NEWS BLOW

Ok. I have a confession.

I’m a news junkie.



I have been for a long time. My addiction started when I was fairly young. I remember eagerly awaiting the mail to come so I could read Newsweek when I was in middle school. I also remember waiting for National Geographic, but for the most part, I only looked through the magazine for the awesome photos.

Really though, it took off in high school. Specifically, it took off when I started caring about politics. I remember following the election of 2004 – although not very deeply. Once I took AP Government and Comparative Political Regimes (which really was just a current events class), however, things really took off. In both classes, we were required to follow the 2006 midterm elections and, shortly after, the early republican and democratic primary debates.

Following the elections got me exposed to various political issues (the environment, foreign policy, welfare, poverty, affirmative action, etc.) that frankly I hadn’t really thought about before. My interest in those issues grew out of that exposure and I felt like I needed to know more.

One distinct memory I have is from 2006, right after the midterms. I saw in the Chicago Tribune that Obama had set up an exploratory committee to help him decide if he would run for president (even though the act of setting up the committee is essentially entering the race). I remember being bummed because right then and there I wanted another democrat to win the white house and fix all the craziness (which back then did NOT include financial crisis) so that Obamalamadingdong could run in 2012 and really “change Washington.” It’s funny to think how little I knew about politics then.

ANYWAYS, I think it was junior year of high school when I started watching the “news” on TV. I watched CNN because I knew Fox News was right-leaning and MSNBC was left-leaning. I quickly realized that getting actual news from the television is a very difficult task and that I HATED the 24-hour news cycle and its effects on news. By the end of Senior Year, I had moved on from CNN and televised news.

College is when my news intake really matured. I fully took advantage of the free New York Times service that Carleton provided. I also started following blogs. Now I had first got my feet wet in the blogosphere in high school… but things really took off in the intellectually thirsty environment that Carleton is. During senior year of Carleton, I started watching the PBS Newshour – usually online & during lunch – which I thoroughly enjoyed (no commercials, no bullshit, no spin!).

And in the past 6 months, I’ve changed my intake patterns in even more dramatic ways. I figured out Google Reader and made it work for me (divided it up by Blogs of Friends, Political Blogs, Education Blog, Space and Science Blogs, Misc. Blogs, etc.). My house/cottage-mate, Chuck (or Gooch as Mr. Foran calls him), also subscribes to The Week, Wired, & Popular Mechanics, all of which I love reading. Similar to our life in Stadium, we have a TV, but only for our N64 and movies – so no news from that thing. And then I still read the Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet (thanks BK for showing this to me almost 3 years ago), my hometown’s newspaper website, and get the NYT’s Daily Headlines in my inbox everyday.

Oh. Then there is something else…

I started a Twitter account.

Now before you call me a hypocrite and talk of how I always called Twitter Users as lame and self-absorbed losers, hear me out. First off, I did it first because I had to for work. But then yes, I did make a personal account. Now, I don’t consider myself a traditional Twitter User. I don’t have it connected to my phone and I rarely tweet. I do however subscribe to some pretty great news sources/people, such as Neil Degrasse Tyson, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Education, Brainpickings, Jay Rosen (an NYU prof who discusses News/Media issues), not to mention Stephen Colbert, CONAN and the Onion.

Honestly, I don’t use it that much, because it’s so hard to keep up with. But when I do log on, I always find an article that is really interesting! And the thing that keeps me involved with Twitter is, that without it, I wouldn’t ever have come across those interesting articles. Articles like this, this or this.

So that’s how I get my news. Magazines, Blogs, Websites, Twitter, Email Digests.

Do you guys keep up with the news? If so, how much? And do you have any favorite intake methods or sources? IT'S THE AGE OF INFORMATION, MAN!

MOLSON OUT.


P.S. Confused about the title of this post: you'll have to read the whole thing of this to understand.