My News Consumption Habits
A lot has changed since my last news consumption blog. As my graduate school life moves on, my screen time has increased drastically because of school work — sending and receiving emails, doing research, and writing articles. I have become sick of staring at screens and started to miss reading things in hard copy. At the end of last semester, I finally made up my mind and subscribed to The New Yorker.
As I slowly cut down the time I spend on Facebook, I do not get news from social media as much as I used to. Even though I am still a big fan of Snapchat and Instagram, I mainly use those two platforms for recreational purposes. I started to read The New Yorker before I go to bed or when I have a large chunk of time to spare.
I enjoy the long, investigative stories on The New Yorker because they are well-written (compared to daily news) and have a unique voice. For instance, I recently read a six-page long story called “Can Football Be Saved?” which is, well, about football. Compared to most sports news, the story is more in depth and critical in analyzing the problems of the current football culture.
Every morning I receive an email from The New Yorker, which contains links to more stories. It makes a great read when I’m on the run or when I can’t really sit down and read a magazine for a long period of time. I am currently slowly going through a long investigative story “The Deportees Taking Our Calls” on my phone whenever I have a couple of minutes to spare. It focuses on the illegal El Salvadoran immigrant community that originated in the late 90s and how most of these Americanized immigrants can’t really make a living back in El Salvador once deported.
I do still receive push alerts from the CNN and NYTimes app on my phone, but I rarely open them, because most of these news apps are not really well developed. Sometimes, when I open a notification that seems interesting, it leads me to a video rather than a text story (which I can’t watch while walking down the street). Other times, when I click on an “old” notification from several hours back, the story has been updated to such an extent that it looks nothing like the original headline.
Since it’s the beginning of the semester, I am busying running errands and getting started with school life, so I don’t use my phone that often compared to during winter break. But I do enjoy reading a little bit of The New Yorker every night before I go to bed, and I would like to keep that a long-term habit.
