I prefer monthly or quarterly publications over daily and weekly. I like when the author takes a deep breath and puts things into perspective.

Unless you are in politics, business, or a market trader, why would you need to read or watch the news daily (and lets forget the state of the media today). What purpose does it serve…

I think the same could be said about email. Which reminds me of Donald Knuth’s web page about email

i think gary (3 post previous) has it right:
he “missed” some “news” due to actual exprience of personal reality.
i have been news-fasting for a few years; it’s been pretty easy since it started when i gave up television – the best thing i have done since walking away from the amaerican dream (giving up a high paying engineering job to pursue actual happiness).
i feel more focused and centered, and i get more work done with much more time left over for fun!!

You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting.–Dame Rose Macauley

I’ve been following things for forty years. The only consistently reliable and worthwhile source I have found is the Wall Street Journal. They have to be right because money is on the outcome no matter the subject. The are worth the read every day.

I believe it was Mark Twain that said “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”…

Where would one be without Doonesbury, The Boondocks, Frank & Ernest, and Hints from Heloise? And don’t forget Dear Abby!

Seriously, you are correct, in that you could insert $variables in for names and places and the same copy could be rerun over and over. Except for stuff like road closures and obituaries…

I missed the ‘live’ airing of the debates ’cause I was watching my sons hs football team march on to victory…

From what I heard of the analysis, cspan was the network to watch. I did watch “analysis” on the Daily show (tongue in cheek) and a re-broadcast fo the debate on fox.

Fox new is pretty funny, they lined up the shots of the two candidates so that bush didn’t look that much shorter than kerry. It was glaringly apparent though because the bushes podium was higher on the screen and he was still shorter.

I do not know what is more amazing, that a campaign would expend so much effort in negating the ‘height advantage’ or that a network would play along with them.

Debate wise, kerry did a pretty good job of handling bush. But, gore did the same in ‘00 and look where that got him.

Christian, only if those debates actualy touched on some interesting issues. By all accounts, they didn’t.

(Haven’t seen them, only reports on them and heard some soundbites. And since when can you trust those anyway!)

Did anyone here watch the debates? Now that will make you lose a day or two of productivity!

PS- even the dogs are voting these days- see petpeevespoll.com

Logically, it seems that the amount of news that one has to ingest on a particular topic should be dependent on both (a) how involved you want to be in the particular issue and (b) how intelligent you want your involvement to be. For example, if you don’t want to vote or if you don’t care how intelligent your vote is, then you do not need to read anything about the elections. This is not the best example (after all, sometimes the answer is painfully obvious without much research), but it illustrates my point: by saying you don’t want to know about the current affairs somewhere, you acknowledge your unwillingness to be intelligently involved. That is fine, as we cannot be involved in everything. But I think the world would be a better place if we were all intelligently involved in a few issues, especially on the global scale, where our decisions (purchases, votes) have most significant consequences.

While I tend to keep an eye and/or ear on the radio and TV news and news.bbc.co.uk for a few minutes each day, I gave up on “real” newspapers a long time ago. (Although I do pick up the free rag called Metro most mornings on my way into work on the tube, but skip the “serious” coverage or take the conclusions it makes with a pinch – make that a bag – of salt) There is just too much news in them too hastily interpreted and judged by the editors. The only way to get value out of those is read many different ones of them front to back every day as most can’t stick with a story to see how it develops, hastily abandoning it as soon as it turns out different from what they predicted the day it first broke.

That said, I like to read the “liberaly approved” international edition of Newsweek regularly. In fact, I’ve just taken out a subscription, so make that weekly now. It gives a bit more depth without being too judging and almost completely void of the negative tone seen in most mainstream publications.

I still firmly believe that the more interrupt driven your life is, the less you will get done. Of course, this is coming from a college student that is currently going though ~120 tabs opened in his ever-streaming RSS reader on IRC and AIM. Maybe if I worked at a helpdesk I could have a critical mass of interrupts and get nothing done.