Media Consumption Reflection
Since enrolling in an intensive graduate school program, my media consumption has become much more disjointed. I mostly get my news on the go — listening to KCRW or KPCC in the car, on twitter while waiting in line for coffee, from a CNN chyron running across the jumbo-screen in the Annenberg Lobby. I’m still informed, and I know the major news events of the day, but I rarely dig into a story or read as many feature-length pieces as I’d like.
Before I enrolled at USC, I had a marketing job for a giant bureaucratic corporation where it was easy to hide out. I completed most of the work I was assigned early in the day with relatively little oversight from managers. This left me hours most afternoons to trawl the web and read, listen to and think about the news.
As much as I hated being a desk drone, this is the one thing I miss about the job. I can’t help but notice the irony that in many ways I have become a less thoughtful news consumer since coming to journalism school.
Tracking my daily news consumption has only reaffirmed this feeling. I do try and read the top stories on the New York Times and Los Angeles Times each morning, but after that there is little rhyme or reason to how I consume news.
Instead of coming to a trusted source throughout the day, I tend to scroll through my Twitter feed and click on whatever peaks my interest. This “a la carte” approach to the news allows me more agency as a reader, but I often feel like I’ve missed something important.
In large part thanks to Facebook and Twitter, many different voices now have a platform to share their perspectives. I think this is ultimately a good thing, but it makes it more difficult to come to a consensus on identifying the important issues, but also to come to an agreement on what the basic facts really are.
This fragmentation has made publishers much more reliant on social media. Only two or three years ago, the goal for most new sites was to surface articles as high as possible in Google’s search results. Today SEO has become an afterthought. News sites now build their marketing strategy around appealing to readers as they scroll through their feeds and convincing them to comment, like and importantly share an article. This no doubt contributed to the “echo chambers” and “fake news” phenomena we heard so much about in the wake of the election.
Over the past few months, I’ve gotten the sense that people are beginning to crave trusted news sources that they can return to throughout the day. The onslaught of links coming at you through your social channels has become tiring and anxiety provoking, and people might be willing to pay for comprehensive, thoughtful coverage from outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times.
For my part, I know I’m going to try and take better advantage of my news subscriptions in the future.
