Final, final realization/thoughts. It's pretty obvious I let the curation of my Feedly go stale and that I should clean out the old cruft, and give it a try again. I forgot about the nice keyboard short-cuts for navigating article titles. And it's also nice way to view heavy news sources, like The Verge.

However, as a user I'd need to decide: do I want to open the funnel of content like this where I feel obligated to read all the stuff in my feed? I kind of feel like I don't need to be so diligent with these things. And if that's the case, my use case looks more and more like only using RSS for super specific, niche websites that I don't want to remember to visit on a regular basis. Which could be OK, but then I have to remember to visit my RSS reader.

How do news apps get their content when it is aggregated from multiple sites? (I've never used google news but the ios news app shows content from multiple popular sites). Is it rss, atom, or something completely different?

Looks like Google has a product called Google News SEO, a way for websites to optimize their SEO so that Google's "news" crawlers can grab the content [1] [2]

"Using the Publisher Center tool, you can share your content with Google News by listing RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos."

[1] https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607...

[2] My original link to how it works: https://ppcexpo.com/blog/how-does-google-news-work

EDIT: found the original Google docs instead