A haiku:

Diary breeds shame

Binge watching Nurse Jackie all week

Netflix is Satan

 

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Takeaways:

1. I spend waste a sh*t ton of time on Netflix, FB and Twitter.
2. I read two actual dead-tree documents last week – a Boston Globe paper and about 40 pages of a book.
3. My attention span is shot. I rapid cycle through 10 apps in 20 minutes.

Based on my calculations, I spent a shameful share of my waking hours on Netflix, followed by FB and Twitter, which is where I get a lot of my news. (More on that later.)  Email didn’t take as much time as I feared, mainly because I get a lot of newsletters I don’t read. If you exclude Netflix, easily 70 percent of the media I consume is news from other publications/NPR.

I was surprised to see that I didn’t listen to any podcasts last week, although I subscribe to several. I think this was a function of being in a lot of Ubers and it feels rude to have the earbuds in while being Uber-ed.

I didn’t include substantive IRL conversations (almost all with other Nieman fellows/staff or Harvard students/professors) or phone calls (almost all with family members) or FaceTime chats (all with my niece and nephew back in Memphis).

Netflix

Since I spent the most time on Netflix last week, I’ll start here. Did you know there are seven seasons of “Nurse Jackie” on Netflix? I do. Did you know Morris Chestnut (in all his chocolatey goodness) is a recurring character in Season 5 and 6? I do. 

 

 

 

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The Twitters

70. That’s the number of times I tweeted between Feb. 10-16. (Follow me on Twitter. I’ll follow you back.)

Around 30 were live tweeting Harvard sociologist (and MacArthur genius) Matthew Desmond’s Feb. 10 talk at the Nieman Foundation about his upcoming book, “Evicted.” (The Grammys also sucked me in.) But a fair share of the tweets were either RTs or essentially RTs with me adding a line of reax. 

 

What this doesn’t show is how much of the news I read was via
links to stories in other people’s tweets. Twitter and FB are curators for me.

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Also, Facebook

Facebook was where I created the most content. I only posted 10 times on my public Facebook page during the diary period, but a couple of those posts prompted extended discussion in the comments. (I’m at my friend cap on FB, but I’d love if you follow me!)

Here’s an example. Tennessee was considering vouchers legislation, which would allow kids from poor performing schools to take public dollars to private schools. My concern is that the kind of public data available to see how well a public school is doing isn’t available for private schools.

An example of the conversation I’m trying to start.

Here’s how I justify this. My post-Nieman project, MLK50, is an online journalism startup focused on economic justice in Memphis in the 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. was killed there. The startup will have a strong social media component, so these posts/discussion are building audience.

MLK50 filters the news through the lens of how the most vulnerable are helped/harmed by public policy. So I use FB to ask questions that MSM isn’t asking – with the goal of getting readers to eventually learn to ask the right questions.