The AJ+ morning fix
Part 1: Our engagement team shares their a.m. news routine
At a recent morning meeting, a producer asked some of us to share our morning news routine. The conversation was so useful that we want to share it with you — both for tips on good newsfeeds, podcasts or newsletters, and so that you can get to know us a little better.
For our first installment, we’re bringing you our San Francisco-based engagement team’s morning fix.
Who are we? In short, the engagement team is the graphic gurus, social media sages, razor-sharp writers and viral video producers. We experiment with the aim that our storytelling makes you think, encourages you to share or inspires you to act. We push all AJ+ staff to interact with our audience by furthering conversations about the most important global issues.
Here’s what we read or listen to before work:
Dolly, our in-house illustrator and producer, likes music first thing in morning — she reads Fader while listening to Frank Sinatra. On public transit she might scan 538’s Significant Digits and /worldnews on Reddit, and checks out the South China Morning Post.
Shadi prefers some good storytelling while in morning traffic. Our executive producer and Jedi is into podcasts like This American Life, Love and Radio and Death, Sex and Money + investigations like Serial and life hacks/insights from TED Radio Hour. She also browses FB, TW and IG for daily news trends. She’s been going down social media rabbit holes reading up on ISIS lately, for obvious reasons.
Hadley tunes into good ol’ Morning Edition on the NPR news app. She also reads newsletters first thing, like TheSkimm, 538’s Significant Digits and Politico’s Playbook for all the politics she’d ever want. For this producer’s non-digital news, she tries to keep pace with long-form stories in The New Yorker.
Alexia checks out BBC Arabic podcasts, in addition to Harpers/The Paris Review or any kind of real paper long-form print reading on the commute to work. When Alexia, one of our producers, gets to work, she takes a look at the NYT, Twitter, our AJ+ Trends Report ❤❤❤ and the Buzzfeed newsletter.
Skyler dives into music news from the crack of dawn — he listens to the latest pop album, then reads music news and reviews on Fader and Pitchfork on the way to work. (He has to be on top of it to give us his weekly column Breaking Beats.) Our resident designer and visionary also digs the Another Round podcast.
Tawanda takes in lots of newsletters, including Politico’s Morning Score and Huddle, Africa Confidential and The New York Times’ First Draft newsletter (he reads these at 3am — getting a major jump on the news day). Tawanda, a producer, also scans his global correspondent Twitter list and /worldnews on Reddit. Oh, and he listens to Reuters TV while getting ready for work.
Sarah listens to NPR’s 5-minute hourly news summary and BBC World Service’s Global News Podcast. Sarah, a producer, skims the main headlines via a news aggregator app (Pulse) that she’s curated for herself. She usually reads the Dawns Digest newsletter, 538’s Significant Digits and a couple of region-specific newsletters. She also loves listening to PRI’s The World episode from the previous evening. On less hectic days, she’ll spend her commute with her nose in The New Yorker.
Katrine is all about hard news in the morning. Our social media editor is constantly scrolling through Twitter and Reddit’s /worldnewsvertical. Katrine doesn’t like reading on the bus, so she tunes into NPR — mixing it up between local San Francisco affiliate KQED, New York’s WRVO or Boston’s WBUR. She also checks what’s happening at the White House, and looks for news out of NASA.
Adrian focuses on breaking news and politics. This engagement producer uses the Hourly News App and has curated lists on Twitter (his political list is his fave). He also likes Memeorandum: The top news from across the political spectrum.
Kevin, a multi-platform producer, has a morning news routine with an international bent. Our favorite Frenchie keeps us apprised of news from abroad, and likes outlets like Libération, Le Monde, Le Figaro from France. He reads newsletters from the BBC, NYT Now, Foreign Policy Morning Brief and Vice, and skims local and regional news in search of those lesser-known stories that will resonate with our audience.
