Legal Commentary

How to gather news quickly

By Ernest Svenson

If you value your time then you shouldn't waste it gathering news. Remember professional news outlets are not in the business of packaging their product for your convenience. The more you dawdle and wait around for them to spoon out information they happier they (and their advertisers) are. If you want to make profit-seekers happy that's fine, but if your time is precious then adjust your news gathering habits.

I'm not going to tell you to use Google Reader. You're not ready for that. (If you are then stop wasting your time reading this post). You need to know about something called Alltop. It's an aggregator of news, basically like Google Reader if you don't want to figure out how to set up Google Reader. When you visit the main Alltop site, you'll want to find categories of information. Choose a few that seem interesting. I subscribe to Mac Alltop, Football, and Politics. There is one for Law (it even features this site; why? I don't know). Bookmark the Alltop sites and use those as the entry point for your news-gathering. Don't know which ones to start with? Okay, here are two of the three that TV stations use: news and sports (go here or look out the window for the weather)

Okay, so let's review: (1) Scanning news blurbs on the Internet is good. (2) waiting for commercial breaks during TV news is bad. Remember what veteran David Brinkley once said about television news reporting: "When there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."

Incidentally, if you visit one of the Alltop sites on your smartphone it will detect the mobile browser and deliver a streamlined version of the page. That's because the Internet was created by smart people for smart people. TV wasn't designed with an 'intelligence function' which is why Seth's advice makes so much sense.

Full post as published by Ernie the Attorney on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).