Detoxing and Retoxing with Quality Content
Having one foot in the new world and the other foot in yesteryear is an interesting schism, especially in regards to my media consumption. I am a voracious reader and at any given time, you can find at least four or five tabs open on my web browser with news stories ranging from The New York Times, Broadly by Vice or Refinery29. At the same time, I also value consuming news in its physical form and thoroughly enjoy reading magazines (although for both financial and spatial reasons, I mostly devour them on my iPad). I generally subscribe to five or six magazines, which I read cover-to-cover at the moment that they are available to me to do so.
What is most striking about the two days in which I monitored my own media consumption is that when I am not in ‘work mode’, I generally check out and allow myself a reprieve from my every day media consumption. A detox, if you will. But when I am supposed to be actively engaged, I retox and am perhaps overly engaged. I toggle between the two modes and consume stories from the moment I arise in the morning, to just before I go to bed in the evening. On the weekends, I generally stay off of my computer and away from the news. Save for the Sunday New York Times, I do not really read too much, mostly because that is what my weekdays are for.
I do not really watch a lot of TV, and I most certainly do not watch traditional broadcast news. It is mostly because of two things; for one, I do not own a TV here in Los Angeles; secondly, the media center does not have sound or closed captioning for all of the televisions that show the news. So as much as I love the BBC or NBC Nightly News (and for as much as I have watched both since I was in high school), they are simply not available to me and thus removed from my life.
A great deal of my consumption occurs on my smartphone or on my computer. I read The Skimm, Lenny and the New York Times newsletter on my phone and everything else (like People.com, Vox, The New Potato, Broadly by Vice, Refinery29, and AJ+) on my computer.
I actually subscribe to the New York Times because I found myself going over the allotment of free stories by the first week of each month. But I am a minority. I know my cohort does not, and perhaps never will. The idea that they would pay for content is almost egregious, especially when there is a plethora of free content available just a click away. And if I am honest, it did hurt a bit to financially commit to a subscription to New York Times, but I (and as I am finding, most of my cohort), place a great deal of value in quality content and tend to gravitate towards that.
This is a valuable realization, because in order for media companies to continue to be viable, they need to understand the importance of quality content, keep it free (or keep the cost low) and find a way to still generate revenue. Millenials will continue to consume content and probably more so than any other generation because of the many ways by which the media is available to us, but it will be up to the media companies to find a profitable way to do so. I do not think that any one company has yet been able to complete the equation, although Vox and Vice are doing a pretty stellar job thus far. It will be interesting to see how financially viable new media models will be and how old models will adapt in order to remain viable.
