The Latest Process Revisions To My ‘Print’ Media Consumption

One of the things I’ve been wanting to get around to is describing the recent changes I’ve made to how I deal with blogs, news, and newsletters. This is something that I switch up now and then, trying to find the right overall process for me. Tracy just responded to Alex Sirac on this very topic so now seems like a good time.

With the increase in blogs added to my feed reader, the experience of browsing through every morning was beginning to feel a bit heavy. I’ve moved any news source whose feed I had there that also exists on Apple News to a follow in that app instead.

This separation actually helps me cognitively transition between mostly blogs in one app to just news articles in another. I’ve got a Shortcut that finds the web URL of any article in Apple News and saves it to my Linklog folder on Instapaper, so that’s still easily kept up to date.

At any rate, my winnowing process remains the same: in the morning before I get out of bed I browse Mail, NetNewsWire, and Apple News. For the former two anything interesting gets sent to Instapaper, while for the latter I save in-app.

I’m basically not using the main Apple News screen. Instead I simply click through each of my followed channels to see what’s new in each since the previous morning.

New for me, and inspired by maybe Colin Walker or maybe some other blogger, is that I’ve started not reading in any sort of Reader View unless I find the website itself substantially irritating. I’m doing this more for blogs than other things, since I’m more interested in how this or that blogger decides to present their stuff than in how a news organization does, but even for news I’m using Reader View less.

I’ll then a couple of times a day read a batch of what’s been saved to Instapaper or Apple News. NetNewsWire gets checked for new items several times a day, but I’m only rechecking Apple News that one time in the morning.

I’m also back to debating how I want to handle newsletters. Do I want to get them via email or do I want just to follow their RSS feeds? Or do I want to go back to using something like Stoop to subscribe to them?

I know that a lot of openweb and indieweb people just want to stuff everything into their feed reader but that approach obviously does not work for me. It’s clearly cognitively useful for me to have virtual divisions between distinct forms of “print” communications.