A More Sustainable Approach to Consuming News in the 21st Century
There have never been more ways to consume the news than there are today.
From apps to newsletters to cable to podcasts to investigative journalism to documentaries there is clearly a plethora of options. But our perception of what constitutes news must change if we hope to heal as a society. Instead of thinking of news as the immediate events of today, we should view it as the collective events we all experience over time and more importantly must work to understand.
In this post, I share three key points that help you improve the way you think about and consume the news.
How do different mediums alter the efficacy of the news?How the 1–3–1 framework leads to better consumption habitsMy 7 favorite news sources
Section 1: News Mediums
There are certain mediums through which we consume news and each brings us either closer or further from the end goal of a healthy, collective knowledge of events, present and past. Let’s break it down by medium:
News distributed via social media is published for the main purpose of generating click engagement, not for the purpose of accurately conveying subject matter or portraying a full picture of the event at hand.
**News via cable **is on par with social media for its ulterior motive of providing more entertainment value than the conveyance of complexities of each issue and story.
**News via email newsletters **is slightly better in this regard as it is often less cluttered with next-to-no click-bait images or headlines, and has more of your attention as you read through the content.
**News via podcasts **is moving in the right direction—the content, often delivered in an ultra-personal manner straight through your earbuds and into your mind often benefits from the fact that most podcasts are more authentically detailed in one particular area vs. broad sweeping news content.
News via documentaries & investigative long-form journalism is the best kind of news, what some call “slow news.” There’s even a new startup founded by ex-Editor of The Times and head of BBC News, called Tortoise, which is dedicated exclusively to slowing down our consumption of news while drastically increasing our quality and retention.
Three impactful documentaries about key issues: the prison system, climate change, and the food industry.If you’ve ever read encountered the famed food writer and environmentalist Michael Pollan, you may be familiar with his phrase: “Eat food, not much, mostly plants.” It’s a lovely way to articulate three connected philosophies around food consumption—both in quantity and quality.
I’ve come up with a phrase in a similar format, but which relates to my recommendation for thinking about and consuming the news:
Read the news, not on social, mostly long-form.
Section 2: The 1–3–1 Consumption Framework
I’ve also devised a new approach for how to consume news. You should try to:
Read 1 Article Per Day
This achieves a couple of things: (1) it gives you a daily, detailed dive into one topic, and (2) promotes a healthy distancing from headline-hustling or the act of simply reading the news headlines and pretending you’ve read the full story.
Seek 3 (Different) Perspectives Per Week
One of the key inhibitors to a healthier news environment is our narrowing of the perspectives that we engage with. In large part, this comes from news consumption via platforms (mainly social media) that are incentivized via their advertising models to only show us content that we agree with.
This step of the 1–3–1 framework is intended to break that stranglehold by intentionally seeking out different perspectives on similar topics. So try each week to find three perspectives from various sources that round out your views on a given issue or event.
Watch 1 Documentary Per Month
Make an effort to watch one documentary per month. Documentaries are the most engaging form of investigative journalism, but it’s an engagement that you can feel good endorsing. Documentarians, like my personal favorite Werner Herzog, spend months, sometimes years, researching one particular story or topic. The documentary is a culmination of that work and is one of the truest ways to learn about the complexities of a story while hearing it told through the art of film.
After I published this piece, one of my best friends Sam wrote me a note on LinkedIn with a few additional great sources that I wanted to pass along:
I dig the 1–3–1 method as it relates to news. Obviously, I particularly care about global news, but I really like to mix in international papers to see how the rest of the world is talking about the US in particular but also their own country. Would recommend BBC, Financial Times, France24, Hong Kong Free Press (good for China-related perspective… and obviously banned in China). Added post-publication.
Section 3: My 7 Favorite News Sources
You’re ready to go, eager to improve your news consumption to be a healthier member of society. Great! But how should you get started? Well, here are five of my favorite news curators that are fantastic places to start (and bookmark).
Longreads.com (Long-form articles from across the web)NextDraft (Newsletter focused on mainstream news, culture, and more)Austin Kleon (Newsletter focused on arts, literature, media, and more)Future Crunch (Newsletter focused on positive news all over the world)Bloggingheads.tv (Website where professors debate top societal issues)The Knowledge Project (Podcast focused on practical wisdom)Invisibilia (Podcast focused on the unseeable forces controlling our lives)These sources break many preconceptions about what “news” is—it is not simply the events of today, but the collective events we experience across a wider timeframe.
Therefore, at the end of the day, we should be focused not on how many news stories we can recite, but the depth of understanding we have about fewer stories that mean more.
This post was inspired by a text from my cousin—thank’s Al. ☺️