Media Consumption: How Much do we Really Consume?

After meticulously recording my media consumption habits for 24 hours, several things jumped out at me. First, I found that I got most of my news information off of my phone rather than in print or on my computer. As soon as I wake up in the morning my phone is right there next to me so I can easily turn it on and access news information. Similarly, with the IPhones fairly new Apple News app it is that much easier to see current news. Also I love twitter, its my not so guilty pleasure and noticeably the number one place I usually get my news information.

The main news sources I tend to lean towards are pretty much anything but Fox News, but I really enjoy the classic New York Times or CNN. These are and have been trusted news sources for decades and I trust them to give me a fairly unbiased account of the news each day. Honestly, I also love the novelty of reading the New York Times, as a journalism student that’s probably the main reason I read it, it just feels right. I follow both the New York Times and CNN on Twitter and Facebook so it makes getting my news much easier.

I also aspire to be a sports reporter so I religiously follow ESPN. I have notifications on for the app so it is extremely easy to access sports news. I definitely trust sources like the ones I mentioned more than those like Fox News or for local news the Deseret News. I find that Fox News and Deseret News are much more skewed, in my opinion, and biased towards one side. This is unfortunate to me because, as a journalist, I like to see unbiased, honest news reporting not one that favors a certain side or voice.

When it comes to how I get my news, as I stated earlier, I don’t usually go to the home page of the organization, rather I use places like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to access news articles and information. By going through Twitter I also find that I read news that is much more broad that things I would usually look for when going through the newspaper or on an organizations’ site. The unfortunate thing however about going though sites like Facebook, Reddit and Twitter is you do have to be careful of who is posting the information and what sites you are being sent to. I find myself running into a lot of ‘fake news’ or unreliable rumor mill accounts that are mainly click bait.

When asked the question “what do you think you might be missing?” and “does it matter to you?” I think I usually find the news I’m interested in and whatever else I might be missing out on I’m not too worries about. I think we also get a lot of our news just through communicating with other people so a decent amount of news I may not hear about I find out from friends and family. Similarly, these days I find myself actively looking for the news less and less because it is so depressing and unbelievable a good amount of the time. Twitter is entertaining because of various tweets from our President, but its also pretty sad and disheartening that this is the time we're living in. For that reason, I feel like I avoid the news sometimes because reading sad story after sad story can be exhausting. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment and getting to really see how much I access news each day whether or not I realize it or not.