Obtaining News Online

Kayla Brun
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

All my news consumption is from being on my phone.

I mostly get my news from the news app on my iPhone. I have notification set up for CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, NBC News, The Washington Post and National Geographic.

There’s an upside and downside to having my notifications on for all these news sources.

The upside is that I can see what news is most important. If more than one news source is posting a story on the same topic, I know the story is big. Those stories are the ones I pay more attention to and those are the notifications I try to read first.

The downfall is that I get a bunch of notifications each day which makes it difficult to keep up. There is a lot of news and a lot of articles being written so I find myself saying “I’ll read that later,” then never get back to it.

This is why the stories pile up. It’s overwhelming to see all the news notifications and then attempting to read them all in one sitting. This leads to me not thoroughly reading the story or notification. Another thing to note is that the notification deletes on its own after a week.

Screenshot of iPhone news app notifications. Screenshot from Sunday. (Kayla Brun)

I do try to keep up by reading all notifications on the day I receive them, but that doesn’t happen often. I read only what the notification says if the topic doesn’t appear in other notifications. I will click the notification to read the full story if I see that the topic comes up multiple times.

When I’m going through the notifications and I see a topic appear more than once, I delete all notifications but one on that topic. This helps cut down the number of stories I need to read. I don’t pay too much attention to which news site notification gets deleted. Maybe I should?

I’ve also noticed that I don’t pay attention to the politic-free or opinion notifications. I assume that information isn’t as important as the political stuff, although I would imagine that sometimes I am wrong.

I also get my news from Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter has its own section for news, but I follow some political people as well. I currently only follow Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. I also follow The Washington Post, The Associated Press, NowThis, and The New York Times. I follow these pages because I don’t go to Twitter’s news section often. Following these pages makes it more likely that I will see the news.

Screenshot of Twitter’s search engine. News is from Sunday. (Kayla Brun)

On Facebook I don’t follow political people or newspapers, but my friends share videos about things going on in the world. I only follow the NowThis page. That page sometimes shares videos from a page called NowThis Politics. NowThis has many other pages like NowThis Entertainment and NowThis Sports.

Facebook posts from the page NowThis. Screenshot from Sunday. (Kayla Brun)

I think my mews consumption is OK. I don’t get too much international news, but if I do, it’s from Facebook unless the international story is big. I know I should pay some attention to sports news, but I can’t get myself to care enough unless it has politics involved like the kneeling did. I also just really need to get into the habit of reading my news app notifications as soon as I get them, so I don’t feel overwhelmed.

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