The Page Flip vs. The Headline Scroll: Which News Leaves You Happier?
It's only March 13th. Yet the 2020s are adhering to (my) prediction this would be a turbulent decade. Resilience science is practically a field of study now—hat tip to Chef Jose Andreas and World Central Kitchen for being early practitioners in this burgeoning discipline.
Terrestrial, regional news can orient, calm and lift the spirits. It took weeks-long wildfires in 2017 for this chord-cutting household to buy a TV antenna. Tuning into the daily CALFIRE updates was incredibly calming during the mornings we dashed around to get ready for work. We didn't listen to every word, but it was reassuring knowing *someone* was monitoring and responding to events.
Flipping the pages of a reliable newspaper is the best way to consume news for people who know how to navigate the medium. But there is a hump for a reader, who first feels overwhelmed and stupid for not knowing which headlines to skip. For supplemental news updates throughout the day, a quality, reliable terrestrial call-in radio station is invaluable, informative, and calming. We dialed our radio yesterday to KGO AM 810 and, to our delight, it still works and is still staffed with human hosts around the clock.
Think of all the ways to "stay informed" or "feel informed". One could flip on the TV to consume cable news (MSNBC, Fox, CNN), or follow stories via social media, or type events into a search engine, or visit a quicksand news site like Slate, The Daily Beast, or Buzzfeed. I'm guilty of dropping the newspaper flipping routine when I tune into Twitter too early in the day. Wake-and-scroll makes for an energized, alert but ultimately disorganized day. And I slip into weeks of wake-and-scroll all the time.
Flipping a newspaper is like weekly exercise. I fall off the routine and regularly have to renew my practice of it.
Quantity of stories:
The newspaper flip scores highest here, and cable news zombie-watch scores lowest.
Variety of stories:
The newspaper flip and magazine flip again scores highest here.
After rating for those two categories, other medium-of-consumption effects come to mind that could be worth rating in the future:
- Calming and ennervating
- Calming yet invigorating
- Alarming and sapping (leading to burnout)
- Alarming & alerting
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
