Learning not to read the newspaper

FOr most of my life, I've had pack rat tendencies.  I can pile up newspapers, magazines, books, papers, various things I always intent to do.  I often ended having to just purge backlogs because I was acquiring new material faster than I could process the old.

I've gotten much better, but I still have a small newspaper backlog and a much larger magazine backlog.  Part of the trick is slowing my rate of acquisition, I've canceled some subscriptions and generally have gotten much more conservative about committing myself to new things.  More important, I'm slowly learning how to not read the newspaper.

I get the Washington Post every day.  I tend to read the front page and the Style section (plus Dilbert, who resides in Business).  I've got about an hour a day on the metro to do my reading plus some less efficient time while walking.  On some days I take another section or two based on interesting headlines.  Most days I can finish both and then make a bit of progress on my backlog from the weekend sections.  However, some weekends I'd travel or the like so old newspapers would pile up.

I've gotten the backlog pile down by training myself to not read certain articles.  I read less profiles in Style, skip most of the political horse race coverage in the front page, and try to just skip news articles that I don't need to know the in-depth story on.  I sometimes skim, but I tend to feel guilty when i do so, for some reason it's often easier to skip articles entirely.

The main thing I worry about is that I'll start over filtering my news. In Earth, by David Brin, there's a mentor character that intentionally sets her news aggregation programs to bring in random articles and viewpoints contrary to hers.  I tend to think that's an admirable sentiment.  The closest I come to implementing it is reading most every article that makes the front page unless I know I can miss it.  In essence I'm trusting the Post's editor's to be my news aggregation program. 

Most of my online news comes from clicking on interesting headlines in Salon or Slate (and sometimes TNR), blogs, and scanning newspaper sites when big news is breaking.  In all those cases, my self-selection bias is pretty darn high.  If paper form newspapers ever really did go away, I'm not sure how I'd fill the gap.