Do you like to read the paper?
I’ll admit, waking up on Sunday morning, putting on my robe, sitting down with a cup of coffee and opening up a New York Times sounds like a great way to spend a morning, right? Well maybe 7-10 years ago it did.
Even though I still have a nostalgic connection to the scenario I just painted, the nostalgia is where it ends. The truth is, for me, that the newspaper is a dead medium that is still in use somehow. So if it’s dead, but not yet dead, it’s a zombie.
Newspaper is an inefficient, and cumbersome way to absorb information. Magazines are even easier to look through than the paper, though you get way more advertisements. I’ll agree that, yes the smell of the newspaper is nice, but I don’t think that is worth the number of trees that are cut down every year to continue this habit.
Why I get my news digitally…
I have an iPhone, an iPad and a Macbook Pro. I can get news on any of those devices at any time without going anywhere to get it and they all stay in sync via Google Reader. Not a single tree needs to get cut down in the publishing and consumption of that news.
By using Google Reader I can pull in any news source I want. I don’t have to just read, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Wired Magazine; I can get all of them online and pull the RSS feeds into Google Reader. In Google Reader right now I monitor 215 RSS feeds; in paper that would look something like this…
…everyday!
When I’m reading a story on my iPad, I don’t need to flip past 15 ads to page C14 to continue my story, worst case I click a link to read the next page.
If I want to know about something specific, I can search within all of my sources in Google Reader.
I can organize all of my sources in folders.
RSS can be used for classifieds, for tech news, for magazines, for blogs, etc, etc.
The best part is, when news happens, it shows up immediately in my RSS reader. If you waited for the newspaper, you’d be one day behind…what’s the point. If you are still a paper person, I encourage you to embrace the freedom of RSS feeds and an RSS aggregator.
Forget that one newspaper, go get the news that you really want and see things from a multitude of perspectives. And forget the robe…for god’s sake put some clothes on!