Often in class, I’ll informally poll students about how they get their news – and the answers are often surprising. Sometimes, no one reads news unless it crosses their Facebook feed. Other times, students favor broadcast television news or picking up the newspaper (usually the New York Times) from any of the various places where it’s free on campus. Still, in other classes, students are getting their news from the websites of popular “old guard” media such as CNN, CBS, the New York Times, or Newsday.
In most of these cases, though, the reader is picking an outlet and relying on that one vision to get their news. I’ll often push things such as RSS readers and Flipboard, but sometimes old habits are hard to break.
So here’s the question for you all: How do you consume your news? Is it a snack here and there during the day? A Thanksgiving-style gorging at night? An intravenous drip? Let me know in the comments below. I’m interested to hear about some new-age method’s everyone’s using.
I’ll start by sharing mine.
The RSS feed
The primary way I get my news is through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. I’m not much of a television watcher, and so in most spare moments during the day, instead of sitting down on the couch with a TV remote, I’ll more often pull up my iPad and scroll through the several different categories I’ve set up: News, Tech, Photography, Journalism, amongst others. I’ve compiled relevant sites into each of these categories – getting my news from CNN, Newser, New York Times and The Guardian. I could put more, but then I tend to get repeat headlines, much like what happens in my tech folder with all of the tech sites I have on there.
Google Reader
Yes, there are many times where going to a site and looking at how an editor chose to arrange the stories is important; but there are many times where getting the news fast matters more – RSS feeds are the most basic way to make that happen.
Head on over to Google Reader to get started and then click on “RSS” feeds for websites to subscribe (usually an orange icon with arches radiating out of it – just like the one I have below my search box at the top of this site).
Google Alerts
I’ve set up Google Alerts for my name and for Stony Brook University. While I could have these delivered more frequently, I have them set for once a week. Daily would become too cumbersome. That said, this way I can be assured I’ll never miss anything that may be published about me or my university.
If there’s a subject you’re interested in, make sure you set up a Google Alert for it so that you don’t miss new news about it.
Tablet apps
I’ve long thought that tablets encourage consuming information more than producing it – but that’s not such a bad thing. Yes, there are apps that are the standard tablet fare – web sites essentially regurgitated in a stripped down form on a tablet (I’m looking at you, USA Today and New York Times).
On the left, USA Today's website. On the right, it's iPad App at the same time.
It’s frustrating to know that I could just open up Safari on the iPad and go to the website of the same news organization and get more information than I’m getting from its iPad app.
That said, there are many apps that leverage the iPad and Android tablets for news consumption very well, aside from the basic aforementioned RSS readers.
For starters, check out “The Daily” on the iPad (and now Android, too apparently). Yes, I know I’ve trashed it again and again, and while the writing and journalism still aren’t up to its competitors, it’s got a lot to offer at a bargain basement price (99 cents per week or $39.99 for the whole year). Now that the bugs have (mostly) been smoked out of the latest releases, you can check out a publication that is clearly rooted in print (news magazine) journalism while providing some nice tablet-only interactive graphics and sections.
Another one of my more recent favorites (and Apple’s too – it was 2010 App of the Year) is Flipboard. After one of our recent graudates got a job there last year, I decided to give it a try – and I had no idea what I was missing. Plug in your Twitter feed, Google Reader account, Facebook profile or any of the other supported Flipboard partners, and you have an instant magazine-style feed of everything your friends and contacts are sharing. Chances are, if someone else found it interesting, so will you, and so this app really gives those articles prominence.
That said it’s a double-edged sword – plugged into my Facebook account, I get weird random photos and odd status updates flowing in, rendering it quite useless. I suppose that’s a reflection of my friends? Sure, I can silence specific people for Flipboard, but that’s a labor intensive process with the amount of contacts I have. Far more useful is my Twitter feed – plugged into Flipboard, I see many articles and stories I may have missed otherwise – a sign that I’m better at curating my Twitter contacts than I am my Facebook friends. It also makes a good case for why you should keep all of your online services professional.
Unfortunately, for now Flipboard is only for Apple devices.
NPR
And my favorite way to consume the news – NPR or National Public Radio.
Aside from having a fantastic website, true to its roots you can still find NPR on radio stations across the country. It’s with me on my morning commute and on my drive home from work. In the 25-30 minute car ride, I can get the broad strokes of what happened in the day easily, and then in my spare time, I can check out the stellar app for the iPad to listen to anything else I want to hear from NPR.
Sadly the Android counterpart is a crash-happy mess. I’ve tried it on two Android phones (an original Motorola Droid and the HTC Incredible 2 – both well-spec’ed for their era) and in neither case did it work well. For my trips to the gym, I usually end up downloading the podcasts in MP3 form and load them into Dropbox to listen. It requires some advance planning, but it beats the app.
What’s your news routine?
So there’s my news consumption routine. I suppose it’s one of constant bombardment. What’s yours? Please share in the comments below – maybe we can all pick up a few new tools!
Lately, I seem to get my news by following twitter feeds from The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Associated Press Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, CNBC, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, ABC and a number of journalists I also follow. I usually read through tweets and certain associated stories while drinking my morning coffee and check in on the news throughout the day when I’m near my computer.
Away from my computer, I’ll occasionally pick up a local paper at diners, coffee shops and airports. I also have a number of journalists among my facebook fans, and they usually keep me pretty well-posted on news of note either to our circles or the more general world.
When working a regular beat, I set Google/LexisNexis/Factiva alerts for my competitors, colleagues, key sources and topics I follow.
I tend to watch local TV news only to see certain familiar faces when I’m in relevant markets. I rarely watch CNN anymore as its content mix has changed so much in recent years.
My main source of news nowadays is twitter – I follow a lot of the typical national and international news outlets (NYT, CNN, WSJ, Bloomberg, CNET, etc) but I also try to follow individual reporters and writers, analysts, local news sources. Their content is a bit different and so is their perspective. I also try to follow my govt representatives and political candidates. I follow things I’m not even interested in just so the topics are on my radar.
I do use Facebook for news sometimes – I follow/like AP, NPR and Morning Edition (there are probably a lot more I could follow, but there’s a limit to how much news I can read on FB). Those outlets are good because they understand that FB is a little different in terms of how often to post. Also, because they’re not restricted to 140 characters, they can be a little more informative in the “status” bar.
If I really have no time for news, I try to listen to NPR’s hourly news summary – it’s just 10 minutes.
I also visit Fark.com when I need to find goofy 30 second stories for work. I don’t watch much TV news but I do try to watch The Daily Show once a week – and am always surprised by how much I learn from the show.
As a print junkie, I still get the Sunday NYT, Vanity Fair, W, The Economist, and People (pop culture is important too!).
Finally, whenever I am feeling like I need a fresh news source, I check out the Atlantic’s Media Diet section http://www.theatlanticwire.com/posts/media-diet/
It depends on what I’m trying to find. If there’s big news that I’m actively pursuing, I’ll run multiple sources at once, usually with some form of video. When the bin Laden raid happened, I had the White House pool feed up on my computer alongside Twitter and several of the regular news sites (WaPo, maybe CNN). At the time, we still had cable, so I also had NBC on (Brian Williams!).
Contrast that with the Tehran riots a few years back, which was almost purely Twitter, following links out to a handful of sites like al Jazeera.
Day-to-day, I rely mostly on a combination of Twitter, Flipboard and Zite, though that tends to skew pretty heavily toward tech industry and multimedia stuff.
I forgot about long form … I use the Longform app, read everything Matt Taibbi writes, and check TheBrowser.com pretty regularly. I also use Instapaper religiously.
Genitaly I scan flipboard, which includes my google reader feeds, and if I see something interesting I toss it to Instapaper.
Rarely does anything get read directly on a site. As soon as I see something interesting it goes to Instapaper. If the site looks worth reading, I subscribe and pull it into flipboard.
I use the same process with twitter.
I’m a bit lazier than most would assume, but here’s how I judge the worthiness of news:
- My daily morning routine before work is to check out the Gawker family of websites for my personal preferences – Gawker (politics/celebs), Gizmodo (technology), io9 (sci-fi, science, geekdom) and Deadspin (sports). In fact, I survived the JRN 490 news quizzes not by reading the New York Times, but by checking these sites obsessively. (Mind you, my average was nearly 90.)
- I have stopped checking Twitter as much, mainly because I’ve followed too many non-news related people on my single account. It might be time I split between these for future use, but I digress. Facebook has gotten better at showing what my friends, many of whom are reporters, think is important. I use the top stories to see what they’re reading or commenting on. Much of the time, I’ll find 3-5 other stories (features, usually) I wouldn’t have found.
- When I have more time to myself when I’m eating or bored, I’ll use Flipboard on iPhone or iPad. The twin apps are similar to RSS readers and make it into a wonderfully beautiful magazine-like experience that allows me to consume tons of stories without reading too far.
- My last strong hold has become Reddit. This website, still amazingly unknown by a lot of web users, uses up and downvotes to play up links. While the site has Rage Comics sections and other non-news sourcing, it does give you a better perspective on what exactly the world at large thinks is important. I’ve made my own account customized to source in sports, news, technology, Today I Learned, and AskReddit links. They’ve helped me see some trends and bounce up new story ideas for my newspaper.