This document discusses the problems with how people consume news today. It argues that news is quickly outdated, news producers have incentives to prioritize quantity over quality, and consuming too much news can hijack people's attention and prevent deeper thinking. It recommends being more selective with news by focusing on publications that add long-term value and reading fewer articles and more books over time.

1. Why You Should Stop
Reading News
We spend hours consuming news because we want to be well informed. But
is that time well spent? News is by definition something that doesn't last. And
as news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality
has decreased.
Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about what we consume: Is this
important? Is this going to stand the test of time — say, in a week or in a
year? Is the person writing this someone who is well informed on the issue?
“[W]e're surrounded by so much information that is of
immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by
the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”
— Nicolas Carr
There are several problems with the way we consume news today:
First, the speed of news delivery has increased. We used to have to wait to
get a newspaper or gossip with people in our town to get our news, but not
anymore. Thanks to alerts, texts, and other interruptions, news find us almost
the minute it's published.
Second, the costs to produce news have dropped significantly. Some
people write 12 blog posts a day for major newspapers. It's nearly impossible
to write something thoughtful on one topic, let alone 12. Over the course of a
year, this works out to writing 2880 articles (assuming four weeks of
vacation). The fluency of the person you're getting your news from in the
subject they're covering is near zero. As a result, you're filling your head with
surface opinions on isolated topics. Because the costs have dropped to near
zero, there is a lot of competition.

2. Third, producers of news attempt to hijack our brains. News producers
perpetuate a culture of “tune in, don't miss out, follow this or you'll be
misinformed, oh wait, look at this!” As you consume more and more of that
kind of news, you have less and less time for what matters.
Fourth, the incentives are misaligned. In part, because there is a lot of
competition, most news outlets feel compelled to offer free news. After all,
everyone else is doing it. However, when the news is free, you still need to
pay people, so you move away from a subscription model that was selling
static ads to a captive audience to a model that's selling the audience to
advertisers. Page views become the name of the game, and the more, the
better. For a lot of people who create news (I won't use the term “journalists”
here because I hold them in high regard), the more page views they get, the
more they are compensated. A lot of these ads aren't just impressions; they're
also giving information about you to the advertisers, but that's another story.
I could go on, but I think you're starting to see the picture now.
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it
consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth
of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need
to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might
consume it.”
— Herbert Simon
The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It's not
important to your life. It's not going to help you make better decisions. It's not
going to help you understand the world. It's not going to help you develop
deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing
it's really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.
The hotels, transportation, and ticketing systems in Disney World are all
designed to keep you within the theme park rather than sightseeing elsewhere
in Orlando. Similarly, once you're on Facebook, it does everything possible,
short of taking over your computer, to prevent you from leaving.

3. But while platforms like Facebook play a role in our excessive media
consumption, we are not innocent. Far from it. We want to be well informed.
(More accurately, we want to appear to be well informed.) And this is the
very weakness that gets manipulated.
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year
reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
— Nassim Taleb
I have a friend who reads The New Yorker, The New York Times, The
Economist, The Wall Street Journal, her local newspaper, and several other
publications. She's addicted. She wants to know everything that's going on
everywhere and to have an informed opinion. She's just like the rest of us —
we all want to know what's going on and have a well-informed opinion. If
we're not well informed, then what are we? I don't want to be ignorant, and
that's just how I'm made to feel if I'm not keeping up.
Despite that, I've stopped consuming news. At first, it was really difficult.
When my friends would start talking about something topical and
emotionally charged and ask me what I thought, I'd have to say I don't know.
This was followed by a “What!?” and “You have to read this” as they took
out their phones to text me a link to an article I would never read. One
hilarious aspect of this situation is that they often expected me to stop the
conversation with them and read the article so I could share in their outrage.
No thanks.
Being well informed isn't regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-
old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be.
Your first thought on something is usually not yours but someone else's.
When all you do is consume, you are not only letting someone else hijack and
direct your attention; you are also letting them think for you.
Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable,
so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days?
Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and
value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what
prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read
books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20
years or so.

4. We're afraid of silence, afraid to be alone with our thoughts. That's why we
pull out our phones when we're waiting in line at a coffee shop or the grocery
store. We're afraid to ask ourselves deep and meaningful questions. We're
afraid to be bored. We're so afraid that to avoid it, we'll literally drive
ourselves crazy consuming pointless information.
Let's close with this quote by Winifred Gallagher: “Few things are as
important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the
precious resource of your free time.”
***
If I'm not adding value to your life on a consistent basis, you should
unsubscribe. Although the irony is that if you unsubscribe, you've just proven
that I am adding value.
Shane Parrish