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How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. Lizzie O'Leary, a Washington D.C.-based correspondent for Bloomberg Television, spoke to us from Natchez, Mississippi, where she was covering the recent floods.
I usually wake up around 4:30 or 5 in the morning because I do a lot of morning TV, and the first thing I do, before I'm even out of bed, is roll over, look at my iPhone, look at the top and most read stories on Bloomberg, and read through my Twitter feed for 15 or 20 minutes, which tends to give me a pretty good sense of what people are talking about in the journalism and business world pretty quickly. The sad thing is I subscribe to The New York Times and The Washington Post but I leave the house sometimes before they're even there. I'm a dual iPad/iPhone person, so on either one I'll also usually read the top few stories at the Times and the Post.
During the day, things are coming at me fairly constantly. There are four main categories: 1) stuff coming through my Twitter feed (I have TweetDeck up all the time, and I usually get news quicker from Twitter than from the wires); 2) the wires: Bloomberg and the AP; 3) if they get to the house before I'm out the door, the Post and the Times, and I tend to steal The Wall Street Journal from colleagues; 4) stuff I want to read or stuff that pertains to a story I'm currently working on. So, for example, I read the Times-Picayune every day when I was covering the oil spill in New Orleans and now I'm reading The Tennessean and The Clarion-Ledger because I'm covering the floods.