What Are You Reading, and How?

Nearly every conversation I've had over the past month has involved some variation of this question: What are you reading right now? The question isn't about fiction, or even books - it's about news. Most of my friends and colleagues are trying to avoid reading (or watching) too much of it - we all know the Trump playbook, and if he's going to flood the zone with shit, well, best to stay out of the zone.

Yesterday I was having lunch with a fellow islander, a man whose built his career in marketing and communications. He asked the same question, and mentioned he's been dissatisfied with the usual fare consumed by members of our tribe - the Times, the Post, the New Yorker et al - the "mainstream, liberal media" as defined by our current leaders. I agreed - and told him I'd recently cancelled my Post subscription (the whole Bezos thing is getting to be too much) and that I rarely read full Times pieces unless they've been forwarded to me, usually via email or text. I've been off Twitter for over two years, and BlueSky is better, but my feed has become a litany of complaint, which isn't exactly helpful.

So what do you read, he asked again? I mean, really read? And that's when it hit me: I read my inbox. Over the past decade or so, it's become my morning (and afternoon, and evening) paper.  I want a filter between me and the media, and I wanted that filter to be made up of humans and brands that I trust. As a medium, email is tempered - I only get things I've opted into getting. There's no algorithm or AI, spam gets deleted instantly, and I chose what I open, and when I open it. It's pretty much the opposite of how our current media ecosystem works. When the newsletters from mainstream media come in, I'll browse them, but I rarely click through. Instead, my diet consists of a lot of individuals, and a ton of niche newsletters.

Take a look at that screenshot of my inbox this morning. I sat down to read a bit late today, and was kind of astonished to see I had fourteen email newsletters waiting patiently in my inbox. Fourteen - and that's just a fraction of the newsletters I subscribe to. Friday is in fact a light day - many publishers don't like sending emails on Friday, because open rates are always lower. I did a quick count of all the news-related emails I read in a given week, and I passed 100 pretty quickly. Is this a good thing?

That got me thinking about how I cook up my daily information diet - what are the ingredients, are they healthy? Do I set a table and savor the meal, or am I hastily shoveling shit into my head whenever I'm hungry?

If I'm being honest, that image of my inbox is a tad bit staged - I'd already cleared it of another two dozen or so emails, including three from the Times, and one each from the Post, The Information, a site called Not Boring, Medium, Adweek, the Journal, a news aggregator called Smashing,  Wired, Coinbase, a few stock analysts, Fidelity, and a rotating cast of two or three random Substack authors who for reasons I'll never understand end up in my inbox each day.  I'd post an image of my Trash folder but I don't want to bum too many folks out....

It was with some trepidation, then, that I took a call with a founder who has built a new approach to news reading built to shake off many of the bad habits now ingrained in our country's information diet. The service is called Spread, and it's kind of an anti-feed. The idea is to create a marketplace of sorts between readers and trusted "spreaders" of stories. You follow these spreaders, and get a simple feed of what they're reading at any give time. No subtweets, no likes, no algorithms, no nonsense (yet). I'm just starting to use Spread (this is day two for me), the service seems built for folks like me, who only read something after considering whether it's worth the time. If I learn anything interesting, I'll report back. But in the meantime, I'd be curious - what are you reading these days, and how?

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