News, in all its forms, is a loaded word at home. Our combined reading habits span the behaviors of a wide spectrum of news consumers (across platforms and continents).
In a nutshell we are proud news junkies, in-depth readers of wars, technology, international coverage, business, art, film, blogs, bottom-up aggregators, self-selecting aggregators, and foreign television newscasts. We skim the surface, turn the pages, scroll through screens, listen to the BBC world news, watch Tanya Beckett in the mornings, and all the while we slice up the information received in semi-conscious waves into new pieces.
We live the news, we write it, we enable its navigation, its channels, feeds. We contextualize it and then re-contextualize several times over as the mood strikes.
Newspapers:
Right now we are missing our daily home delivery of the NY Times. Nearly once a year for the past several, we have chosen to cancel our daily subscription to the Times in favor of saving a few bucks and many trees. Every time we do this, not a week goes by and we miss the paper in the worst possible way. I believe this is our 4th time canceling delivery. We even sampled the Financial Times as a halfway measure this time. It’s not working.
Screens:
We read on screen, all day and often through the night. We need the physical. When all else is bits, we still want something outside of our screens we can handle, fold, crumble, tuck away, bring to the beach, read on the train, forget, drop, leave behind and be done.
Screens will never go away. They will only proliferate. Understanding the context of use for each form is where we’re at. Some folks are getting it (NYTimes, BBC, The Guardian come to mind). Others seem miserably lost (Chicago Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle). Nothing new here. We’ve been tracking the decline of print publications for many years at home.
It’s just now that we see this trend realizing itself finally. The web, blogging and digitization is only one of many factors which helped to create the perfect storm for the news industry.
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