I woke up this morning thinking about news and how I get it. Do you know how much I fight the urge to say “ingest” when I talk about content? A lot! Talk about professional jargon. But I digress… I grew up with two parents who always read newspapers: the New York Times and the Newark News. As an adult I, too, read the news but I do it in different ways. The Times used to be a must for me but after I became a parent it was abandoned because it required too much time. I stuck with the Chicago Tribune, a paper I sneered at until I spent five years in Tucson and had to settle for the Arizona Daily Star. Now I’m back to the Trib and appreciate it more. I read it from cover to cover (okay I just skim sports) and get the details of life in Chicagoland. I also read the weekly paper, The Evanston Review, and find out what it going on with the local schools city council and the like. That’s just print.
I used to have cable TV (something easily forsaken when unemployed) basically because my ex-partner was a sports fiend. I would tune in to CNN and the Weather Channel (only in Chicago – no one bothers in Tucson), often obsessively, and ingested (sorry, it slipped out) the news in sound bites. I also listen to NPR quite often, just not as much as I used to when I worked a 9 to 5 job.
Still, my real window on the world beyond Chicago is through my computer. I usually look at the news online before I sit down to read the printed Tribune. I subscribe to a bunch of news feeds and start off back at the NYT, scanning its headlines and digging in occasionally (more this morning on 1st Amendment and regulating video game violence). I also glance at the online Tribune, CNN (Madeline Albright’s interview), Wired, CNet (ten seconds on Bacn today), ZDNet, and some blogs. Why this morning I even found myself reading an article from Military Information Technology on implementing Internet Protocol version 6 that I found because I have a Google Alert set up for "telecommunications infrastructure and policy". Who would've thunk it?!
I grew up with print newspapers and three basic TV channels. Even without cable or satellite TV, I still feel like I’m drowning in news. The Pew Research Center has found that news readership/viewership is declining and online news consumption is growing. I am trying to set my homepage up to make this all more efficient (thanks for pushing me, Simon) but still don’t feel as if I have a handle on the news. I’m definitely feeling overwhelmed, how about you?
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It has been said that the news is never really new. Same stories, different names. Mostly this is the truth. So to read the news is at some level an act of great redundancy--a waste of time. It keeps changing while it stays the same.
Like you MAB, I can't seem to find enough time to *ingest* all that is fit and unfit to print. The ultimate act of news reading is of course the Sunday NYT. This gluttonous act requires not time but eternity.
Which leads me to wonder if you are going to post your blog daily. Do you have the time? Here's a suggestion. Stop skimming the sports page.
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