Sunday, June 14, 2015

What I Learn From Six Daily Newspapers


I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, not because my job as a book promoter and publicist would naturally call for it, but because I’m a news junkie.  Sadly, with more news to be discovered, less of it is reported and consumed by the masses.

Each work day I go through six papers, including The New York Post, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, NY Daily News, and Washington Post.   I wish I read papers from other time zones as well, like the LA Times, Chicago Sun-Times, or something small and in Middle America, but I don’t have an unlimited budget nor unlimited time.  Still, the papers I do have access to tell me a lot.

First, from these papers I have a pretty good idea of what’s dominating the daily news cycle. These papers are the ones whose articles get talked about and circulated by other media.

Second, these papers generally reflect what’s circulating in the media, covering politics, business, crime, sports, and entertainment.  Smaller papers tend to run syndicated or news wire content and mix it with local news that covers the usual – corruption, violence, human interest, and weather.

I like reading op-eds and editorials and columnists who ponder and pontificate.  The other articles are just daily repeats of the usual.  Sometimes the photos of barely dressed celebrities get my attention, but even they have become predictable.

The newspaper feels good in my hands.  I prefer it to a screen and I prefer these first-source articles over bloggers just interpreting things in a second-hand way.  On television you can barely find news.  It’s drawn out between commercials, soft stories, or obsessive coverage of snow or heat.  Radio gives you weather, traffic, sports scores, and maybe four minutes of headlines that ran in the newspaper. It is still the newspaper that breaks stories and advances the reporting of what’s in the news.

I also learn what the media is covering and how they chose to cover things.  If you’re promoting a book or writing one, you need to consume the newspaper out there.

When reading a half-dozen papers daily you also see bias, incompetence, and stylistic differences amongst the papers.  The same story can be reported on differently by each paper.  Sometimes, the
way to the truth is to put each of the stories together or to weigh them against the other.

What I really learned about reading newspapers is that there’s little more I like to do on a daily basis than to read books and newspapers.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015

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