1440 Daily News Briefing

How the 1440 Daily News Briefing helped me quit the news and how it's going...

First, for everyone celebrating Christmas Today - Merry Christmas 🎅. Today I’m writing about a product that won’t cost you anything and you can start enjoying write away (hah that’s a pun)

In 2022 I quit the news. I also quit Twitter (well temporarily, but maybe permanently? I’ve found a new home on Mastodon, a de-centralized Twitter).

In 2108 I quit Facebook. My life is a bit better. Well, what’s it like quitting the news?

Well after years of doom scrolling, I was wondering if this is what I was meant to do - aimlessly for an hour a day or more. I would like to be informed of what is happening with my friends, the world but I really don’t see the current “news” as providing me with what I wanted and felt I needed.

So, I deleted all the apps. I nuked the Apple News app. I kept the WSJ for occasional reading. I nuked apps like the Atlantic, which helped me reason through the pandemic because I just got tired of their approach.

I started to curate stuff that was interesting to me on Substack and other websites. I do read a lot, but I read stuff that I find and try to avoid ad-driven curation. For example, I just discovered that James Fallows has a Substack, Breaking the News

I discovered this daily newsletter called 1440 and subscribed. I get a daily summary of what’s happening in the world. They put the most essential information in the subject of the email so that I can ignore it and not read it but still feel like I didn’t miss anything. I wish more emails had critical information in the subject line vs. requiring me to open it up to read it.

Look, a useful subject line!

Here is their pitch from their About Us page.

Separating fact from opinion is 
now an everyday obstacle course.

Staying informed means wading through thousands of headlines, ads, and op-eds, all driven by one goal. To be loud. To continuously catch your attention and keep it. But that's why we started 1440—A news source made for knowledge. Not clicks.

I love 1440 and have been telling people about it and wanted to share this with my readers.

I also want to share this awesome article, Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News, because it does an excellent job of capturing what I felt in the months that followed.

I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information product on a daily basis somehow makes you thoughtful and informed in a way that benefits society.

But I still encounter people who balk at the possibility of a smart, engaged adult quitting the daily news.

Oh go on…

The author shares these five things that you will experience

1. You feel better

2. You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news

3. Most current-events-related conversations are just people talking out of their asses

4. There are much better ways to “be informed”

5. “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not

The news isn’t interested in creating an accurate sample. They select for what’s 1) unusual, 2) awful, and 3) probably going to be popular. So the idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd.

Their selections exploit our negativity bias. We’ve evolved to pay more attention to what’s scary and infuriating, but that doesn’t mean every instance of fear or anger is useful. Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports—not an incidental side-effect—to agitate and dismay the viewer.

Ok, well that makes sense…

Curate your own portfolio. You can get better information about the world from deeper sources, who took more than a half-day to put it together.

Well feel free to read the article and decide for yourself. At the very least, try it out. We are about to go into an election cycle…

I really like Substack, Mastodon and 1440. I occasionally read the WSJ. I read articles that people send me to read as this is a good “filter” for what currently matters or is funny and noteworthy.

1440 is an awesome product that helps you get a more even view of what is happening in the world and if you manage to delete all the news apps, you will continue to get the important stuff while curating your own view of the world.