What Is News?

I consume a lot of news during the day. I monitor the markets and my investments, the telecommunications and broader technology business, local goings-on, sports, global news, and more. I can't seem to get enough of it.

There is of course a huge effort on the part of many individuals and companies to sort, prioritize, correlate, distribute and enhance items across all media and sources to meet the specific needs of various individuals. I use them yet I remain unsatisfied with any of them. As a result I use many news aggregaters and related services and bounce along among them throughout the day. All of them have their pluses and minuses. Some are truly dreadful and I avoid them entirely.

I think one problem is that there is no consensus view of just what is news; news can be a very individual thing. I even needed to ask myself that question since without understanding my own wants and needs how could I possibly assess what's on offer. Criticism is unfair without a clear set of objectives as a metric.

Tentatively, my working definition of news is as follows:

• Relevant to one or more interests that I explicitly prioritize. This could something as simple as news about Google, the company, the Opportunity Rover on Mars, or gun-running in south-east Asia.
• Important, either to me (however I might choose to describe that) or to the relevant area of interest.
• Timely, especially if it is important, which would make an item not only timely but also urgent.

I get the bulk of my news via the internet. I do not watch television and I do not subscribe to a newspaper or news periodical. Seriously. Anything that needs to be packaged up and prettied up to be delivered once a day (week, month) or at a specific time of day, is not news. At worst it's merely entertainment, and at best it's relevant and important, but far too late to be timely. I do like to be surprised by items, which would be on topics I might never think to search out yet still appeal to me, but I do not mistake these as being news.

I'm going to keep this post brief to just introduce the topic of news. At irregular intervals for the next while I'll write some posts about news, what does and does not work for me and why, and the positives and shortcomings of some of the news sources I have used.

And as a closing point, is my own blog news? By my own definition, certainly not. It may be interesting and relevant, perhaps even important or entertaining to some people, but it is never timely. That means it can be read at leisure anytime. Your life will not suffer if a post is read weeks after it is written, and I won't feel compelled to feverishly write timely posts.