I know. It’s weird. Why would anybody write a post about a Morning News ration? Well, it’s because the internet has made the morning news about a bazillion posts long.
First off, let’s face it, the internet is a very very very deep hole. You can start off with one article and move on and on and on and on. I use the concept of ration to essentially tell myself, my ‘better’ self, that I know it’s really entertaining and all that jazz but maybe I should put a cap on it. Since I’m over-educated I tend to try to put a cap on it, not on it. So I realized that I just can’t keep going down that rabbit hole that winds up with me following clickbait after clickbait after clickbait. So, let me tell you what I do.
First, I need to tell you that I’m a Chrome user. Chrome is, of course, a Google product. Originally, I was a Mosaic user and the first search engine that I used was one called Alta Vista. Back in those days I was a newspaper reader. Actually, I was a newspaper reader long before I ever touched a computer.
Let’s face it, America used to get its news on one of three channels on the television. I was never a big news fan as a young person. I had other interests. I didn’t really start reading the newspaper until I started delivering it in high school. Later when I went to college my girlfriend got a paper route and we did it together to make ends meet in our little apartment in the student ghetto. We became somewhat successful at it and by the time my girlfriend was no longer my girlfriend, a couple of years later, I was deeply involved in distributing newspapers. At the end of my morning route I would go home, take the paper to my desk, light up a smoke, pour myself a cup of coffee and “News Out” as I liked to say. I did that for years, as in, over a decade.
I liked it. I really did. Well, I didn’t wind up smoking cigarettes that whole time, and I do miss the cigarette smoking with the coffee in the newspaper, but I’ve kind of moved on. By the mid-1990s I was starting to realize that newspapers were headed in a really bad direction in terms of the word longevity. They were going to become a thing of the past, as in terms of sitting down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and reading the paper. Hopefully, the cigarettes will disappear as well but I’m certain it won’t be any time in the near future due to the fact that so much of the world’s population has yet to enjoy the wonderful experience of nicotine addiction.
So today, it’s not a cigarette and coffee and a newspaper, it’s a cup of coffee and a web browser called Chrome. But before I open, well, actually right after I open the web pages for my morning shot of news, I set the timer on my cell phone for 10 minutes. I open the pages all at once because the Google Chrome web browser allows me to right click on a tab that I use to save my favorite news sources and open the pages that I designate. It opens them all up at once and I start getting my 10 minute morning fix of the news. I will tell you that my web browser has the following news sources which are listed in alphabetical order: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and NPR. Also listed are Google News as well as the four local ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates so that I can get a little local news. I give myself 10 minutes, which, as you can imagine, is simply enough time to go over a very basic scan of the top stories. Anything that I want to look at in depth I simply save the heading or storyline to a file I call Research. I may or may not get back to the story of the storyline, depending on my schedule for the day or week and how significant the storyline is to my curiosity. At the present time I am considering using some of the headlines or story lines to utilize as topics for my website BS wanderings.
Why limit myself to only ten minutes a day? Well, actually I don’t but I do limit that initial examination of today’s news to 10 minutes primarily because I think the news has become more of a deep rabbit hole and less of an informative source for the reality in which I live. Call me a skeptic but, I think competition for the almighty dollar, or rather competition for the shrinking attention span and expanding number of dollars, has become significantly more important than ethics or morality In terms of the information we are being fed by the ever growing fourth estate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t think we need the fourth estate and need them desperately. It’s just that it seems that the profession of journalism is becoming significantly less professional because it’s not necessarily good news that the public wants, it seems to me that the public is more interested in entertainment than ever before and the ability to become a pseudo-journalist is easy as simply writing a blog post.
Like this one.
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