#101, I'm a journalist/mom. I'm changing the way I read news. This is how.

Sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love less, and differently.

In addition to writing about drinks and lice, I’m the editor of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. The below is a version of a post I wrote for Nieman Lab this week, with like 5% more editorializing/meanness added.

I was worried about the response to this piece from other journalists, but the response has been, actually, fantastic and extremely +1. There are SO SO many people out there, even and especially including people who absolutely need to read news for work, who also hate that national news is taking up so much space in their brains. We can do this differently. We can be informed citizens while living lives as whole, fulfilled human being with agency; we do not have to invite in this constant sense of lurking dread.¹

If you are thinking about changing your own news habits, please leave a comment and tell me how.

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For the last eight years, I’ve spent hours with my children while simultaneously also on my phone. If I read bad news while I’m with my kids, my reaction to their normal kid behaviors is disproportionate; I find myself snapping at them over things that normally wouldn’t bother me. Sometimes, it’s because the news I’m reading is very sad, bad news about kids who are far less fortunate than my own three. In the moment, I can’t fully wrap my head around that disconnect — the fact that some children are suffering or dying while my own children are safe and are not, in that moment, explicitly acknowledging how lucky they are. Instead what they’re doing is acting like human beings, but what I’m reading on my phone is bringing out the worst in me.

When the news is good, I’ve also ignored the kids, because I’m busy reading the good news and want to gloat, to read more and more of it, to read reactions to it — happy reactions, from people who agree with me; sad or unhinged reactions, from people who don’t agree. The kids get more time on the iPad, or another episode, or a dinner of snacks because I’m sucking the good news in, even after it stops feeling good.

I’ve read bedtime stories with a kid on one side, scanning my phone on the other side, messing up the words I’m reading aloud because I got distracted by the news.

It didn’t take the 2024 presidential election to make me realize this is a bad way to live. I already knew I should stop. Last week, though, I realized I had to stop, before I got sucked down, before more years passed, before I spent my entire adult life this way.

Because yes, right now I can say I’m doing this in large part for my kids. But more broadly, my news reading habits are affecting my human relationships. If I didn’t have kids, the habits would be the same.

I’m still a working journalist and a huge part of my job is to read and follow the news. I’ll still do both those things because I love them. But sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love a little less, and differently. Here are the things I’m changing:

I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news. I have resubscribed to print newspapers because they are finite; when you’re done, you’re done. Here, I’m taking a cue from Kelsey Richards, the “print princess” and “media literate hottie” who reads print newspapers on TikTok. “When you read print media, you give yourself that space to feel those emotions compared to if you read something online and then you immediately switch over to Instagram…and then you go on Twitter….and then you go on Facebook…and then a CNN notification comes up on your phone,” she told Slate last year. “With all those distractions, those emotions no longer belong to that blocked-out time period. They are now convoluting your schedule, your work, the fact that your mom just texted you that something’s going on with your grandparents — it’s just too much for your body to handle. Print media gives us the opportunity to sit down, and decide when we want to feel the emotions we want to feel, rather than letting some arbitrary algorithm decide how we should feel.”

It’s not even just print, though. Articles news outlets post online are still significantly more finite and finish-able than social media reactions to them.

I’ve spent the past few years reading tweets about articles, not full articles; reading screenshots of the bad part (highlighted); reading only the most outraging detail from a story. I get it: Pulling out the best bits is what makes for the best social media posts. But, too often, I never click through. I’m left with the outraging line and nothing else. And instead of coming up with my own reaction to the entire story, I just ingest reactions from other people.

These tweets rarely link to articles that I couldn’t have found on my own. They’re almost almost always articles from major news outlets. When I stopped seeking those outlets out myself — when I started letting the news just come to me on social media — I was the worse for it. I’m rebuilding my RSS reader so at least I have to scan the headlines myself.

I deleted Twitter, because it’s been the main place where I read other people’s reactions to news. (Follow me on Bluesky where I am now reading other people’s reactions to news in a decentralized non-Elon environment.)

I’m erecting barriers around online-news-reading times. I sometimes tell myself that I have to follow news outside the work day, for my job. This is rarely true, and I am not that kind of journalist. As I tell job applicants, there are not that many emergencies in innovation in news, and there are even fewer that happen before 9 or after 5 or 6 p.m. If being up-to-date with news is part of my job, let it stay inside work hours.

I’m switching to more monthly Substack subscriptions and unsubscribing from a bunch that I’m no longer excited to open. I’ve generally chosen annual subscriptions to save money, but that means I have long subscriptions to a bunch of Substacks I’ve gotten sick of. My criteria for paying for a Substack going forward is the same goal I have for coverage on our site and also for things I write for I’ll Be Right Back: Is it interesting? Is it surprising? If it’s become totally predictable AND/OR SCOLDY, it’s not worth paying for, even if the person is saying things I agree with. There is one parenting-adjacent Substack in particular that I unsubscribed from and I felt so free! Maybe you did too!

I’m researching new ways to teach kids about news. I do see reading the newspaper as a good habit, I’d love my kids to pick it up, and I realize they almost definitely won’t. They will get their news online. And YouTube is where most of their content-watching happens. I hold out hope that some kind of palatable media literacy can be taught via YouTube; that I can show my kids something that meets my standards in terms of lessons taught but also meets, or comes close enough to, their standards for entertainment.

In the meantime, I subscribed Alice (11) and Hugh (8) to The Week Junior, a news magazine for kids. If you’re thinking about this, note that it’s very center/opinion-free, which is exactly what I was going for, even though it means they chose a really way too flattering picture of Trump for the cover of last week’s edition.

Do my kids — who really like reading — run to read this? They sure do not. The only time they have voluntarily read more than a few pages of it was when we were in a church service they also didn’t want to be at. Will I possibly start paying them to read each issue? Strongly considering it!

1. I loved, loved, loved this quote by licensed social worker and therapist Jneé Hill from a Vox piece by Allie Volpe: “That philosophical question of how you live your life is not something that can be dictated by other people.”