Day One: What is News?

First things first. I had to replace the New York Times page as my homepage, obviously. For both browsers I use. At work and home. Yeah, I was in deep.

What to replace it with? I went with the New Yorker (long-form articles) and Science and Nature magazines. That may change depending on how useful I find them, but seems like a good start. I agree with Dobelli that one thing that should replace news consumption is deep reading about how the world actually works, and these three sites qualify. I'm sure I'll find more as this experiment progresses.

The straight news sites are easy to identify and eliminate. I'm having trouble with other semi-news sites, though. Should I keep visiting Facebook? Not exactly news, but it has some of the same bad characteristics. I decide FB is okay for now, so long as I don't overdo it. A few reasons I think this is okay: (1) it is entertainment and clearly identifiable as entertainment and (2) I can control what I see on FB, unlike news which serves me what they think is important. FB has information that may actually personally affect me, or may help me make a decision. So it's a yes for now.

Having said that, if I find I start spending unreasonable time on FB, I may reduce it to once a day or eliminate it altogether.

A more difficult case is io9. It's definitely very newsy, but it also discusses interesting science and technology (usually with links to longer articles on the topics). At first, I told myself no, it's too much like news. In some ways, being an aggregator, it represents the worst of the culture of bite-size news stories.

And then I relented. I've found many good science articles through io9. Plus they do have original long-form articles as well. And there's an element of entertainment rather than news. Maybe I'm already rationalizing...

I expect to eventually limit or eliminate io9 as well, though. I'd like to get my sci-fi and fantasy fix through fiction. But it's in for now.

Lest you think I'm not eliminating much news: overall the majority of the sites I visit are out. Slate, MSN, Yahoo, CNN, NY Times, Wired--all gone. I'm going to have to find some good new reads.