How to keep with the reading NYT,Economists, Bloomberg etc

Nagraj

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Hey guys i am a news junkie which i guess most people on this forum are.
but latly i have reaised that it was taking too much of my time. i have been lots of unrelated insignificant stuff.
i was looking for an answer and i found one article.
so i sharing it here
Time Management: How do people keep up with reading The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist, etc? - Quora
Nick White, Billions, Mitch.
67 votes by Sid Burgess, Neville Fogarty, Jeff Lin, (more)
As well as the general advice of using RSS feeds, mashups like Flipboard etc I offer something more simple. Choose just one source as your comprehensive daily read.

Most of the content each day in Bloomberg, the WSJ, FT etc is going to be incredibly similar. Reading any one of those news sources would give you the same headlines and major company news that any of the others would provide. Where they differ, largely, is in commentary - and that's just a matter of personal preference.

It's a bit like following people on social media; why follow two people who have 98% of the same likes and follows? Following just one of them would give you more or less the exact same content without the extra noise. Furthermore, odds are that if "a" likes something "b" has posted (that "a" would not have posted themselves), it's a good chance that "a" will link to "b" 's unique content anyway. So it is with news, too.

The very point of reading news is to isolate signal from noise. Using multiple, redundant sources increases the noise - you actually make it harder for yourself by increasing information entropy. This adds up to an enormous waste of time - especially from a trading point of view. I decided to find the one I most enjoyed, and stick with it as my main daily "cover to cover" read. The rest you can likely access ad hoc.

For me, that choice came down to the FT. The quasi-sardonic style and understatement suits my temperament - and I couldn't really live without the musings of the epic Lucy Kellaway. I also love the FT Weekend Edition; my weekend wouldn't be complete without reading the weekend edition on the iPad at Saturday morning brunch.

For live, breaking news on any topic I have my Bloomberg Terminal with customised news feeds and alerts. I couldn't do my job without Bloomberg (not necessarily because of the news, but because of the entire platform). In a world where anyone can become a commentator, the depth of Bloomberg's careful fact checking, speed-to-market and sourcing is real value-add.
UpvoteDownvote "¢ Repost "¢ Comment "¢ Thank "¢ Mar 17, 2011


Michael Sinanian, Writer, student, tech startup enthusiast
43 votes by Anil Ozkaynak, Edwin Khoo, Marc Bodnick, (more)
I'm a recovering newsholic so I've got a lot to share on this subject.


UPDATE [10/22/11]: I've been experimenting with some more time management hacks around keeping up with news and here's what I've found:
podcasts aren't a panacea: podcasts can be useful because if they're weekly, you get pre-aggregated, pre-filtered news; BUT they're grossly inefficient because there's too much extraneous commentary that just ends up wasting a bunch of your time; if you're reading instead, you pick the pace and even choose what parts of an article to read; unless you're in situations where you cannot read the news but can still listen to it (like your commute), this isn't an ideal solution
weekly digests may be promising: if you have things you like to keep up with but aren't urgent, the weekly route may be the best. of course, people have been doing this for over a century by just reading the Sunday edition of their paper, and that's actually not a bad strategy. however, if you're looking to implement this strategy with blogs, you're going to see mixed results. most blogs don't have a good weekly digest, and if they do, it's just a list of links to the week's top stories, nothing really chewed up and rehashed for an end-of-the-week rundown; for an example see Tech News: What is the best weekly top tech news digest?
further experiments and hacks will be posted if i find anything worth sharing


First, an overarching framework for approaching "catching up with news":
"News" these days can become too much of a PASSIVE activity. You just sit there and find out about things, adding to what you know in the moment. This is an inefficient use of your time.
Thus, completely abandon this notion of having to "catch up with the news." No!
You should zero in on the articles that will add to your knowledge about something you are DOING in this world. Never read news for the sake of "being up to date."
There's a minimal amount every citizen of a democracy should know in order to participate, and you should spend 5-10 minutes doing that each day. Not doing so would be irresponsible. The rest is about YOU.
It's about DO-ing, not simply READ-ing. Approach the rest of this answer with that framework in mind.

Second, a couple principles:
There's just simply too many articles and things being written to make productive use of even a fraction of it. You'll thus be splitting what time you make available for news between direct relevance (local news/specialty information) and indirect relevance (national-global events/general interests). The latter must never take up more than 10-15 minutes of your day at most. Learn to accept this early on.
Most "news" is simply link-bait: a majority of headlines (particularly from blogs) are tailored to catch your attention, even if the content is of little importance. In other words: you could do without it. Learn to just grasp a headline and maybe a few lines down if you absolutely have to. (especially if you're cruising an aggregator).
Most "news" is simply info-porn. "Information pornography" is what today's blogs and news sites are in the business of selling. Information for information's sake. It's useless banter and you don't need it.
Ask yourself: how much "news" will realistically directly affect you? The answer would probably be close to zero. Here's a good case where it would: you're a Greek citizen in 2011 and your government is enforcing austerity measures and you need to know the implications of that for you and your family. In this case, you should probably follow the Greek dailies. But do I need to know that the Mississippi River is flooding right now, considering I live in LA? Probably not that relevant.
Avoid Twitter for general news capture. It's just too much to make sense of. If you have a directly relevant, domain-specific Twitter account you follow for updates you must urgently receive, fine. Everything else: inefficient.
If you insist on Twitter, use Lists. Spend some time upfront to build your own lists (collections of Twitter accounts) that will help you zero in on a niche. If you need help, visit: https://support.twitter.com/arti... For example, I've collated a bunch of engineering school accounts into one account so I can always be informed about what our brightest minds are developing in the research labs. It's publicly available here: https://twitter.com/#!/michaelsi... Best part: you don't have to follow who you add to lists, making your main feed even cleaner. Niche, focused, relevant.
Avoid "news" about things that will or could happen. Read the news that is actually happening. For example, "Hilary Clinton Flying to Mid-East to Negotiate Peace Talks" is to be skipped in favor of "Hilary Clinton's Trip to Mid-East Results in Positive Peace Talks." Stick with the stuff that's actually happened to avoid wasting your time. (Note: there are exceptions to this for investors/scientists/academics/etc who need to stay on top of things in the future (trends, etc), but for general use, this rule definitely applies.)
Use weekly podcasts as an automated filter. Let's say you work as a commodities trader and need to know about that domain on a daily basis. One strategy is to focus only on commodities-relevant news each day and leave anything else for an end-of-the-week podcast. Within this same example, if you have hobbies like entertainment or technology, then you would watch on Sunday your "at-the-box-office" podcast or a "This Week in Tech" podcast, knowing full well they've automatically condensed the most important stories of the week for you, hearing only what you need.
If you don't follow these guidelines, there's nothing stopping you from spending hours reading "news" and "articles" and "catching up with things." It's seriously endless.

Develop a workable strategy and go from there:

News is like a river. If you're looking for more domain-specific, niche content, you must travel further up the stream to the source. (And in an era where most people are Specialists and not Generalists, you are one of these people.)


Pick a few specialty news sources (blogs, journals, etc...) that are of direct relevance to your field. The authors of these sources must be well-placed and deliver news that, if important for "the world" the other major publications will turn to. This is the first cornerstone of your news system.

For example, I'm interested in Technology Law, so I'll give Ars Technica's Law and Disorder section some dedicated time. Later on, I'll be checking the ABA Journal for even more domain-specific news.

If you're a curious science follower/VC, the MIT Technology Review will cover real news out of actual research labs. If you're an actual scientist or researcher, you have your own journals and periodicals you follow.

If you're doing any type of investment, go to the consulting firms and investment advisory firms that are putting out quality economic analyses if you absolutely rely on this information. Every other source is just regurgitated dribble.

To sample the rest of "the world"... use aggregators to sample the length of your river. For the tech industry, there's Techmeme, for media, there's Mediagazer, then of course there's also Hacker News and Google News.

These aggregators let you mix-and-match and not rely on one source. If you're time-pressed anyway, you won't have time to dig into articles, as the earlier principles apply strongly here: lots of scanning, minimal "digging down" into articles.

You're still going to need to keep your "finger on the pulse" vis-a-vis a "trusted publication" with major branding power and influence. For these, you should subscribe to one of:
The Economist
The Financial Times
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal

Membership Sites are coming up and it's becoming expensive to "pick a side" so choose wisely (unless you fit in the case mentioned below).


As Marc Hoag mentioned, the weekly thorough Economist rundown is a wise strategy.

At most, you may want something like The NYT + The Economist to get good daily coverage supplemented with strong weekly cover

If you're playing the markets and must absolutely need every angle to a story, then you're a special case that justifies paying for different news sources like:
FT (good finance / econ analysis) AND...
Bloomberg (good per-company analysis) AND...
The Economist (good macro /international / political analysis)

Lastly, round off your news system with a local component. This can easily be integrated into your general aggregator like Google News. This way I can quickly see which teenager got shot at a nearby public school or which freeway will be closed next week. These are, of course, more relevant than some natural disaster happening halfway around the world.



Remember, I'm not advocating ignorance. I'm advocating a rational approach to managing our time. If you manage your time right, you'll be giving yourself more time to be productive in tasks that will help others. Simply reading about others will not solve their problems. Catch my drift?

Last but not least, as others have mentioned, using a time-shifting read-it-later system is critical to staying on top of things. Instapaper definitely comes to mind here. More and more publications allow direct saving of articles to Instapaper from their own apps, so that's improving as well. Speaking to The Economist's digital team, they agreed such functionality would be useful.

So every person's case will be very different. Every professional has to rely on their own river, and know how to best exploit that river's natural resources. Or else you'll get swept downstream, washed up and wasted in a barrage of news that, frankly, just doesn't matter.


--
*Credit to Nieman Journalism Lab for the NYT paywall photo, "The Wall"
UpvoteDownvote "¢ Repost "¢ Comment "¢ Thank "¢ May 19, 2011


Li Xiaolai, Common individual with common sense
16 votes by Ben Golub, Kah Seng Tay, Edwin Khoo, (more)
I think understanding yourself is the key.

Even keeping up only one journal is sometimes impossible for most. There is simply too much information in any newspaper or magazine to absorb. Time is scarce, and energy is limited, therefore, covering all sorts of information is simply impractical.

Ask yourself what you need most? Whether investing time to read hinges on your specific needs.

Those who keep up with several journals at the same time are not wandering readers. They do not read everything, simply because that's impossible; and instead, they read with purpose, such as looking for specific information, comparing opinions, or finding new perspectives.

So, rather than being afraid of missing something, try to work out your own need. What you have to miss should be missed.


This answer may need to be an answer comment. (more)
UpvoteDownvote "¢ Repost (1) "¢ Comment "¢ Thank "¢ May 18, 2011


Brad Hall, Live in Brooklyn Heights; work in Mid...
4 votes by Alexander Trafford, Nathan Ketsdever, Marc Bodnick, and Jarrod Cugley
Lots of great advice here. Just wanted to add a couple more things:
-- Memeorandum (memeorandum) - the general news version of Techmeme
-- Politico Playbook (POLITICO Playbook - POLITICO.com) - a daily, early morning e-mail summarizing all of the big political news and often breaking news as well. You can read online, via the iPhone or iPad app, or by e-mail subscription. Politico has several other similar e-mails, including Morning Tech (http://www.politico.com/morningt...) which might be useful for this community
-- Other daily e-mail aggregators, mostly political, include: Ezra Klein's Wonkbook at WaPo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/bl...), MSNBC's First Read (First Read), ABC's The Note (http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/).
-- E-mail subscriptions: you can get an e-mail from most major papers summarizing what's in the paper's that day -- NYT, WSJ, WaPo, FT all do it. If you're pressed for time, it's an easy browse through and then click on any story that interests you.
-- The Real Clear sites: RealClearPolitics (RealClearPolitics - Opinion, News, Analysis, Videos and Polls), and others (World, Sports, Energy, Markets).
-- Summify (http://summify.com/): goes through your social networks and pulls out 10 or so stories. It does a good job of highlighting stuff you might miss, but I don't think it always sends the most relevant or "top" stories
 

nrj

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Just install app in your smartphone & you will get real-time notifications. No need to waste time reading every source.

I have Bloomberg app & whats better than twitter lists ? :)
 

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