A useful heuristic for measuring news quality is to ask yourself, “Am I more informed about what’s happening or about what people are angry about.”
Like you, I was a life-long listener and donater. I stopped both during the pandemic when I noticed NPR was playing the anger game, like every other outlet, for social media points.
https://thenewpaper.co - sends you a daily text message with a short, concise daily news report that is sufficient to be aware of anything major.
https://www.boringreport.org - aggregates news stories on a particular subject from various outlets and produces AI-generated summaries of them with all the clickbaity headlines and other forms of button-pushing removed.
Be careful, Katherine Maher (NPR CEO) was CCO/CEO of Wikimedia Foundation 2014-2021.
She then gave a TED Talk that contains some slippery equivocations about truth, includes the inevitable climate-change jibe, and states the contradiction: "we all have different truths" (she uses the phrase 'personal truth' instead of 'subjective opinion' )...
Like you, I was a life-long listener and donater. I stopped both during the pandemic when I noticed NPR was playing the anger game, like every other outlet, for social media points.