#23: news consumption tip for the week

a Monday experiment + question

Good morning,

I'm in the information-organizing phase of writing so I'm going to share a small news consumption tip for the week (each week maybe? let’s see!) + a question that’s been lingering in the back of my mind.

📕 News Consumption Tip of the Week

A tip to experiment with how you’re consuming the news.

If you’re a morning scroller, like me, and tend to discover most of what you read from social media and email newsletters, you either waste a long time consuming a bunch of random articles and videos, or you open a million browser tabs and never return to them.

If the latter, this is a good thing!

This week’s tip is: don’t read anything when you first find it.

Instead, save it using your preferred tool (I like Pocket, Instapaper, or Reader on Safari). Then, come back 12-24 hours later and see what still piques your interest.

I’ve been doing this a lot lately, and finding that I don’t actually want to consume 80% of what I have saved once the moment passes. That’s an enormous amount of attention saved to consume what you actually care for, and I almost always think a book or longform article is best.

Bonus: if you’ve saved it, then the next time you’re in a situation where you say “I saw something about X” you can easily find it.

Extra Bonus: it’s really fun to have a year’s record of saves to look back through in December and remember the year.

💌 As I create these tips: if you have a news/information consumption issue, leave a comment or send me a note and I’ll add it to the list of solutions to explore. And if you do the exercise, let me know how it goes!

✍🏼 Question on my mind

Something I’ve been thinking about for at least a month.

Illustration by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People by Monica Brown (via Brain Pickings)

As discussions about the creator economy proliferate, I keep wondering: should we create content, just because we can? Or rather, what are the potential pitfalls of doing so? Ten years ago, as I entered into journalism and watched traditional gatekeepers vanish and user-generated content boom, it felt exciting. Today, the tooling finally exists for independent content creators to earn a living off their work.

In October, I participated in ODW's inaugural writer's fellowship, which was something of a feeder for Substack (the newsletter platform that powers this letter, which could be paid if I wanted it to be). It was wonderful to meet people from around the world, interesting to see how and what people are writing, and very neat to see how a cohort-based learning experience functioned seamlessly online. But as a trained journalist, it left me wondering: just because it's easier than ever to be a (paid) creator, should we all become creators? 

Having small windows into the writing process of many others online has also given me pause more often than I imagined. While the support, advice and inspiration exchanged has been unparalleled, I’ve also noticed small things that made me cringe. People recording calls without making it clear whether a conversation was on the the record. Publishing interviews without quotes. Writing fantastic explainers with zero sources listed.

Similarly, this month I started spending more time on Clubhouse. I’ve stumbled into fascinating conversations that felt like radio shows, but I had no idea if the speakers were experts or just riffing. Usually it was a mix of both.

The serendipity and leveling happening in these spaces is truly exciting. So is the value from getting to work in public. Creators can:

• Get feedback

• Find community

• Make money

• Build audiences

• Be seen, heard, felt, appreciated

• Publish valuable information that wouldn’t get past a traditional gate

• Change narratives

But we can also:

• Get addicted to feedback

• Seek power

• Create an echo chamber around ourselves

• Write and say what we think people will react to, whether it creates value or not

• Misinform our audiences

• Get things very wrong, very publicly

Some of journalism’s conventions are archaic, I’ll admit. But the system of checks and balances, born of journalism ethics and editorial oversight were useful to avoid the above.

A short checklist of things I am periodically asking myself to try to mitigate this:

• Diversify income: Dependence on income from content (the news industry had to learn this lesson the hard way) is a slippery slope and I find seasons of diversified income very helpful.

• The public service question: To whom am I providing what value, according to what value system at large?

• Transparency (about biases, expertise, agenda, funding etc): Transparency is what the news industry landed on as the most useful and reliable alternative to “objectivity” that doesn’t and never did exist.

• Intention: Why create at all?

On that last point, I’ve found it useful to revisit a few wise thoughts on why human beings create. First, Kahlil Gibran in a letter to Mary Haskell:

The first poet must have suffered much when the cave-dwellers laughed at his mad words. He would have given his bow and arrows and lion skin, everything he possessed, just to have his fellow-men know the delight and the passion which the sunset had created in his soul. And yet, is it not this mystic pain — the pain of not being known — that gives birth to art and artists?

Which is similar to Pablo Neruda in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.

And finally, not to be glum but, the 4 desires driving all human behavior, according to Bertrand Russell: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.

Jihii

P.S. It’s International Women’s Day and I’m sure your feeds are packed with stories, but if they aren’t and you want to learn something new, the latest issue of the journal Feminist Economics (I work for IAFFE) examines the effects of COVID-19 from a feminist economic perspective, and is currently freely available to public! I’ll also be posting a recording of a fireside chat with the editors on Twitter tomorrow.

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🙏 Consider sharing this email with a friend, especially if the news consumption tips are something you want to try together :) + reach out to me here with requests or to chat.