.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 Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic National Correspondent.
Now that I’ve started blogging, I’ve pretty much stopped reading blogs. I wake up, check my email, the weather, and the front page of the New York Times. I tend to read the Times on paper and on-line simultaneously, I read virtually all of it, and I go back to it probably 25 times a day. I also check out the Washington Post and the LA Times, on-line, but there's not as much in those papers by comparison.
We get up early in my house and by 6:30, 6:45 or so we're ingesting news. I'm training my children to read the actual paper, and they seem to like it. This is sort of like training them to build iceboxes, or to write Baroque madrigals, but it makes me happy. I check out my own blog, to remind myself what I have and have not posted, and then I check the blog e-mail account. I check the Atlantic website, just to see what’s going on there, and I do read my fellow bloggers, Ta-Nehisi, Ambinder, Fallows. I run through a bunch of Middle East websites: I go to Ha’aretz, sometimes the Jerusalem Post, Al Jazeera, and various Arab newspaper sites. I have a Twitter account, but I don’t use it. Even though I never tweet, people sign up for my tweets. Maybe because they know I won't burden them. I’m so old-fashioned that I read Matt Drudge. Also Romenesko (the media industry gossip site) to see which of my friends has been fired. It's not entirely true that I don't read non-Atlantic bloggers--I'll go to Instapundit, Talking Points, maybe, and Jon Chait. These are people who I trust to edit the Web for me.
I usually go to the Daily Beast because I like to see what Tina Brown finds interesting. And RealClearPolitics, which has most of the columnists I want. There are maybe eight to ten a week whose views I’m interested in: Krauthammer, Kristof, Friedman, Ignatius….
Actually, my on-line reading is mainly based on recommendations that are emailed to me by readers of my blog. A lot of the material I wind up linking to comes from them.
I still read magazines mainly on paper. The New Republic, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, the Weekly Standard, Vanity Fair. I think magazines—paper magazines—are an incredibly efficient way to organize information, and they deliver aesthetic pleasure. I appreciate close editing now more than ever. I still like long magazine articles. And with the torrent of shit raining down on us from the blogosphere, I appreciate the Atlantic and the New Yorker as places where someone has gone to the trouble of clearing out the shit.