For news, Reddit is the one stop shop for me.  I try some of the crypto news sites, but aside from coinfire a couple others, most of them have had way too much bad history for me to trust.

As far as anything else and actually participating in the community, this is the place.  Mining hardware/knowledge and basically anything you could get from the other sub reddits of the bitcoin subreddits (aside from maybe some notable TA's on bitcoinmarkets) are mostly better picked up from here.

When you are starting out and dipping your feet into crypto, start here.  Once you have a few niche sections of the forum that suit you, you'll naturally find yourself on reddit a more significant portion of the time.

Also, I spend a lot of time on IRC's, but that's personal preference