My news stack

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Tuesday night it hit 14 degrees, which is not unheard of here, but is also not what most days are like, thank God. I didn’t have any meetings planned until lunchtime, so I decided this would be an excellent day in which to sleep in.

When I rolled out of bed at 10 minutes to 7 (I am, my wife tells me, bad at sleeping in, but to be fair, that is almost an hour and a half later than I normally get up) I padded into the kitchen and started the coffee. I noticed the sunshine coming in the kitchen window, the hoarfrost on the grass in the backyard, the cats under my feet. I feel peace and calm.

Then I realize I had left my phone in the bedroom.

As soon as I picked up my phone and scrolled though the social media feeds, I find myself getting angry about things the current President is doing. I find myself reading articles - almost all opinion pieces – about how bad it is. I feel the urge to respond, to chime in “me too!

Then it hits me – I’m doing it again. It’s me. The problem is me.

I do not have to live this way. I had a “before the phone” experience and an “after the phone” experience that morning, and trust me, the before experience was better.

The problem isn’t my phone – it’s a tool, like the hammer someone uses to hit a mugging victim is not the problem. The hammer is agnostic, and so is the phone. In both cases, the user is at fault.

I’m not so willing to give the platforms a similar break, though. Unlike the hammer, or the phone, they are operating exactly as their creator intended: manufacturing stimulation, generating outrage, pulling me deeper and deeper into engagement. If it’s designed to be addictive, and you are addicted, it’s hard to blame the addict for falling into a trap someone set for you.

The only way to avoid the trap is to stay out of the woods.

I’m not giving up my phone – given my work and the environment I live in, that’s untenable. But, I can change how I interact with it.

I deleted social media apps from my phone.

I still have Instagram on my phone, but I don’t get “lost” on Instagram the way I do on other apps. If it becomes a problem, it will have to go too, but I like taking occasional “in the moment” pictures and sharing them, and seeing yours.

My desire to stay informed is at odds with my desire to remain sane.

Unlike a lot of folks, apparently, I don’t doom scroll in the evenings. Instead, for me, it’s morning that is the problem. I’ve used my morning cup of coffee to scroll social media to see what has happened while I was asleep. But honestly, that’s a very innefficent use of time, and algorhythims are not a great filter for deciding what I should be reading.

I need three kinds of news: Global, national, and local. Of the three, arguably, the local has the most impact on my day to day life. The crime wave in my neighborhood or the selection of a garbage collection contractor has far greater impact on my daily quality of life than does the potential tarrif on goods made in Mexico.

I changed my news stack

Starting local, and moving outwards:

We subscribe to our local paper – the Clarion Ledger. It’s not a great paper – like many legacy media, it’s been gutted, but it’s at least as deep as what I would glean from social media, and it doesn’t have an algorithm. I read the weekend edition local coverage to get an overview of what’s rising to the surface.

I also read Mississippi Today, our state’s nonprofit news organization. (Find your local nonprofit newsroom here, and then donate money to them). They are the best at telling me what’s happening at the state level. Again, state level news is far more important than national in terms of my daily life. A 10% sales tax on groceries impacts my life much more than whatever happens to the national income tax, and is far more in my control to influence as well. They have an app, so I can read it in an algorithm-free environment as well.

This week, I added a subscription to The Guardian’s weekly news magazine to the mix, and installed the Guardian’s app to my phone. They are a UK based news org, and so, in an age where US media is in a flurry to bend the knee to this current administration, having a trustworthy outside perspective is valuable. This gives me both (US) national and international coverage, is well written, and I like paper-based media – the act of sitting down with a cup of coffee to “read the news”.

It’s worth noting that all of these sources cost me money. But paying to actually read news means I take it seriously, and if you are not paying for a product, you ARE the product.

I still have social media accounts, but I have to be at my desk to use them – I can’t doomscroll while sitting on my couch, watching a movie, or at the table while eating Cheerios, or, God help me, at a stoplight. No, just like we did in 1995, I have to go into a separate room in my house and turn on a machine to see that part of the Internet.

I’ll report back next month on how it’s working for me.