Institute For The Future

Horror of horrors—I am finally done with newspapers

What did it?  Twitter.  O.k., I may be late to the game, many people I know have stopped reading newspapers a long time ago.  By newspapers I mean their physical incarnations.  Many of my colleagues and friends have turned to online news sites, magazines, and blogs.  For me, however, these somehow didn’t provide a good substitute for the “real” thing, particularly as the “real” thing was such a big part of my morning “news with coffee” ritual.  Even when I stopped reading the New York Times in the morning for news, I still read it for feature articles and deep analysis.  That is until a few weeks ago when I got on Twitter… Now I find my morning newspaper just lying there on the kitchen table in a sadly pristine state.  I see it untouched in the morning and in pretty much the same state in the evening, when I return home from work. Every evening I feel slight pangs of guilt as I a put a perfectly good bundle of untouched paper into the recycling bin.  I am not quite ready to give up the subscription but I wonder how long before I take that plunge. What I also noticed is that despite abandoning the paper, I feel more informed and “in the flow” than ever before. The never-ending little twitter stream in the corner of my screen delivers important news and ideas filtered by people I trust and respect.  They are connecting me to things I am really interested in, many times, in the same newspapers and magazines I used to read.  I am micro-reading constantly throughout the day but my reading is much more focused and filtered through the my friends, colleagues, and people whose views I respect. Suddenly I have access to what they are thinking, doing, paying attention to, and in a way that requires hardly any effort on my part.  As I open my computer and see the stream they have created, I feel a sense of gratitude to these people for their generosity—friends, strangers, and familiar strangers who are sharing bits of their lives and thoughts with me. Thank you, my twitter followers and followees.  Good bye, morning paper.