My fragmented news consumption

Posted Monday, April 2, 2007 at 8:03am in Blogging, Media, PR General  | 

How do you consume your media? I get my fix from a number of methods throughout the day. It’s a bit of a habitual process for me as I tend to use different media as I go about my day from morning until night. Each fitting to the situation I’m in at that particular time.

Morning

On a morning I read my feeds on my phone from Bloglines Mobile. It’s easy enough to turn on my mobile, click a few buttons and be open to 170 feeds from around the blogosphere or, indeed, from general news sites. I’m usually half asleep at that time but the morning fix is a good start to the day.

Once washed and ready my walk to the tube will entail either listening to the radio or a podcast stream from my new phone I mentioned last week. I generally tend to listen to Radio 1’s Chris Moyles Show which has half hourly news bulletins but I’ll sometimes tune into Radio 4 which is a tad more serious than Moylesy, Comedy Dave and Co. No Celebrity Tarzan on Radio 4 that’s for sure.

When I get to the Tube station I usually pick up a copy of the Metro. I like the Metro for its quirky stories, stapled pages (believe me you need a newspaper that won’t fall apart at 8.30am on the Northern Line) and the fact that there’s just enough content to last from end to end. Not to mention it’s free also.

If I’m running late all the Metros are usually gone so I might pick up a tabloid. The Sun for instance.

Work

Once in work I’ll spend 20 minutes catching up on my feeds using the Bloglines web edition and will go on to check them at different points throughout the day. At around 9am I also receive two emails-type-newsletter from the Guardian. The first is the day’s headlines from the Guardian itself and the second is a media briefing outlining what’s making the headlines in the tabloids and broadsheets. The Guardian also sends a weekend briefing on a Monday too.

Evening *

Leicester Square Tube station making my way home I’m usually mobbed by the ‘paper boys’ to take either a London Lite or the London Paper. Yes, mobbed. Have you ever seen them fellas fight among one another to give you a paper? I’m like “dudes, calm down! I only want one, thanks.” Like the Metro, either of these has enough content to allow me to step inside my little bubble, headphones on and forget about the fact that I’m stuck between someone’s armpit headlock stylie.

I read the Standard for a while but the content is quite in-depth and I wouldn’t get half way through it before it was time to hop off the Tube. It’s 50p a pop too.

When I get home I’ll watch either Sky News or BBC News 24 for half an hour. The 24 hour news channels are repetitive so half an hour to an hour is enough before you start feeling a sense of deja vou. I’ll also have a read of the various news sites available for the mobile phone and read some mobile magazines available from this application I’ve started using. Mobizines are magazines (Nuts, NME, Time Out, GQ, Hello! etc.) for the mobile phone built using Mobile Java. They provide small snippets of content from each of the magazines available in Mobizines form. They’re pretty slick and, once you’ve updated the content, very quick too.

It’ll be interesting to see what other media people consume throughout the day so, on that thought, I was going to start a memetag. I then realised how annoying they can be so I won’t bother.

* I do actually have a life some evenings.

technorati tags: media, news, news+consumption

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