The Atlatic’s series of articles where they have various journalist describe their media consumption diets has been a lot of fun to read. Beyond that though, they’re an interesting look at the amount of information we all consume. My routine of information consumption is something I actually think about quite a bit and I’m constantly trying new or different ways to manage the onslaught of information I expose myself to. So here’s my: What I Read.
To begin with, I consume almost zero print media. I split my time about 50-50 between my laptop and my iPhone and that’s where I consume 99% of all the articles, blogs, tweets, podcast, you name it, that I consume on a daily basis.
Right away in the morning I sit down with a cup of coffee and I usually spend a bit of time on my phone checking my email, Facebook, Twitter, and the blogs that I follow with the Net News Wire iPhone app. I organize and prioritize a lot of the different streams of information I have for moments like this. Moments when my primary goal is to get up speed as fast as possible with the latest news. Facebook is the easiest because the only info coming through there for me are my friends, so the activity there is fairly slow and easy to catch up on. Twitter is a whole different story entirely. I follow over one-thousand people and the stream of updates, photos, videos, and foursquare checkins flies by so fast that any attempt to read each and every one is impossible. I take the “River of News” approach to Twitter and allow the onslaught of updates to flow past me like a river and I simply dip in and out when I have time. That being said, there are a handful of individuals whose tweets I try to always catch. I have around 20 people on a Twitter List that I can easily glance at and catch all of their updates without all the clutter of the other 980+.
Some of the people on my “must read” Twitter List are:
RSS feeds used to be huge for me and I read several hundred each and everyday. Then Twitter hit and I stopped obsessing over RSS to obsess over Twitter (didn’t we all?). Today though, much like with my “must read” Twitter List, I follow only a handful of RSS feeds from the blog or news sites that are the most important to me. Sites like Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Ezra Klein’s blog, Dave Winer’s Scripting.com, and a few others.
Many of the top news sites I follow are mixed in both in my RSS feeds and on Twitter. I get a lot of duplicates because of this but I like the redundancy in case something happens, I know I’ll see it. The main news site I go through deliberately each day is Slate.com. The writers that they have (John Dickerson, David Plotz, Christopher Hitchens, Anne Applebaum) are some of the best anywhere.
While on the topic of Slate, they have to of my absolutely favorite podcasts: The Slate Political Gabfest and The Slate Culture Gabfest. In each case, the three hosts speak the top 3 stories of the week and discuss them thoroughly and amusingly. Additionally, they also have a “cocktail chatter” segment at the end of each episode where the hosts go around and tell the one thing everyone should know before going to a cocktail party that week. Very amusing.
I’m a massive consumer of podcasts like Slate’s. Except for having MSNBC or CNN on in the background I don’t watch TV on any regular basis. I do watch a handful of TV shows on Hulu and through iTunes (LOST, 24, The Office, House, Top Gear, Mythbusters) but my viewing of those shows tends to be highly sporadic at best. Beyond all of those exceptions… on a daily basis the majority of audio video content I consume is in podcast form. I love the convenience that they afford, especially since I spend a large majority of my time commuting.
Some of my top podcasts are (besides Slate’s which I mentioned above):
- Radio Lab
- This American Life
- This Week In Tech
- This Week In Google
- NPR’s Planet Money
- Rebooting the News
- The Engadget Podcast
- The Totally Rad Show
- You Look Nice Today
As far as books go, it’s all Kindle all the time unless it’s something that I simply must read that’s not on there (happening less and less often). The convenience of the Kindle is simply fantastic. Throw in the iPhone app so that I can read even when I forget my Kindle and it’s totally changed how I read. I read so much more now than ever before and I owe a lot of that to the Kindle. I am looking forward to getting an iPad which would likely replace my Kindle but until then… Kindle rocks!
So that’s my media landscape. I actively consume way more information than most people today do commonly but I suspect many people are going to be attempting to find solutions to the problems of data/information consumption like the ones I face along with other news junkies as more and more people turn online for their news.
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