Day 1 of paid-only news

Man, what a wild news day! Or at least I think it was: In my first full day of relying only on news I pay for, my brain felt considerably less plugged into the usual whirlwind of Trump’s crazytown, but I can’t say I felt any less informed. A few notes from my paid-only news diet experiment:

  • One thing I am definitely less informed on is the meta-narrative of how news develops. I got the news alerts that Rod Rosenstein was likely out and then checked the NYT and WaPo a couple times and saw that he’s staying until at least Thursday. I missed what I’m guessing was a whipsaw on Twitter in between. 
  • While I don’t feel like I’m missing much news (yet), I do feel like I’m missing the experience of the news. Early on Twitter offered me the thrill of not just being in-the-know but something that felt like participating in a breaking news story. I now know that sensation is one of the illusions conjured by social media platforms, but most importantly, I don’t miss it. I’m OK reading the news rather than living it. 
  • I’m really out of practice in finding news after growing so accustomed to news finding me. The day’s big stories found me thanks to alerts and homepages (and also: newsletters—I signed up for a bunch of newsletters from the publications I subscribe to). But it’s really tough to find the more specialized news that I care about. For instance, news of the launch of The Markup and a report on Vox’s revenues first reached me as links sent by friends. Partly I’ve lost the muscle memory of knowing which page of a printed newspaper to go to or cycling through a few bookmarks or homepages. But it’s largely because news apps aren’t built for browsing: I couldn’t find those stories displayed anywhere in the  WSJ and NYT apps and had to resort to searching. Â