post overload
Lately my “General News” folder in Google has been flooded with stories. Upon doing some digging, I’ve discovered that just a few days ago The New York Times started posting a huge number of stories as evidenced by this graph (edited for relevant information) from Google Reader. This is true of their World and U.S. news feeds both of which I’ve been following for the past year or two.
This looks like a huge increase of roughly 3-5 times as many stories per day. Even before this increase the feeds from NYT were pretty bloated, and I ended up doing more skimming than reading. Who finds all these stories to be relevant? Certainly I don’t. Neither do I have the time to skim the titles anymore. Unsubscribed.
This has gotten me thinking about the fact that most of the news I read is curated by the community of friends I keep on Twitter, Facebook, and the personal blogs that I follow. This represents a fundamental shift in acquiring news. In a sense, I’m using my friends as a relevance filter on the massive amount of data posted online everyday. More and more editorial content is coming from trusted friends, rather than some writer on a payroll. I feel that it’s a good shift, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.