Adam Pasick: What I Read
.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 friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from a conversation with Adam Pasick, managing editor for Atlantic Media's forthcoming business site.
I get almost everything through Google Reader and Twitter. I have a few hundred RSS feeds that I subscribe to in Google Reader--it's very efficient--and I follow more than a hundred news sources and bloggers on Twitter, using the Seesmic app. Basically I’m trolling for links, starting with my morning coffee. Google Reader automatically creates a public page of the items I’ve shared.
The problem with getting all that information is that it’s not prioritized, so reading the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal (which I get in hard copy), the FT and Reuters.com helps me to see what their editors think is important. I also read a lot of print magazines: The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, The Week, National Geographic and The Economist.
When it comes to blogs, most of what I like is focused on finding interesting ideas, whether they're in business or culture or technology: Kottke, Waxy, Daring Fireball, Fimoculus, and Felix Salmon among others. There’s work stuff and there’s fun stuff, and the line between the two tends to blur.
When I moved to Washington from New York I lost the hour of daily reading I used to have on the subway, so I don’t read as many books as I used to. Now I go through about one every other week. I also use the Kindle app on my iPhone--it works surprisingly well. Since the move I’ve given up cable TV, so for television I hook up my computer to a projector and watch Hulu, Netflix on Demand, iTunes, Amazon Unboxed, and whatever else I can find online, plus the channels I pull in with a digital terrestrial antenna. Finally, radio: NPR in the morning, This American Life and Radiolab as podcasts, and WNYC's New Sounds as I'm falling asleep.