A Cord Cutter’s Life is a series of guest posts by Greg Baker, featuring stories on the motivations, challenges, and benefits to cutting cable. If you’ve considered cutting the cord, let our visiting Cord Cutting Guru show you how in this fun, helpful series.

No matter your political beliefs and stances, no matter what you think is right or wrong, despite which side of the aisle you’re on or if you think there shouldn’t be an aisle at all, there’s one thing we can all agree on: we live in pretty crazy times. Between elections, the gun debate, whatever's happening in North Korea, Bitcoin, and local dogs who save people from burning buildings, it’s always important to keep up with the news.

A big part of being informed and thinking critically about the issues is to actually watch things and not just get all your news from Twitter—not that I would know anything about getting all your news from Twitter. Anyway, the point is, you’ve gotta stay informed in this day and age, so here are a few channels you can put on the TV to keep you up to date.

The Almighty Antenna

Once again, the almighty antenna reigns supreme as a way to watch. With your handy antenna, you get access to any and all over-the-air channels, FOX, ABC, CBS, and NBC. That means you can watch all of the programs you’re used to from 60 Minutes to Good Morning America to Dateline NBC, to—if you want—Fox and Friends. You’ll get to watch your local news at 5 and 11, and anything else your heart desires.

Local programming

For all the non-antenna people out there, this paragraph’s for you. The thing is—you don’t need an antenna to watch a lot of news. Fortunately, there are both national and local Roku channels for most of the over-the-air content. There’s a bunch like FOX 5 Nashville, and CBS 11 Raleigh, and stuff like that. I can’t guarantee that there will be a local app for your specific local station, but keep in mind—it’s also really fun to see the news coverage from other parts of the country. There’s strange accents, references to places you don’t know, and also, the national stories are all pretty much the same. And by the way—they’re all free. 

National/ World programming

Much like the local stations, you can get most of the national coverage from a host of streaming channels as well if the antenna just isn’t cutting it. NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX all have national dedicated channels on your TCL Roku TV where you can watch live programming or pick out selected stories to see. Additionally, Aljazeera has a great app for all your world news as well. Keep yourself informed about all issues foreign and domestic—without having to pay a dime. Of course, you can also use apps for cable news shows, but those do, as the title suggests, require access to a cable subscription.

Reuters

Special shoutout of this post goes to the Reuters channel. Partially because I didn’t have anything else listed that specifically deals with economy news, but also because their channel is really cool. There’s a function on the homepage of their channel with 10-, 15-, and 30-minute broadcast options to get all the news you need in however much time you’ve got. This is really great for getting the lowdown while you make your coffee in the morning, or something to put on and listen to when you’re getting ready to go out at night.

That’s it for the news today. Remember that while the antenna is your friend, you’ve got lots of options for keeping up with the news, even without a cable subscription. Keeping informed and up to date on everything going on in your community, country, and world is important, and now you’ve got the tools to do it. This is Greg Baker, signing off.