Old Habits Die Hard

When I was young, my parents subscribed to the Tuscaloosa News, a daily broadsheet publication in my hometown in Alabama. We were also the rare Southern family who received the Sunday New York Times, which I didn’t like because there was no “funnies” section. We watched the NBC nightly news with Tom Brokaw almost every night. On the way to school, my dad played NPR on the car radio, and on Fridays we listened to stories by Kathryn Tucker Windham, whose elegant drawl made me nostalgic for the bygone days of an era I never knew.

A lot has changed in the decades since, but the bulk of my habits and preferences formed long ago. I still read the Tuscaloosa News, though not daily, to stay informed on the issues surrounding my family and friends (and Alabama football). I don’t subscribe to it, but I read it online when someone shares an interesting article on Facebook.

I still take advantage of my parents’ New York Times Subscription by using their password to access articles, and I receive an email with a friendly “Good morning. Here’s what you need to know:” every day, which starts my morning in a familiar, yet less leisurely than reading a paper, manner.

I must have missed the experience of reading an actual newspaper, because I recently subscribed to the Los Angeles Times Sunday paper, and got a free USC Trojans blanket for my trouble. Now that I think about it, I don’t know that I’ve received it in a couple weeks. I’ll have to check on that.

I still listen to NPR as well, but rather than finding the frequency on my car radio, I play the NPR One app, or a This American Life podcast on my iPhone, occasionally interrupted by Siri as she directs me to my destination.

I like to think NBC News is still my preferred national network, but since I don’t have cable I find I spend more time reading the news than watching. When I do watch the news, I stream the previous night’s “The Daily Show” as I go about my morning routine. More and more, I find I eschew traditional news broadcasts for short web videos and articles.

While my methods of consuming media have changed over time, my preferences in publications largely have not. In the changing news environment, the traditional outlets have a huge advantage in having time-tested credibility over upstart web outlets. The habits that the older generations developed in their early years will carry traditional outlets far, but new outlets are already creating new consumption habits in the younger generations.

One outlet that has done a particularly good job of adapting to the modern climate is NPR. They have made their programming easy to access through smartphones and the web, while incorporating video, photography, and text in meaningful ways. I find that ease of use is my highest priority when searching for news.

Having a variety of ways for one to consume the news is a huge advantage for a multimedia outlet, so when NPR has content on traditional radio as well as web, smartphone apps, podcasts, and text for web, it allows their stories to have a far greater reach than other outlets’ stories.