I dusted off my Feedly account. You can follow up to 100 publications for free. For me, that's more than enough to get the main U.S. and world headlines, plus a few special interests. I like to sort by Popular + Latest or just latest.

You can sort by Most Popular if you pay $6 a month. I never felt a need to try that. The free version is easy to use, looks nice, and keeps me informed. Hot stories are marked with green text and a green arrow, so they're pretty easy to spot.

I set it up years ago. Just added every newspaper or news site I could think of, plus whatever looked interesting from r/worldnews and a few other subreddits.