My Habits and the Media in General

Since this is my media analysis, I think it will be worthwhile to spend a bit of time talking about the way I get my news.

I don't have a television. Somehow I manage to remain mostly media-literate, however.

In terms of broadcast journalism, I've been known to watch hours of youtube videos of Barack Obama and probably an hour or two of Mrs. Clinton as well. I listen to NPR news. I stream WBUR from the internet-- I do this every morning, when they're not doing their pledge drive.

I get the podcast editions of Fresh Air, This American Life, All Songs Considered, several columns of the New Yorker (political commentary and fiction), Slate Magazine, 60 Minutes, and Radio Lab. I also get Wait...Wait...Don't Tell Me, NPR's weekly news quiz show, and I laugh at most of the jokes they make. This entertains me on a basic level (I laugh) and also reinforces my belief that I'm pretty much aware of the important news stories of the week (if I didn't know what happened in the news, I wouldn't get their jokes, right?)

I read newspapers daily, usually online. I check headlines at the BBC and Boston Globe, I read the frontpages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. I get BU's Daily Free Press in my inbox every morning. I read online news magazines like Slate and Yes! about once a week, sometimes less.

I read a lot of blogs, and I do this every day. I read blogs about local news, political commentary, blogs about multimedia storytelling, blogs about environmental issues and how to be a more conscious consumer. I read blogs that make me laugh, like StuffWhitePeopleLike. (SWPL is probably the subject of a future post).

This morning, I logged onto my favorite blog, MultimediaShooter, only to find a message that it is no longer being published because it has been hacked, and I almost cried. It was a fantastic resource that offered examples of effective multimedia storytelling, reviews of helpful products and tools, and a source of general optimism about the state of the industry (even if it was the place where I first learned about AngryJournalist.)

But, before I do any of this, I check my email. Many mornings, facebook is the first website I visit, before I check the front page of NYTimes or the Globe headlines, or the Allston-Brighton TAB blog, and before I open iTunes to stream the WBUR newscast. Before I learn about news in the larger world I live in, I want to know who has tried to get in touch with me specifically, and if any of my personal acquaintances have written about important changes in their lives on their facebook profiles, or added pictures of things they experienced themselves. For years I've discounted this instinct as typical college procrastination, but I'm starting to think it's more than that.

During a roadtrip on Spring Break with several of my best friends, my buddy woke up from a catnap in the backseat and said, puzzled, "I just had a dream that Rachel Mennies died. I found out because it was on the front page of the New York Times." Rachel Mennies is a mutual friend of ours, and a fellow BU student. Everyone in the car responded right away with fairly predictable reactions-- "Oh, that's weird." "How did she die?" "That's kinda creepy, dude." and it took me a while to respond, contemplating in silence, but I said "Actually, I think you're on to something." I predict a convergence of social networking sites like facebook, and sites like digg that let you rate stories based on how much they interest you and sometimes track your reading patterns, to the point where, yeah, 10 years in the future, Marc might go to pull up "The New York Times" on his iPhone, and on the front page, there's a picture of Rachel Mennies and the headline is that she died because the newsgathering source "knew" that it would be the most interesting thing to tell Marc about the day's (or moment's) current events.

I think the direction we're moving is toward hyperspecialization, and super-targeted audiences. It's already happening in the blogosphere, where I can choose to get my news from sites that share my political views, sense of humor, and interests. I see this trend continuing, and I feel somewhat ambivalent. Someone ranted on AngryJournalist in caps lock, something along the lines of, "I hate journalism students who act nostalgic for newspapers-- YOU ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BE NOSTALGIC!!" I kind of understand where this anonymous person was coming from, and I'm not sure that what I feel is nostalgia as much as a respect for some of what that medium offers that I think the internet has taken from us.

In newspapers, space was limited. The most important story of the day was on the front page, and the lead photo was big, front and center. Newspaper websites still put the most important story on their front page, but as soon as you click on a link, that story and photo is the same size as the lead story, and in the same position on your screen as the other would be. With a newspaper, if all you wanted to know was the score of last night's game, you had to first turn past the story about the local election scandal and the war in Iraq to the sports page. In the evening newscast, you had to listen to the newscaster run through a summary of the night's headlines and several of the stories before you saw some of the game's highlights. Either way, you had to physically interact with these stories. Now you can go straight to espn.com, or even get updated scores text messaged straight to your handset. What a news editor thinks is important need not have any impact on the speed with which you access the information that you want, because you know where to find it. I predict that even general news websites like the New York Times and Washington Post will become more and more customized, so that "the most important story of the day" will not be chosen by an editor-in-chief, it will be chosen by the reader, as generated by a previous selection of preferences.

I find the world of new media that we are immersed in fascinating and also scary, and I think 10 years in the future when potentially the concept of Marc's dream is a reality and hopefully not the specific content (Rachel is so great!) will be even more fascinating... Although I'll admit I find it kind of scary.