Trying a Healthier Approach to News Consumption
The TL;DR of This Post
If you don’t want to read this whole thing, here’s a quick snapshot of how I’m changing my news media consumption for the better:
Consume less media. Binging on more information, ironically, doesn’t always make you more informed.
Focus on local news; subscribing to our local paper is a way to more intentionally get the news, support local journalists and keep my head a little less cluttered.
Not using social feeds as my primary source of information.
Okay, Still Here? Keep Reading.
The news? It’s exhausting.
Not just the actual content of the news but the commentary around it. Is this story true? Is it not? Does this publication skew right or left?
Does anyone talk about anything else besides COVID-19 and Trump?
It used to be easier to moderate your intake of news. The barrier to entry was higher, competition slimmer. There were no algorithms for media companies to fight for relevance and views. Not nearly as much incentive to sensationalize what’s going on as their is now.
Being well-informed is an act of good citizenship. We shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend the world doesn’t exist around us, as tempting as that may be. News consumption does have a law of diminishing returns. It’s one thing to stay engaged with the world. It’s another to slip into unhealthy patterns of “doom scrolling.”
When it comes to news, less is more
One of the best things Megan and I did at the onset of the pandemic was limit our news consumption. We were home all day and it would’ve been easy to let (insert cable news channel of choice here) run in the background all day. We didn’t.
Instead we limited our news consumption to watching the first hour of CBS This Morning to get the rough overview of the day. We’d also listen to NPR’s “Up First” podcast, a 10-15 minute overview of the day’s news.
That was it.
We took the approach that we needed to know enough to make well-informed decisions in our lives. During a pandemic, especially one dealing with a virus we knew nothing about and learned new things every day, we stayed informed enough to know what we needed to do.
We wouldn’t dwell on the COVID case counts, the death rates or any of the other slicing of data that people on TV talked in circles about. We learned what we needed to do to help keep ourselves and our neighbors safe. I went to bed every night knowing that if I washed my hands and practiced social distancing where possible, that was about all I could do.
Dwelling on my impending doom, with color commentary from cable news, wasn’t helpful. Didn’t help my mental health. Didn’t help me stay safer from a virus. We just focused on controlling what we could control. And that made all the difference. Sure there was a chance we could’ve gotten the virus (still could). There’s a chance family might have as well. But we were selling a house, keeping toddlers alive and still had deadlines with work. Gorging myself on headlines wasn’t doing anything to keep the world safer.
Seth Godin had great thoughts on doom scrolling that mirrored my approach to consumption. He’s a concise writer, so I’ll share his entire post:
Being informed is a virtue. It helps us make better decisions and encourages us to take action.
Getting hooked on an endless scroll of media inputs is not the same as being informed. There’s long been a business model of urgent news (“man bites dog!”), but now it’s been leveraged, amplified and optimized to suck people in for hours at a time. And division is much easier to sell than progress.
If it’s not helping you take action to make things better, what’s it for?
That last line should guide how we engage with binging news. If it’s not helping us take positive action in life, what good does it do?
Investing in Local Journalism
Between the ripple effects of COVID, a recent primary election where we hardly knew who anyone on the ballot was for local office, and watching this episode of Patriot Act about local journalism, Megan and I started subscribing to our local paper.
Now, I try to make the AJC my primary source of news. My goal coming out of 2020 is to be more mindful of my local civics and less obsessed with the reality show that is our national politics. Local news impacts my life directly more so than most things out of D.C.. I still pay for other subscriptions (Wired, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times) but engage with those more from their email newsletters or print editions.
For example, I actually read a printed version of our Sunday paper. Over coffee. Like an old man.
I read about our state legislative assembly and how many bi-partisan actions came out. There were examples of Republicans and Democratic state reps working together to pass legislation. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch but a more civil showing of government than what I would’ve gathered from a national outlet.
It was refreshing.
Also, as Hasan Minhaj points out in Patriot Act, local journalism is dying. It’s an incredibly necessary service for holding officials accountable and keeping our community informed. Despite that, many local newspapers are financially dying out. It’s more important now than ever to help support your local journalists. They’re a function of society we wouldn’t really know what we had until it was gone.
I Think The Simplicity Will Pay Off
I don’t know for sure but I think the intentionality behind news consumption will pay off over the long haul. I’m hoping I’m actually more informed than I would have been otherwise. More productive because I’m not wasting time doom scrolling or going down internet rabbit holes. My mental health will probably reap benefits because I’m not taking up mental and emotional space for negative polarization.
I also think actually using print editions, the website or native apps in lieu of using social media for my daily news habit will help. It’ll allow me to read a news story and come to my own conclusions. I hope it’ll help me think more for myself.
Time will tell.