EYE TO EYE
Tools for Taming the Media
The daily onslaught of information made manifest by the Web is both a blessing and a dilemma experienced by anyone with an Internet connection and a few subscriptions. There are any number of individual strategies for dealing with it, so, out of curiosity, we asked a couple of power users — Clay Shirky and John Battelle — to share their go-to media apps.
John Battelle Founder, Federated Media
Given that I curate a media product and am addicted to industry news, I consume a ton of media-related services.
First and foremost is my RSS reader (Shrook for Mac), which I know is passé, but it's the only way I can quickly scan headlines from nearly 150 different sites -- industry, local and national news, and other aggregators like Hacker News, Techmeme, The Browser, Mediagazer and more.
Second is email. Again, old school, but it's where I get curated headlines from services like Percolate and News.me, as well as human powered goodness like Jason Hirschhorn's Media ReDEFined, Dave Pell's NextDraft, I Want Media and FM's DailyBuzz newsletters.
I'm not a huge fan of apps, as anyone who reads my site knows, but I do peruse Flipboard to tame my Twitter and Facebook feeds. And I use Evernote like a maniac to cull the web for projects I'm working on (like my next book, or a new project I'm considering that must remain stealth at this point).
I think that about covers it!
Clay Shirky Associate Arts Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence, NYU
At this point, my media diet is like Istanbul, layers of ancient and modern all mixed together. My main dashboard is Netvibes, the RSS reader (so 2004!), which I use to track several generalist sites -- Crooked Timber and 3Quarks daily, Slashdot and BoingBoing, Guardian and Al Jazeera.
I'm addicted to reddit, as all right-thinking people are, and check r/politics and r/worldnews daily.
After that, a lot of it comes via email (so 1974!). The three media mails I most look forward to start with thelistserve.com (it's usually the oddest of the three). Next is News.me, a) because they use click-stream data from bit.ly, so they have a better raw filter, and b) no matter how many thousands of things people shared yesterday in my stream, they just mail me 5 links a day. I also subscribe to Conor Friedersdorf's "The Best of Journalism," three great stories curated by an actual human being.
The long tail of email is a bunch of Google alerts on various subjects I'm tracking -- Kony, newspaper economics, stuff like that.
But for all that, the most important tool I have isn't an application, it's discipline. There are lots of applications that start with the premise "Did you know that there are interesting things on the Internet that _you haven't seen yet???_ (Which: yes, we know.) The trick is to adopt both tools and practices that maximize relevance instead of volume, and minimize time spent searching in favor of time spent reading. Tools can help with that (as with News.me), but the most important thing isn't the tool, but the mindset of the user.
