Life Skills: Developing Your Media Mix
This post is by George Altshuler ’11. George, a former lead editor of MiddBlog, just finished an internship with Tikkun magazine in Berkeley, Ca. He’s now living in San Francisco and teaching English at San Quentin State Prison.
Creative Commons / B.K. Dewey
The cliché you hear the most about our demographic’s news consumption is that we get all our news from The Daily Show. Just to clear up any potential inter-generational confusion: this cliché is most often employed as a genial criticism by people who think we should get serious every morning with our coffee and a New York Times dead-tree edition.
Contrary to the criticism in this cliché, however, most people in our demographic care about the news and do follow it. But we also understand that we live in an era in which the Daily Show is a good source for news and the paper New York Times is increasingly obsolete (unless you can wrestle one way in Proctor). In this era, the news doesn’t literally arrive on one’s doorstep, and it’s important to be proactive about finding ways to follow the news.
One starting point for following the news in this digital age is to understand how this era of turbulence for journalism actually makes this a great time to be a consumer of news. The decline of traditional media (newspapers have lost half their revenue in the past five years) and the advent of new technologies have opened the door to a myriad new news sources and tools for distributing the news. And, for now at least, traditional journalism still exists. The key to being a good news consumer is learning to take advantage of all that is being offered to us.
In this first of three posts on keeping up with the news, I’ll provide suggestions for assembling your Media Mix — the different types of sources you’l need to successfully follow the news:
- It’s good to have at least one source that works like the front page of a major newspaper by assigning importance to stories and exposing you to important stories you may not have otherwise found. Traditional news websites like The New York Times, Reuters, and The Washington Post work well in this role. Aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum that use algorithms to find and feature the internet’s most popular stories are another option. Read more
