  We study the online problem of reading articles that are listed in an
aggregated form in a dynamic stream, e.g., in news feeds, as abbreviated social
media posts, or in the daily update of new articles on arXiv. In such a
context, the brief information on an article in the listing only hints at its
content. We consider readers who want to maximize their information gain within
a limited time budget, hence either discarding an article right away based on
the hint or accessing it for reading. The reader can decide at any point
whether to continue with the current article or skip the remaining part
irrevocably. In this regard, Reading Articles Online, RAO, does differ
substantially from the Online Knapsack Problem, but also has its similarities.
Under mild assumptions, we show that any $\alpha$-competitive algorithm for the
Online Knapsack Problem in the random order model can be used as a black box to
obtain an $(\mathrm{e} + \alpha)C$-competitive algorithm for RAO, where $C$
measures the accuracy of the hints with respect to the information profiles of
the articles. Specifically, with the current best algorithm for Online
Knapsack, which is $6.65<2.45\mathrm{e}$-competitive, we obtain an upper bound
of $3.45\mathrm{e} C$ on the competitive ratio of RAO. Furthermore, we study a
natural algorithm that decides whether or not to read an article based on a
single threshold value, which can serve as a model of human readers. We show
that this algorithmic technique is $O(C)$-competitive. Hence, our algorithms
are constant-competitive whenever the accuracy $C$ is a constant.
