The question of whether to read news or fiction to build a new language often gets treated as a matter of taste, and personal interest genuinely matters for whether you'll stick with either one. But they also do measurably different things for reading skill, and knowing the difference helps you pick deliberately instead of by default.
Structure: predictable versus variable
News writing, especially straight reporting, follows a fairly consistent structure: the key fact up front, supporting details after, attribution of claims to named sources. Once you've read a reasonable number of news articles, this structure becomes predictable, and predictability is genuinely useful early on, because you can guess what kind of information is coming next and use that to support comprehension when a specific sentence is hard.
Fiction has no equivalent structural convention. A novel can open with dialogue, description, internal monologue, or action, in any order, and the pacing of information is a deliberate authorial choice rather than a genre convention. This makes fiction less predictable and, for a lot of learners, harder to use as a scaffold early on, but it also exposes you to a wider range of sentence construction and narrative technique that news writing rarely uses at all.
Vocabulary: current and topical versus timeless and idiomatic
News vocabulary skews toward current events, institutions, numbers, and topical language, exactly the vocabulary you need if your goal is following current affairs, understanding what's happening in a country you're moving to, or discussing recent events with native speakers. It refreshes constantly, so there's always new material, but it can also date quickly; yesterday's political vocabulary may not be this month's.
Fiction vocabulary tends toward more timeless, often more idiomatic and emotionally expressive language: describing feelings, relationships, internal states, physical sensation, the kind of vocabulary that comes up in ordinary conversation about your own life far more than news vocabulary does. If your goal is comfortable everyday conversation rather than following current events, fiction's vocabulary set is arguably closer to what you'll actually need day to day.
Dialogue: fiction has it, news mostly doesn't
This is one of the clearest practical differences. Fiction, especially contemporary fiction, contains extensive dialogue written in a register close to how people actually speak, including contractions, interruptions, and informal syntax. News writing rarely includes extended dialogue and, when it does, it's usually a formal quote rather than a natural conversational exchange. If your goal includes handling real spoken-register conversation, fiction dialogue is a genuinely useful bridge that news simply doesn't provide.
Which one actually builds skill faster: it depends on what "skill" means
If the goal is building comprehension of formal, structured writing quickly, news wins, because its predictable structure gives you scaffolding that supports comprehension even when individual sentences are hard, and there's a functionally unlimited, constantly renewing supply of it. If the goal is building comfort with natural spoken register, emotional and idiomatic vocabulary, and varied sentence construction, fiction does things news structurally cannot.
Neither is objectively faster in the abstract. The honest answer is that they build different, complementary skills, and a learner who reads only one indefinitely ends up with a lopsided reading ability: strong on structured, formal text and weak on conversational register, or the reverse.
A practical way to use both
Rather than choosing one permanently, a reasonable split for most learners is to use news as the daily habit, because its predictable structure and constant renewal make it easier to sustain as a routine, and add fiction periodically, a short story or a chapter at a time, specifically for the dialogue and idiomatic vocabulary exposure news doesn't provide. The two aren't competing methods so much as covering different parts of what real reading fluency actually requires.
What your current goal actually implies
If you're learning a language because you're moving somewhere and need to follow local news, understand policy that affects you, or hold your own in a conversation about current events, news reading is directly aligned with that goal in a way fiction isn't, even though fiction would still help your general fluency. If your goal is closer to everyday social comfort, following a conversation at dinner, understanding a friend's text messages, fiction's conversational register and emotional vocabulary maps more directly onto that. Neither goal makes the other material useless, but it's worth being honest about which one your actual situation calls for, rather than defaulting to whichever one happens to be easier to find in your language.
A caution about short story collections specifically
If you're using fiction as a secondary source alongside a daily news habit, short stories are usually a better entry point than a novel, not because novels are inherently harder, but because a novel's opening chapters often carry a heavier setup burden, establishing characters, setting, and backstory, that can feel slow and vocabulary-dense before the story's actual momentum kicks in. A short story reaches its point faster and gives you a complete, self-contained reading experience in one sitting, which matters if fiction is meant to be an occasional addition to your routine rather than a second full daily commitment competing with the news habit that's actually doing the heavier lifting.