Category Archives: life in general

being me, life in general

News consumption in a networked world

If you read any pieces on the future of news, and especially, the future of newspapers, in my experience, most of them point out that newspapers are dead dinosaurs, clinging onto life in a world they don’t understand, flailing desperately to protect their revenue models, trying to find ways to get people to pay for news content online that the newspapers have previously given away free online (with some advertising support) in a desperate bid to keep their ways above water. Occasionally, there will be a battle about copyrights with aggregators – Google News doesn’t operate in Spain at the moment, for example, or clipping services.

Print sales are dropping for a lot of publications and income from digital advertising isn’t even going to come close to replacing lost income from print based advertising. The picture of life for newspapers is a grey and dying one, it seems.

I tend not to buy newspapers. Part of it is I’m a child of the connected era, and I’ve been reading papers online for well over 15 years; another part of it is that none of the Irish broadsheets, with the possible exception of the Examiner, really appeals to me. The Sunday Independent has a bunch of writers who don’t so much as “not appeal to me” as definitively drive me away from the newspaper. So I operated a pick and mix thing with newspapers online. And I customised Google News and I followed a lot of media outlets on Facebook.

In truth, I used to see the internet as the great white hope for someone like me. I speak multiple languages and the internet gives me access to multiple news services in those multiple languages. But I can’t customise Google News to handle news sources in multiple languages. It is getting to the stage where I’m going to give up on it. Facebook, in some respects, is better. I can follow any number of organisations on Facebook, and media wise, that includes but is not limited to several German, multiple times that several French, and some Finnish language services in addition to the New York Times, The New Yorker and the Atlantic. But I don’t really get to choose what I read either which way. Facebook tinkers around with their newsfeed algorithm on a regular basis and Google is simply uninteresting as an interface.

I started thinking in detail about how I – and I hate this term – “consume” news, and how people consume news. News is compelling, and particularly, happening now news is compelling. But the recent events in Paris made it clear that even while news is happening, there are big swathes of time in the middle when NOTHING is actually changing, then moments of utter confusion while people try to work out what has changed in the 10 seconds between swathes of time when NOTHING is actually happening. I found this with passenger aircraft going missing. Rolling news often isn’t so much rolling news as rolling guesswork and misinformation. Mostly now, I prefer summary reports.

This is true in terms of rolling news on the television. I find it utterly frustrating because while it’s on for 24 hours, the number of news stories it covers seems to be significantly less than the amount of news stories that you would get in a 30 minute summary on, say, Channel 4.

What I’ve noticed, however, is that between all the news services I have access to, I don’t believe I am anywhere near as as informed as I used to be. I also have realised that I don’t actually like navigating news online all that much, and similarly, am not such a great fan of dedicated applications on tablets or phones either. It is entirely possible that this is a function of how I learned to acquire news in the first place; namely by lying on my stomach as a child with the newspaper spread out on the floor in front of me. That double page spread seemed to offer so many possibilities.

The internet should as well but it’s not as easy to navigate I think because far fewer of the possibilities present themselves to you on a single page. For all the access to more material, I find it less easy to find. In some respects, some form of curation is nice, but neither Facebook nor Google are doing well on that front, although to be fair, Facebook are doing significantly better on that front; I’d just like to be able to split my newsfeed into a feed of media based links and a feed of status updates from my friends. I’d equally like them not to bother refeeding me links that are 5 and 6 days old. I saw one Le Monde report on the Charlie Hebdo shootings every day for almost a week after the shootings happened.

So I started wondering how I could change this and decided that it probably would be a good idea to start buying newspapers again, and specifically, a couple of different newspapers, from different countries. I specifically wanted them in paper format for various reasons, and up front, the choices were to be the weekend Financial Times, the weekend Le Monde, mainly because I didn’t think it would be possible to get Le Monde Diplomatique, and Die Zeit. I know there is no Irish paper in there but the one thing I have felt well informed on over the past 5 years are Irish matters. Sometimes too well informed.

As it happens, it looks like this is going to be a bit of a quest. It transpires that Easons on Nassau Street does stock (at least last on Thursday of last week) Le Monde Diplomatique but it’s a monthly paper so I suspect I will be looking at that one week, and the weekend Le Monde the rest of the weeks. None of the four branches of Easons I was in had Die Zeit, and again, only the branch on Nassau Street had any German newspaper, which is why I’ve been reading Frankfurter Allgemeine. My local branch of Easons had two copies of the FT last Saturday morning so if you went to the one in Omni and found it gone, I’m sorry. I did enjoy reading it though.

So this week, I have learned that Harz is now a good place to go if you’re looking to learn to ski again, and I’m quite pleased about that because the last time I went skiing, it was in the Harz mountains. And just because you’re reading the Financial Times doesn’t mean you’re away from celebrity divorce battles. Mind you, not too many reality TV stars play for the high stakes of a fortune totalling over 400 million pounds sterling.

I haven’t gotten to Le Monde Diplo yet though.

In the meantime, I’m looking at finding a way to curate news reports more effectively for myself across languages. Under the About Treasa there will shortly be a list of news media sites mainly because I can’t rely on any of the aggregators to supply accidental serendipity about stuff.

being me, life in general, things of beauty

waterbaby

I started back at the swimming again  today. That again is quite telling. It tells you I have been swimming on several well spaced apart occasions in the last indistinct period. I’m back at my old haunt, DCU Sports Club mainly because a) it’s the closest pool to me (just about, Ballymun isn’t too far off either) and more importantly, they have a very decent deal for alumni which has seen me chop more than 60% off the cost of gym membership. Against that, I don’t have regular access to climbing walls any more but I figured that was a suitable sacrifice to make in the face of starting back at the swimming.

I’ve been a member of a number of gyms with swimming pools (swimming pools are deal breakers for me; if you don’t have one, and preferably, one that’s at least 25m long, we’re not going anywhere), and of all of the, DCU’s is probably the most windsandbreezes friendly. Provided I don’t get lost looking for the carpark. Yes, UCD’s new 50m pool is beautiful, but it’s not a great place for me to start back at the swimming. And yes, I’ve had NAC membership (somehow never quite got into the habit of going to Blanchardstown), and yes, I’ve had ALSAA and Westwood membership. Westwood had a climbing wall and a fairly decent swimming pool.

But for some reason, I prefer DCU. The last time I was regularly swimming in DCU, I used to go three to four times a week after work. It seemed easy (although it pretty much predated Twitter, Facebook and 1.4 million other online distractions) to fit into my life and by the time I stopped going, I was doing 1600m each time. It’s probably the fittest I ever was. I miss that. Why I never got it working at any of the other pools, well Blanch’s outofthewayness aside, I don’t know.

Today, it was lovely, if evidence of the mountain I must climb. 225m is a long way short of 1600m. I don’t think it will be as hard this time though because the main reason I didn’t do more was the sudden arrival of Children. Lots of Children.

At this point, I would like to apologise to Sunday morning regulars at Tipperary Swimming Pool whom I probably terrorised in the same way at the age of 10. The pool isn’t the same when it’s not almost completely empty.

Anyway. While I’d probably have gotten more than 225 done, the truth is I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near 1600 so I’m not going to crib too much. I did find the conversation between the other two in the jacuzzi somewhat surreal given that it covered the economic and political differences between Russia and the West, with special mention of political leanings in the UK, all in German.

Still, this is why we go there; to improve mind and body.

life in general

Nous sommes tous Charlie

I lived in France, for a bit, and Belgium also. I speak fluent French. I never read Charlie Hebdo because I like my comic strips to be pure humour (think Asterix, Calvin & Hobbes, Sturmtruppen) rather than laced with acerbic satire.

The thing with satire is if you’re missing some of the cultural references, and as I moved around a bit, I tended to be missing them, it’s hard to read. I mean, if you look at Waterford Whispers, and Sminky’s Shorts, you can see how much you need to understand Irish cultural references, and unspoken references at that, to understand what’s going on. So while I’d pick up magazines about knitting, crochet, surfing photography, science, current affairs, economics and food, I tended to let the satiricals alone; Canard and Charlie. Being frank about it, for me, Charlie Hebdo was a splash of colour in Relay that I didn’t actually bother picking up.

I’m not going to say I’m sorry for that. For missing out on what they’ve done for the last amount of time. I’m only going to say that for the most part, you know, no matter where you live, if you get up, go to work, you should be pretty sure that you’ll come home in the evening without the downpoint of having been shot dead just because you were a journalist or cartoonist who wrote stuff someone didn’t like. Regardless of their reasons for not liking it.

I guess I’m saying I really didn’t care too much what Charlie Hebdo published. I care a lot that they had the right to do so because that right, that’s a good right.

It’s an important right.

Of the cartoons which have sprouted up in the past few days, it is probably predictable that the one which impacted on me most was one of Uderzo’s. If you’ve not seen it, it was posted to the Asterix Twitter Feed. I really would love a print of it. I’ve no idea whether it will turn up in the comic and graphic novel shops – I suppose I could be lucky.

In the meantime, I suppose, France is a very different country today to what it was on Monday, and while you can look at that in a sombre manner, it’s also fair to say that France is a very different country every day. Each place changes just a little every day anyway, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Our lives never flatline.