From today's Good Morning, Silicon Valley:
Here's an interesting bit of self-assessment you might try, spawned by a post last week from Jeremiah Owyang at PodTech.net: What's your media consumption diet? In hopes that others would do the same, Owyang outlined where he gets his recommended daily allowances of information and entertainment -- from top to bottom: Web, music, TV, communication, movies, magazines, books, newspapers.
My breakdown's after the jump. Tell me about yours in the comments.
Online -- I get daily e-mail newsletters from: the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Slate, Salon, ArtsJournal, NRF SmartBrief, CTIA SmartBrief, NAPTE Daily Update. RetailForward, Retail Update, Reason, Christianity Today, the Poynter Institude, SciTech Daily, Very Short List. Daily Candy, Ideal Bite, WhoWhatWear Daily, Charles & Marie, Philanthropy Today, IG's TrendCentral, YPulse update, Ikea Hacker, News.com news alerts (green news), Marketwatch, Marketplace, Blumsday, Powell's Review-a-Day, GMSV (linked above).
Also, have I gushed about Feedblitz? It pulls the RSS feeds from the weblogs I follow regularly, including Rex Hammock's weblog, 43 Folders, Good magazine, not martha, Starbucks Gossip and Buzzfeed. I get one daily round-up of those blogs (plus about eight others like NotCot). I love that I neither have to surf nor leave my e-mail client to get full weblog posts.
Also, there are other sites I hit, but I don't feel like plowing through the week's browser history to pull them up.
If I had to assign an RDA ... 65%.
Music -- This is tiny, for many reasons. First, I listen to news radio to and from the ferry, so I don't listen in the car. Second, when I'm at work, I'm usually listening to podcasts. However, if I need to buckle down and work without distraction, I'll put on a playlist, click the "repeat" button on iTunes and jam. My work playlist is currently scrambling The Dan Band Live! by the Dan Band, Bill Hicks' Rant in E Minor and the original Broadway cast recording of Rent.
The cognitive dissonance keeps me sharp. It also occasionally causes me to send e-mails to Phil reading, "Rent's "La Vie Boheme" is to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" as Generation X is to the Baby Boomers. WHY has nobody noticed this before?"
If I had to assign an RDA ... 2%
TV -- Y'all, I watch the Colbert Report and The Soup and that is as close as I get to TV news. If I'm lucky, I also manage a TiVo'd episode of Clean House (my latest reality trainwreck TV viewing) each day, and then there's NBC's Thursday comedy block and FOX's animated shows on Sunday. And then, for those moments when I'm in too good a mood, I catch up with backlogged episodes of The Wire. And then there's the matter of the two of us having shows to recap. And all the backlog on the TiVo like Heroes, the State Within ... oy.
If I had to assign an RDA ... 3%
Communication -- I'm assuming this is other people telling me news? Um.
If I had to assign an RDA ... 1%.
However! If it's radio, I still listen to Marketplace daily, in part because I love the way they present business news and in part because I have schoolgirl crushes on Sean Cole, Cash Peters and Kai Ryssdal. Also, I catch as much of Morning Edition and All Things Considered as I can, and I listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on the weekend.
If I had to assign an RDA ... 3%
Movies -- Maybe a TiVo'd movie on the weekend.
If I had to assign an RDA ... "not a significant source."
Magazines -- Oh, I love print. I'm now subbing to the New Yorker (which explained for me this week why the daddy long-legs living in the corner of my living room is now much fatter and the rest of the spiders in the house are gone), Entertainment Weekly, Scientific American, Reason, Sunset, Cottage Living (although actually reading the words "that's not a cottage thought" in one issue had me seriously contemplating unsubscribing) and Cook's Illustrated. And on the news stand, I buy the Economist and Us. Don't judge me!
If I had to assign an RDA ... 12%
Books -- I know it doesn't look like, because I keep forgetting to write up the books here, but I'm still reading an average of 1-1.5 books weekly.
If I had to assign an RDA ... 10%
Newspapers -- I read the San Francisco Chronicle daily (only section I skip? Sports) and the Alameda Journal every so often.
If I had to assign an RDA ... 4%.
That's mine. What is yours? I love learning how other people find out what they know.
Online: I'm an online editor, so I spend my work day trolling around on the internet. I read a list of sites too numerous too list out in full, most of them through Google Reader. I follow a whack of new sites (Times, WaPo, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, CBC, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, New Scientist, Wired, a bunch I am forgetting), read several blogs (this one, Boing Boing, Torontoist, Spacing, Table of Malcontents, Treehugger, WorldChanging, Lifehacker, Engadget) and pay attention to what's pushing up on Digg and Reddit. My Google Reader window is never closed.
Music: I am sitting here with iTunes open, clearing out some songs from my iPod because I have less than a gig of space left. My boyfriend runs a music review site, so CDs arrive at our apartment at a rate of about five per week; we're pushing 1000 in our collection by now. We're both big music nerds. I listen to my iPod on the way to and from work, and sometimes on my break, and music is often on at our apartment. I never listen to the radio though; I download podcasts sometimes, but I don't find the time to listen to them. Lisa, I wish I could listen at work -- our boss implemented a no headphones policy, sadly.
TV: I watch about an hour of television news (CBC Newsworld) on weekday mornings, right when I get in the office; I have a television on my desk at work. Then I often watch the reruns of the previous night's episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The television stays on CBC for the rest of the day, but I keep it on mute until something captures my attention. At home, we have satellite television, but pretty much all I watch is Ugly Betty and hockey. We do watch some shows on DVD, but we haven't done that as much since the NHL season started. (Side note: Go Flames! And Penguins! Wooo!)
Communication: I have a cell phone; I don't use it that often. I wish I could check my email and use a web browser with it. I don't have a laptop, PDA or Blackberry. We have WiFi for our Wii, but I haven't set up the browser yet. I use IM at work -- both for my job and through Google -- but rarely do at home. I tried to sign onto MSN's messenger yesterday, and I'd forgotten my username.
Movies: I don't see a lot of movies -- two a month, maybe, usually at home. I saw two last month in theatre (Smokin' Aces and Music and Lyrics) and that was unusual. We have a hard time carving out two hours for watching a movie. I blame this on the fact that we have a lot of sports channels with our satellite subscription.
Books: I read a couple books a month, mostly non-fiction; this is the one area where I would really like to up my consumption.
Magazines: Given that I made buying less magazines my reduce goal for March, it's clear that I buy a lot. I get Lucky, Domino, Allure and Wish regularly; I sometimes also buy Esquire, Wired, New Scientist, New Yorker, Walrus, Macleans and Entertainment Weekly. But I'll pick up pretty much anything that catches my interest. Most of my magazine consumption tends to be pretty fluffy; I read hard news all day at work, so I want garbage to read at home in the tub, apparently.
Newspapers: I don't get a newspaper delivered anymore, but I do read most of the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star online, along with much of the New York Times and USA Today and some of the National Post, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. I also read Toronto's two alt-weekly papers, Eye and Now.
Posted by: drunken monkey | 2007.03.04 at 06:53
Oh boy, I am too tired on a Monday morning to write about my media consumption. But I have to share that both my girlfriend and I totally have crushes on Kai Ryssdal too, and are very saddened that he's not doing the Morning Report any longer. Scott Jagow is an OK replacement (they sound kinda the same...) but he's no Kai!
Posted by: ambient | 2007.03.05 at 06:03
Interesting. Here's my breakdown:
30% Web. I read the NY Times; Salon; Chronicle of Higher Education; a whole mess of blogs about houses, politics, and celebrities wearing ridiculous clothing; a smattering of message boards; and links that people send me.
0% Music. I occasionally have something on at work, but it's probably something I've listened to a million times before.
30% TV. This is more than I'd like it to be, but I married a TV-holic. It's generally on, but I'm not necessarily watching. We see a lot of sports and are dedicated to a few network series. The only thing I absolutely refuse to watch is the Seymour the dog episode of Futurama.
10% Communication, if this in fact means radio. I live in Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes and ubiquitous public radio - I can't help it. I'm kind of moping over the fact that Kai Ryssdal is no longer the host of Marketplace Money. It's just not the same.
0% Movies. I get my movies from the library by putting titles I want to see on hold. I'm always number 132 on the list, and three or four DVDs always end up coming in at the same time, generally on a weekend when I have other plans. But I'm cheap that way.
10% Magazines. I get Cooking Light, Smart Money, Midwest Living, and Cottage Living. I'll occasionally pick up Martha Stewart, Money, or Organic Gardening at the library. (I just read the "not a cottage thought" article yesterday. I gagged a little, too. I was also ticked that they referred to their 2,700 sf Idea House as "so small." That's double the size of my house.)
15% Books. I read a lot, probably 2 or 3 books per week. I love the library. What more can I say?
5% Newspapers. We get the St. Paul Pioneer Press, but I'm thinking of canceling. My husband reads the sports section, and I'll occasionally leaf through the front pages and the opinion section. Oh, and I check the Sunday ads to see when Diet Coke is on sale.
Posted by: Ellen | 2007.03.05 at 07:28
This is very interesting...and I hadn't really thought much about my media consumption recently.
Web: I'm online most of the day. I'd like to say that I don't abuse the wireless access at my law school during class, but I'd be lying, and frankly, I multi-task by nature, and find I'm actually more engaged when I can do more than one thing at a time. I check Slate, WaPo, NYT, Chicago Tribune, the BBC, my hometown paper, AlterNet, Democracy Now, a variety of sites related to my hobbies (knitting, quilting, TV sites), and a number of both personal and new oriented blogs.
Music: I listen to a lot of music. I listen to my iPod during my commute every morning and evening, and if the TV is not on, I definitely have music playing. I get twitchy if there isn't enough music, and in particular, new music in my life.
TV: I watch a lot of TV. A lot. I watch the Today Show while getting ready in the morning and there's usually one show a night I try not to miss, plus as much of the Daily Show and Colbert Report as I can stay awake for. But the TV is often on, usually to reruns or DVDs, even if I'm not actually watching it, as background noise to whatever else I'm doing.
Communication: If this means radio, my alarm goes off to NPR and I usually listen to 20-30 minutes of Morning Edition before I actually get out of bed. I, too, have a crush on Kai Ryssdal, but I usually catch Marketplace and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me online or as podcasts. If I got better radio reception in my apartment I'd listen to NPR all day instead of having the TV on.
If communication is other forms, like email or phone, email is my primary form of communication with family and friends, and have a cell I maybe use 3-5 times a week.
Movies: The last movie I saw was over the Christmas holidays, and before that was probably last summer. I read a lot about movies, from a variety of sources, but I rarely watch them. I'm considering signing up for Netflix, though, since there's a lot of movies I'd like to see if it didn't actually mean going to the theater or video store.
Magazines: I subscribe to Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly, and pick up the Atlantic and InStyle regularly. I'll grab the New Yorker if there's something on the cover that interests me, along with a sort of rotating bunch of decorating, knitting, cooking and fashion magazines based mostly on my whims when I'm standing at Barnes and Noble.
Books: I'd like to read more than I have the time for, but it's probably about 1-2 a week during the school year, and 4-5 during breaks and summer. There's probably a dozen waiting to be read on my desk right now, plus posted lists of 40 or so more. I've found, though, that as my web consumption has grown, that time has come directly from the time I used to spend reading actual books. I haven't yet decided what I think about that.
Newspapers: I'll occasionally grab the Red Eye (a crappy free tabloid/"youth oriented" paper put out by the Chicago Tribune) if I've forgotten to grab something to read on the train, but I can't remember the last time I actually read an entire paper.
Posted by: Janna | 2007.03.05 at 15:17
I had no idea Kai Ryssdal had such a following! I thought I was alone in my affection for him. I love that I'm not.
dm, thanks for mentioning Table of Malcontents -- it's on my Feedblitz now.
Ellen --
I was also ticked that they referred to their 2,700 sf Idea House as "so small." That's double the size of my house.
It's triple the size of ours. I realize the point to idea houses is to showcase different materials and treatments, and to produce an abundance of inspirations ... but come on! The dimensions/scale of the rooms alone more or less guaranteed I couldn't find anything that works for me.
Then again, as I was remarking to Phil on our pedestrian tour of the neighborhood yesterday, living comfortably in our space has totally whacked out my sense of livable proportion.
Posted by: Lisa | 2007.03.05 at 16:09
I had no idea Kai Ryssdal was so cute, in a geeky, NPR-ish way.
Posted by: Divaah46 | 2007.03.05 at 17:23
This is interesting.
Web: I spend most of my day browsing the internet while working. A lot of what I do is waiting (or on the phone) so I muti-task. I'm also a procrastinator and use the web when there are things I want to avoid. I've got about 15 sites I check each day on a regular basis. None of those are news news sites, although a lot are entertainment news - I don't really get any hard news online unles it's through a blog post or if I'm specifically looking for information on a particular topic.
Music: I listen to the radio online through my computer at work - the whole office listens so we rotate stations to keep everyone happy. I also listen to my iPod for my commute each day - an hour each way. I never listen to music at home, unless I'm in the kitchen for an extended period of time and then I'll put on the radio.
TV: If I'm home, I have the TV on. I only watch the news if my flatmate is home - I don't like TV news. I prefer sitcom re-runs in the background if I'm doing something else, and I have about 8 shows that I Sky+ (similar to Tivo), as I'm rarely home when they're on. I also probably go out of my way to watch one or two documentary programmes a week.
Communication: I access my work email at work only, and personal email at work and at home. I've got wireless at home, so I can use my laptop anywhere. I haven't set up my mobile to get email because I don't want to be THAT much in contact. As for using the mobile, I primarily text people, because it's easier and cheaper than calling. I don't talk on the phone that much. I do use IM a lot, both at work and at home. I use Messenger and GoogleTalk, althoug I prefer messenger. I went on holiday last week and didn't check my email once the whole week. That was probably the first time in 6 or 7 years that I've done that.
Movies: I don't got to the movies often. It's really expensive in London. I saw maybe 10 movies in the theatre last year, compared with 50ish that I'd see when living in Canada. I don't rent movies either. I'm crap at returning them. I was going through a list of last year's films and realized that pretty much the only ones I'd seen were ones I saw while on a plane. So I just signed up for a Netflix-esque thing. We'll see how it goes.
Magazines: I subscribe to Ideal Home, Psychologies and Vanity Fair. I also buy InStyle and Marie Claire on a fairly regular basis. That's pretty much my magazine consumption.
Books: I read a lot of fiction. Probably about 100 books a year, since I read before bed and for 2 hours on the tube each day. I can get through a book pretty quickly. I'd say more half of those books are re-reads, and the others are new books.
Newspapers: I read the free-on-the-tube papers occasionally if I've finished the book I have with me, but that's it. My flatmate reads about 4 a day, so there are always some lying around if I fancy a look, but I never do.
Posted by: Alice | 2007.03.06 at 06:58
I'm curious what movies cost in London, Alice. They're about $12 at the major chains in Toronto right now, but I'm not sure if they're cheaper in smaller centres.
Posted by: drunken monkey | 2007.03.06 at 08:44
This made me realize just how little news I consume these days! And most of it is from old fashioned sources - newspapers and radio. Also, I am really boring.
Web: I use the internet mostly for keeping in touch with people. I update my own blog, and visit friends' blogs and message boards for various groups I belong to. I read this site and a handful of others daily. And I spend a bit of time on craigslist just for fun. Most of my web surfing is related to religion, politics, parenting, cooking and shopping.
Music: I've never listened to much music.
TV: We didn't get cable hooked up last time we moved so we've been without TV for 5 months now. We watch Lost (and my daughter's favorite Wonderpets) online and otherwise haven't missed it at all.
Communication: I am so lame that I use my cellphone for making phone calls. It doesn't have a camera and I think I've sent 5 text messages in my life. I e-mail my family less than I used to now that I live in the same time zone and calling them is easier.
Radio: I listen to public radio whenever I am in the car. Figure I'd better get my fill before the kids are old enough to complain about it!
Movies: I can't remember the last movie I saw in a movie theater. It wasn't that long ago - last August - I just can't remember what it was. We watch our DVDs on occasion, but I'm usually too tired.
Magazines: I get Entertainment Weekly so at least I know something about all the music I'm not listening to and movies and tv shows I'm not watching!
Books: I try to read at least a book each month. I need to get better about this.
Newspapers: My husband recently subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the Mercury-News (sundays only). I guilty about the waste, but I do love reading newspapers.
Posted by: KatieM | 2007.03.06 at 15:34
drunken monkey, movies here cost between £8 and £12.50. Pricey, considering books cost about £6.
Posted by: Alice | 2007.03.07 at 02:17