Lists and your sidebar

Once you subscribe to more than a handful of publications, one long list stops helping. Lists group them, and the sidebar can be arranged around how you actually read.

What a list is

A list is a folder for the publications and people you subscribe to — Work, Fiction, Read on Sunday, whatever is useful to you. It has a name, an optional description, and members.

Being in a list does not change your feeds. Everything you subscribe to still arrives on Home and in Latest exactly as before; a list only changes how the sidebar is organised, and gives you a page you can read — or share — on its own.

A publication can be in as many lists as you like, or none. Lists are also public: each one has its own page and its own feed, and other people can follow it. Following a list subscribes someone to everything in it at once — so a good list is a way to hand a whole reading habit to somebody, and it keeps working as you add to it.

Making a list

Select New list from the sidebar's Subscriptions controls.
Give it a name. The description is optional and appears on the list's public page.
Add publications or people, then Create list.

You can edit or delete a list later from the same place — Edit list reopens the same dialog, and deleting a list never unfollows anything inside it.

Adding and removing publications

Anywhere you see a publication, its menu has Add to list. That dialog also creates a new list on the spot, so you do not have to plan your groups in advance.

To move several at once, open Subscriptions, select the rows you want, and add them all to a list in one action. That is much faster than doing it publication by publication.

Each list becomes its own group under Subscriptions, with the number of unread articles beside it. Anything you subscribe to that is not in a list stays in the ungrouped section below.

Groups collapse and expand, so you can keep the sidebar short and open only what you are reading today. Collapse all lists and Expand all lists do it in one go.

Arranging the sidebar

Reorder subscriptions… lets you drag your lists into the order you want, so the ones you read most sit at the top. Select Finish reordering when you are done.

Which destinations appear at all is a separate setting — Customize sidebar under Making it yours hides the ones you never use. Subscriptions and your lists always stay.