I’m a media junkie, but when I kept receiving reminders to renew my subscription to The Atlantic I couldn’t bring myself to spend the money on it. What gives?
The Atlantic is a fantastic publication. It’s one of the few that is worth the price of a subscription because its content is intelligent, well-reported, thoughtful and differentiated — all the pre-requisites for a mag to be worthy of selling subscriptions in our content-is-free world. To boot, the publication is even doing well financially – mainly on the heels of its excellent Web iteration – while its peers founder in the Internet age.
So why would I want to give up reading a publication like that? Well, dear Atlantic, it’s not you, it’s me. I have realized that I have simply way too many media outlets to consume, many of which I wouldn’t read if it weren’t for the Internet.
On a daily basis, I consume the Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mashable, TechCrunch, ESPN’s SweetSpot blog, SB Nation’s Baseball Nation, Lifehacker, PR Daily, Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog, about 10 menswear Tumblrs, ESPN’s Baseball Today podcast, The Brian Lehrer Show, KEXP’s Morning Show and KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic — not to mention tons of other blogs and whatever I’m linked to via Twitter.
On a weekly basis, I consume (in no order) Sports Illustrated, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, On the Media, This American Life, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, Only a Game, and All Songs Considered. I’m not even counting the 10 minutes I spend flipping through Time Out: New York which still arrives in my inbox despite never spending a dime on it.
On a monthly basis, I read Wired, Esquire, and GQ.
That’s a lot of content. I haven’t even mentioned TV shows during the season, any sports I may watch and my time-sucking addiction to Longreads, Longform.org and other longform journalism.
Before the Internet, I consumed two of those outlets: the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated. Now my media intake has expanded exponentially – which is good and bad. On the one hand, I am exposed to more ideas and more thinking. On the other hand, demands for my time and attention are pulled in so many different ways. I barely have time to read books anymore.
The Atlantic is the first extra media weight I shed. I had the least relationship with it after only subscribing for a year, so it was an easy choice. I don’t suspect it will be the last.
As the Internet expands access to content, we will need to find better curation tools to determine what media is worth our time. Of course, Twitter and sites like Longreads and Longform have begun this, but we will have to develop our own abilities to filter out what we want to read and how to divvy up our time among a large amount of media.
Or maybe, I just need better time management for my leisure reading.
Tags: Internet, Longform Journalism, Media, New Media, The Atlantic
