What are the best general news sites for staying informed on breaking stories throughout the day?

If you want broad, reliable, fast-moving general news throughout the day, the best sites usually fall into a few categories:

Best overall general news sites

• Reuters — Excellent for straight, fast, low-frills reporting. Very good for breaking news and updates.
• Associated Press (AP News) — Similar to Reuters: concise, widely trusted, and quick on breaking events.
• BBC News — Strong global coverage with good context and live updates.
• The New York Times — Great for depth and major breaking stories; especially useful if you want analysis plus reporting.
• The Wall Street Journal — Strong on business, markets, politics, and major national/international news.

Good for quick updates all day

• CNN — Very strong live coverage and breaking-news alerts.
• ABC News / NBC News / CBS News — Solid mainstream coverage with fast updates.
• Reuters live pages / AP live updates — Especially useful when a story is actively developing.

Good if you want a mix of speed and context

• The Washington Post — Strong U.S. political and national coverage.
• The Guardian — Good international perspective and live blogs.
• Financial Times — Best if you care about economics, markets, and geopolitics.

Practical recommendation

If you want the simplest high-quality setup, use:

1. Reuters or AP for fast, reliable headlines
2. BBC News for international context
3. NYT or WaPo for deeper reporting on major stories

One tip

For “throughout the day” updates, the best experience often comes from:

• enabling push alerts from one or two trusted outlets
• checking a live news page
• using a news app or RSS feed to avoid missing updates

If you want, I can also give you:

• the best free news sites only
• the least biased options
• or a best news sources by category list for U.S., world, business, and tech.