The morning routine
Posted on | September 10, 2007 | 2 Comments
Island Mike offers insight and a link to a good piece from the Boston Globe about changing media habits. Among many points that resonated with me was the morning habit:
I love newspapers and subscribe to three of them at home. I cannot begin my day without a newspaper.
In the temporary paperless mornings that mark my household, I’ve tried alternatives. Magazines, mostly. This morning I fired up my laptop with my coffee and read my RSS feeds. It felt informing to a degree but not as satisfying as trolling through print and ink.
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2 Responses to “The morning routine”
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September 10th, 2007 @ 10:17 am
There have been a number of studies that show that information read on a screen is not retained as well as what is read on paper. It has to do with the additional tactile input. This is also why video teaching is not as effective as having a professor stand up and lecture.
Once electronic paper becomes ubiquitous, those may change, but the multisensory approach to learning is still the best.
That doesn’t mean I’m a luddite, though. My browser is set is sfgate.com, which is the first thing I read in the morning. (The reason I don’t get it delivered is that delivery in my neighborhood is HORRIBLE and I was paying twice the amount of the subscription to go buy it at the grab and go the mornings it didn’t show up. )That’s followed by the RSS feeds for EE Times, Reed publications BBC, Forbes, Mercury News and various blogs. Then I pick up the Redwood City Daily News paper, because it is virtually impossible to get local news online right now.
And that’s where the future of print journalism lies…the local market. The small, local dailies are still making money…although Craig’s list is hitting them (see my interview with Marty Weybret).
Print is not going away, it’s just changing focus.
September 10th, 2007 @ 11:42 am
I feel the same way trying to read news on the computer. But primarily, my reasons are different. One, if I go to a news ‘site’ such as the Providence Journal, there’s SO MUCH there on the front page, I get so distracted, and I don’t see most of what I’d normally see by flipping through the pages. You know by feel and custom where local news is, where world news is, and a great deal of information is available in your field of vision with a two-page spread, but not the *entire paper*, for Christ’s sake.
Also, I have news aggregators. I set them up to show me only the news that I think I’m going to want to read about, since ‘everything’ is, as I mentioned above, too much. But then, you’ve compartmentalized your news, your interests, yourself, into only what you want. This is where, for example, the reality-distortion field that is high tech comes from. Look at all the Apple fanboys. They read Daring Fireball and MacMinute and MacNN and MacWorld and of course some fun with Fark…and there’s a lot there to get through. Not much time to spend on stories about price-fixing of bananas, or what’s going on in Kosovo, or your local school committee meeting.
Paper is a happy, happy medium. Not too much (e.g. CNN home page), not too little (e.g. RSS aggregators). But then, it’s wasteful of resources, and can’t be kept up to date nearly as easily as electronic resources.
If newspapers were smart, they’d hire information architects to redesign their web sites so that users can read the site as they would a newspaper — not too much, and not too little. (I make good freelance money doing exactly this, but so few people are willing to spend money on concepts they don’t understand. ;-])