custom keyword sections. Type a keyword or phrase and NewsBlur uses Elasticsearch to find matching stories across your feeds, then a dedicated section is written for them. If you always want a section about “climate change” or “Apple earnings,” just add the keyword and it appears in every briefing when there’s stories that match.

Three writing styles

Choose how you want your briefing written:

• Bullets — One-sentence summaries for each story, grouped by section. Quick to scan.
• Editorial — Narrative prose that explains why each story matters and connects them thematically. Each story’s feed favicon appears as an inline bullet.
• Headlines — Just the linked story titles, nothing else. The fastest way to scan.

Delivery schedule

Set the briefing to generate once, twice, or three times a day, or weekly. Each frequency has its own delivery slots:

• Daily: Pick morning, afternoon, or evening
• Twice daily: Morning plus your choice of afternoon or evening
• Three times daily: Morning, afternoon, and evening
• Weekly: Pick the day of the week

Briefings are delivered at fixed times in your local timezone: 8:30 AM, 12:30 PM, and 5:00 PM. Each briefing only includes stories from its lookback window, and stories never repeat across same-day briefings.

Notifications

Turn on email notifications for your briefing feed and the full summary lands in your inbox, complete with feed favicons, section icons, and classifier pills. The HTML is fully inlined for email clients, so it looks right in Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and everywhere else.

You can also enable web, iOS, and Android push notifications if you’d rather get a ping than an email.

Choose your model

The briefing summary is written by a language model, and you can pick which one. The same model selector from Ask AI is available here, so you can use whichever model you prefer for writing style and quality.

Your data stays yours

The briefing uses your feed stories and classifier training to generate the summary. Story content is sent to the model provider you choose, but NewsBlur doesn’t use your data to train models or for any purpose beyond generating your briefing. The same privacy principles from Ask AI apply here.

Availability

The Daily Briefing is available now on the web for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. You can configure everything from the briefing view in the sidebar.

All users can open the Daily Briefing to see a preview with a handful of top stories. To unlock full briefings with all sections, custom keywords, and scheduled delivery, upgrade to Premium Archive.

If you have feedback or ideas for how to make the Daily Briefing better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Story clustering solves this. When NewsBlur detects that multiple feeds are covering the same story, it groups them together and shows you the highest-scoring version. The duplicates don’t disappear – they fold neatly underneath, so you can still see who else reported it and jump to their version if you want a different perspective.

How it works

In the story titles list, clustered stories show their sources directly below the representative story. Each source shows the feed’s favicon, feed name, story title, and how long ago it was published. Click any source to read that version instead.

When you open a clustered story, the detail view shows rich cards for each alternative source at the bottom. These cards include the feed icon, story title, a content preview, the article’s thumbnail image, author, and date. Click any card to jump to that version of the story.

Two layers of detection

Clustering uses two complementary approaches to catch duplicates:

Title matching is the fast, obvious check. NewsBlur normalizes story titles (lowercasing, stripping punctuation) and groups exact matches. But it also does fuzzy matching using significant-word overlap – so “Apple Announces New iPhone” and “Apple Reveals the New iPhone at WWDC” will still cluster together, even though the titles aren’t identical.

Semantic matching goes deeper. NewsBlur sends each story’s title to Elasticsearch’s more_like_this query, searching across all your subscribed feeds for articles covering the same topic. This catches stories that are about the same event but written with completely different headlines. The two layers are merged, so title matches and semantic matches combine into a single cluster.

Clustering runs automatically in the background every time a feed updates. Results are cached for 14 days, so clusters are ready instantly when you load your river.

Mark duplicates as read

When you read a clustered story, you can optionally have NewsBlur mark all the duplicates as read too. This is off by default – enable it in the feed options popover under “Story Clustering” or in Manage > Preferences > Stories.

There are two controls:

• Cluster related stories / Keep stories separate – Toggles clustering on or off. When enabled, duplicate stories are grouped in your river view. When disabled, every story appears individually as before.
• Mark all as read / Keep others unread – When you read the representative story, this controls whether the other stories in the cluster are automatically marked as read.

The same options are available in the global Preferences dialog under the Stories tab.

Availability

Story clustering is available to all NewsBlur users on the web. If a feed you subscribe to has cluster data, you’ll see grouped stories automatically – no configuration needed. Clustering is now enabled by default for all users, and can be toggled off or back on in your account Preferences.

Premium Archive subscribers get full control over clustering: choose between single-line and expanded preview styles, and automatically mark duplicate stories as read when you read the representative story.

Premium and free users see clustered stories on popular feeds where cluster data already exists. You’ll see clusters most often on widely-subscribed news feeds. To unlock clustering settings and get clustering across all your feeds, upgrade to Premium Archive.

If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Now you can mute a feed for a specific duration. Pick anywhere from 1 day to 1 year using the slider, or mute indefinitely the old-fashioned way. When the time’s up, NewsBlur automatically unmutes the feed the next time you load your feeds. No reminders to set, no manual cleanup.

Two ways to mute

Right-click any feed and choose “Mute this site.” Instead of muting immediately, a slider appears with two buttons: one to mute for a set duration, and one to mute indefinitely. Drag the slider to pick your duration, from 1 day all the way to 1 year with natural stops at 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, and so on.

The same controls are available in Site Settings. Open any feed’s settings and you’ll see a Mute section with a status message showing whether the feed is active, muted with a countdown, or muted indefinitely. The slider and buttons work the same way, and you can unmute at any time.

If a feed is on a timed mute, the right-click menu shows how much time is left next to the “Un-mute this site” option, so you always know when it’s coming back.

Auto-unmute

When a timed mute expires, NewsBlur unmutes the feed automatically the next time you open NewsBlur or refresh your feeds. There’s nothing to configure and no background job to wait for. Free accounts respect the 64-feed limit, so if you’re at the cap, the feed stays muted until you have room.

Timed muting is available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Web Feeds is a new feature that creates RSS feeds from any website. Point it at a URL, and NewsBlur analyzes the page structure, identifies the repeating content patterns, and generates extraction rules that turn the page into a live feed. It works on news sites, blogs, job boards, product pages, or really anything with a list of items that changes over time.

This is a huge feature and has been requested for years. I’m so thrilled to finally be able to offer it in a way that I feel comfortable with. Other solutions including having you select story titles on a re-hosted version of the page, but it was clumsy and error-prone. This way, we use LLMs to figure out what the story titles are likely to be, present the variations to you, and then let you decide what’s right. So much better!

How it works

Open the Add + Discover Sites page and click the Web Feed tab. Paste a URL and click Analyze. NewsBlur fetches the page, strips out navigation and boilerplate, and analyzes the HTML structure. Within a few seconds, you’ll see multiple extraction variants, each representing a different content pattern found on the page.

Progress updates stream in real-time while the analysis runs. NewsBlur typically finds 3-5 different extraction patterns on a page. The first variant is usually the main content (article list, blog posts, product grid), but sometimes the page has multiple distinct sections worth subscribing to. Each variant shows a label, a description of what it captures, and a preview of 3 extracted stories so you can see exactly what you’d get.

Select the variant that matches what you want to follow, pick a folder, and subscribe. NewsBlur will re-fetch and re-extract the page on a regular schedule, just like any other feed.

Story hints

Sometimes the initial best guess isn’t what you’re looking for. Maybe the page has a blog section and a job listings section, and you want the jobs. Click the Refine button and type a hint like “I’m looking for the job postings.” NewsBlur re-analyzes the page with your hint in mind and reorders the variants to prioritize what you described.

What gets extracted

For each story, NewsBlur extracts whatever it can find: title, link, content snippet, image, author, and date. Not every field will be available on every site, and that’s fine. At minimum you’ll get titles and links. The extraction uses XPath expressions, which means it’s precise and consistent across page refreshes as long as the site’s HTML structure stays the same.

When things change

Websites redesign. HTML structures shift. When NewsBlur detects that the extraction rules have stopped working (after 3 consecutive failures), the feed is flagged as needing re-analysis. You’ll see a feed exception indicator, and you can re-analyze the page with one click to generate updated extraction rules.

Use cases

Some examples of sites that work well with Web Feeds:

• Company blogs without RSS — Many corporate blogs dropped their RSS feeds years ago. Web Feeds brings them back.
• Job boards — Track new postings on a company’s careers page.
• Government sites — Follow press releases, meeting agendas, or public notices.
• Changelog pages — Monitor when a tool or service ships updates.
• Event listings — Keep tabs on upcoming concerts, conferences, or local events.
• Product pages — Watch for new arrivals or restocks on stores that don’t offer feeds.

Availability

Web Feeds are available to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. The ongoing feed fetching and extraction runs on NewsBlur’s servers like any other feed.

If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Here’s what’s new:

iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe

NewsBlur is built for the latest Apple platforms. The toolbar is transparent and fades as you scroll. The column layout has been simplified to “feeds beside” or “feeds over” the story detail. On iPad, a new draggable divider lets you resize the feeds and stories columns, and the sidebar auto-collapses when space gets tight. On Mac, the sidebar auto-hides and trackpad swipe gestures work throughout the app.

The default theme is now Auto, so NewsBlur follows your system appearance out of the box. Dark mode correctly overrides the window style to stay consistent with whatever NewsBlur theme you’ve chosen.

A warmer sepia theme

The Sepia theme has been completely reworked with warmer tones that are easier on the eyes for long reading sessions. The theme selector itself has been rewritten across all menus, with improved contrast on the pill buttons so you can clearly see which theme is active.

Story titles pill bar

The top of the story list now has a pill bar with quick access to Discover, Options, Search, and Mark Read. The search bar slides in and out instead of fading, and the mark-read button has a wider tap target with an optional confirmation step.

Discover related sites

Discover Related Sites lets you find related feeds from any feed or folder. Tap the Discover button in the new story titles pill bar, browse what’s available, and try a feed before subscribing with a preview banner.

List and magazine views

Two new story layout options join the existing Grid view. List shows compact rows for scanning headlines quickly. Magazine shows taller rows with larger thumbnails, giving you a richer preview of each story without opening it. Switch between them from the story titles pill bar.

Dashboard

The Dashboard sits at the top of your feed list and shows stories from your favorite feeds, updated every five minutes. Add, remove, and rearrange feeds to build a personal front page that keeps you current throughout the day. It’s the first thing you see when you open the app, and it updates in the background so fresh stories are always waiting.

Redesigned login, preferences, and upgrade

The login screen now features animated Metal shader waves with a frosted glass card. Preferences have moved from the old InAppSettingsKit to a new native SwiftUI PreferencesView. The Premium upgrade screen has been redesigned to include Ask AI integration and the new Premium Pro tier.

Share, Trainer, and Ask AI dialogs are presented as swipeable sheets on iPhone with grabber handles, replacing the old full-screen modals. The sync indicator has moved from a large HUD to a subtle top-right nav bar dot.

Ask AI

Ask AI brings the same AI-powered Q&A from the web to your phone and Mac. Select a story, tap Ask AI, and ask questions about it. Summarize a long article in one sentence, get the backstory on a developing situation, or fact-check a claim. Pick from multiple AI models and keep the conversation going with follow-ups.

Push notifications with feed favicons

Push notifications now show your feed’s favicon alongside the notification using Communication Notifications. At a glance, you can tell which feed a story came from before you even open it.

Everything else

Beyond the headline features, this release includes a long list of improvements and fixes across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Improvements

• Pinch-to-zoom images to full-sized Quick Look preview in any story.
• Mark Story Read options: mark read on scroll, on selection, after an interval, or manually.
• Premium Pro tier added to the iOS upgrade dialog with higher limits.
• Custom feed and folder icons now supported on iOS.
• Unmute support for individual feeds.
• Collapse-all and expand-all button on All Site Stories.
• Modernized menu bar on Mac and iPad with keyboard shortcuts.
• Icons added to context menus on Mac and iPad.
• Redesigned story action buttons with modern styling.
• Text, URL, and regex classifiers added to the iOS Intelligence Trainer.
• Compact story title cells with equalized vertical spacing in list view.
• Fetching/offline banner moved from bottom overlay to top of story titles.
• Feed list search bar replaced with a compact text field.
• Scroll-to-hide toolbar synced with swipe-back gestures.
• Sidebar toggle buttons for showing and hiding the feed list.
• Redesigned Add Site as a SwiftUI half-height sheet with autocomplete.
• Story traverse bar and feed bar fade gradually as you scroll.
• Mac Catalyst: dismiss modals via overlay tap or Escape key.
• Mac Catalyst: trackpad swipe gesture support.
• Improved theme selector pill contrast for medium and light themes.
• Show toolbar when tapping status bar to scroll to top.

Fixes

• Fixed WebSocket disconnects from EIO4 protocol and session lifecycle issues.
• Fixed story width rendering wider than viewport on first load on iPhone.
• Fixed memory issues with PINCache cost limits.
• Fixed offline queue priority inversion.
• Fixed saved stories showing incorrect read/unread status.
• Fixed YouTube Error 153 with HTTPS and inlined resources.
• Fixed trainer popover showing empty content on first open.
• Fixed crashes with custom feed icons in story detail.
• Fixed blank statistics modal by adding missing JS globals.
• Fixed white flash and navbar color mismatch when opening stories in dark themes.
• Fixed sepia theme yellow tint on Mac Catalyst.
• Fixed (null) username and missing avatar when sharing on Mac Catalyst.
• Fixed Catalyst pill bar AppKit chrome artifacts.
• Fixed Mac traverse bar layout, highlights, and previous button state.
• Fixed Discover popover placement on Mac and iPad.
• Fixed mark-read pill confirmation.
• Fixed status bar color and liquid glass gradient boundary.
• Fixed stale collapsed folder unread counts on iPad.
• Fixed stale story responses when switching folders quickly on iPad.
• Fixed Mac Catalyst split divider limited to grab handle area.

NewsBlur for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe is available now on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you have feedback or run into issues, I’d love to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.

The new Add + Discover Sites page changes that. It’s a full-page discovery experience with eight tabs covering YouTube channels, Reddit communities, podcasts, newsletters, Google News topics, trending sites, popular feeds, and of course the classic search-and-subscribe workflow. There are over 50,000 curated feeds to browse, all organized into dozens of categories and subcategories.

Eight ways to find feeds

The tab bar across the top gives you eight different lenses into the world of RSS:

• Search — The classic search bar, now with semantic search and autocomplete. Type a topic or URL and get instant suggestions. Below the search results you’ll find trending feeds ranked by a hybrid algorithm that combines subscription velocity, read engagement, and subscriber counts.

• Web Feed — Create RSS feeds from any website. This one gets its own blog post.

• Popular Sites — Thousands of curated RSS feeds organized into categories like Technology, Science, News, and Business. Each category has subcategories for drilling down further.

• YouTube — Over 2,000 verified YouTube channels converted to RSS feeds. Browse by category or search for specific channels. Subscribe and read YouTube in your feed reader the way it should be.

• Reddit — Nearly 6,000 real subreddits across 47 categories. From r/programming to r/sourdough, you can subscribe to any subreddit as an RSS feed.

• Newsletters — Newsletters from Substack, Medium, Ghost, Beehiiv, and other platforms. Platform pills let you filter by newsletter provider if you have a preference.

• Podcasts — Popular podcasts organized by genre. Search for shows or browse the curated collection.

• Google News — Eight preset topics (World, Business, Technology, Sports, and more) that create feeds from Google News. One click to subscribe.

Categories and subcategories

Most tabs are organized with a two-level taxonomy. Click a category pill at the top to filter, then drill into subcategories for more specific browsing. YouTube’s Technology category, for example, breaks down into Programming, AI & Machine Learning, Gadgets, and more.

The categories are consistent across tabs where it makes sense, so you can explore Technology feeds across YouTube, Reddit, Popular Sites, and Podcasts without having to rethink the navigation each time.

Grid view and list view

Every tab supports two viewing modes. Grid view shows feed cards with thumbnails, descriptions, subscriber counts, and freshness indicators. List view compresses things into a denser layout when you want to scan quickly.

A style popover in the top right lets you toggle between views. Your preference is saved per tab.

Try before you subscribe

Every feed card has a Try button that instantly fetches the feed and shows you the actual stories. No commitment, no subscribing. Just a quick look at what you’d get. If you like what you see, the subscribe button is right there with a folder picker.

A breadcrumb link at the top takes you back to where you were browsing when you’re done previewing.

The new Add Site popover

If you don’t need the full discovery page, the popover that appears when you click “+” in the sidebar has been redesigned too. It still has the quick URL input for when you have a feed address handy, but now it also shows freshness indicators and has buttons to jump into any of the discovery tabs.

Semantic search

The search tab uses Elasticsearch to find feeds by name with fuzzy matching. Type “cooking” and you’ll get cooking blogs, YouTube cooking channels, cooking subreddits, and cooking podcasts. It searches across all feed types, not just traditional RSS. If Elasticsearch doesn’t find anything, the search falls back to a database query so you’ll always get results.

Where all these feeds came from

Building the discovery page meant curating a lot of feeds. I wrote management commands to discover and verify channels, subreddits, podcasts, and newsletters from real sources. The collection includes over 2,000 YouTube channels, 6,600 subreddits, 7,300 newsletters, 32,000 podcasts, and 14,000 RSS feeds. Over 63,000 feeds in total, all real, verified, and categorized.

The Add + Discover Sites page is available now on the web for all users. If you have feedback or ideas for new categories, platforms, or features, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.