Adding Some News Back Into My Life

As I wrote about in a previous post, I’ve been on a news fast for a while. This year I’ve started to break that fast ever so slightly, by experimenting with adding some news back into my life. I decided to do this not because I was feeling out of touch with every day events, was unable to keep up with conversations at social gatherings, or even because other areas of my life were being limited for a lacking worldview.

I decided to add some news back mainly because I usually work from home and was looking for a way to more strongly connect to the outside world, primarily from an international perspective. For most of my professional career, travel had been a considerable component of whatever I was doing at the time. A good amount of that travel was international travel.

I can’t say that I particularly miss the travel component of work at the moment and do find that not traveling has been extrememly beneficial to me over the past few years. Living in NYC means that I’m never bored and the city provides plenty of opportunities to stay engaged and connected with the outside world. My wife and I have also been fortunate to travel internationally on vacation on a semi-regular basis throughout the years as well.

I do find that I began to miss more regular exposure to an international setting. As I write this and look at the sources of news I’m beginning to allow back into my life, I realize that the desire to increase this exposure has been a big driver in adding some news back into my life.

So far the experiment seems to be working pretty well. I record the daily BBC World News morning broadcast each day and listen to the first half of it while having breakfast. I subscribed to Monocle magazine last year and try and find some time to work through it each month. I listen to WBGO a jazz and NPR affilate out of Newark, NJ, each morning and late afternoon. WBGO broadcasts what is, at least for me, a good schedule of news briefs on each half hour in the morning and then again in the evening, rather than each half hour throughout the day. I try and remember to switch to WNYC at least once a day to get the daily local NYC NPR summary too.

I download the Financial Times weekend edition to my Kindle each Saturday and scan the news sections and try to spend some extra time enjoying the Weekend section throughout the weekend. I found that even though I much prefer to page through the print version of the Financial Times Weekend Edition, the FT unfortunately does not offer weekend only print subscriptions to US subscribers. Downloading the Kindle edition for $0.75 is the least expensive and most convenient way to have access to the Weekend Edition’s content.

I haven’t tried to add the Sunday New York Times back into the rotation, as I found that when I did subscribe to it, I would need to set aside a solid chunk of time to focus on it, otherwise I just felt frustrated when it would sit on the coffee table only partially processed each weekend.

This slow leak of news back into my life seems to be working so far. I’m starting to feel more of a connection with the larger world as a whole, rather than seen throught the bubble that NYC can be sometimes. I think what concerns me is that if I don’t keep a close eye on the stream of information, my natural curiosity, if not kept somewhat in check, can slowly, or maybe even pretty quickly, cause the stream become an overwhelming, overflowing, and raging river! In an attempt to prevent this, I’m trying to temper my natural curiosity so that the news stream doesn’t become more draining than enlightening. I’ll be curious to see if the process of controlling the stream gets easier and doesn’t end up becoming a drain on me in and of itself.

(As an aside, I wrote this post in two parts, between yesterday and today. I found myself spending more time than usual not really rolling with it and trying to get this last paragraph, which I wrote today, just right. I can’t tell if it was my prior English training telling me to get it just right or me trying to figure out exactly how this news experiment has been working for me. As I write this I think it’s more the latter than the former.)