[1-2-Read] How To Stay Informed Without Going Insane

I've removed the paywall from this week's 1-2-Read segment because the news and algorithmically curated content are posing a serious threat to our civil discourse. If you're feeling frazzled by what's going on around you, I hope that this article will offer you some solace and clarity. And if you've enjoyed what you've read, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. These contributions will allow me to keep investing time into independent research + writing without sponsors or algorithmic interference. Thank you for your support!

(1) The Idea: Quit Your News Feed

A lot is happening around the world, and we tend to default to one of two ways to make sense of the chaos. We can either retreat and plug our ears while pretending Rome isn’t burning or throw ourselves into the infinite scroll of discourse under the excuse of “staying informed” while feeling all the more powerless. And in this case, online content can cater to both demands. It can entertain us to the point of distraction, allowing us to forget about all of it, and also steer us into polarised waters through algorithms. 

What we’re going through now is an information crisis where corporate interests have fundamentally altered how opinions are shaped, worldviews are formed and how discourse is carried out. According to a recent 2024 survey by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the number of people sourcing their news from social media has increased from 17% in 2022 to 20% in 2023. And the most staggering increase came from my age group of 18-24-year-olds, where a whopping 46% of us now stay informed about the world through our fyps.

Now, if you’ve read my post on the decline of longform reading, you’ll see that this trend of relying on shortform coverage/content doesn’t just impact our perception of the world, but also our intelligence. Moreover, as a recent article in The Economist pointed out, these impacts also extend into our political sophistication because with reading/writing, “the medium is the message”. If we’re confined to limited coverage that’s afraid of going beyond 300 words or 60 seconds, then that’s all the ammunition we have to work with when we bring important issues to a public forum. Nuance is entirely lost if our base information diet is (in Cal Newport’s words) Ultra-Processed Content, and now we can only argue with headlines with no context.

So, in this week’s letter, I want to share an alternative way to stay informed without getting totally sucked into the endless vortex of machine-curated media. Because in most cases, they’re feeling off of reactions instead of discussions, and if we ever want to bring back civil discourse, it must start with a fundamental restructuring of how we curate and consume information.

The first part of this post, again, will be structured in protocols because I don’t like to give catch-all advice. The point is for you to see the core of what I’m saying and work backwards, creating a tailored plan for your own situation. The second part will tackle a common objection to this alternative approach.

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Protocol #1: Read beyond the headlines

In 2024, I went to a writer’s festival and wandered into a panel full of journalists from The Herald Sun, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review. The headline issue was a lack of support for legacy journalism, and the whole panel lamented about dwindling subscriber numbers alongside a media landscape that is increasingly hostile towards their industry. This is not an Australian issue alone. Even major news outlets like The New York Times are now resorting to games and podcasts to retain their subscriber base.

This is what the writer Mark Manson called “a slow-moving crisis of [the media industry’s] own design”. See, quality journalism takes time and effort to consume and even more trouble to fund and produce. So gradually, long-form reporting fell out of favour, and a lot of news sources resorted to “pushing out cheap content that looks expensive”. Popular news sites routinely publish stories with urgent headlines, but most of us walk away from these pieces with sprinkles of information with no context. And of course, this type of journalism is easily replaceable. Like Manson mentioned in his article, even an uninformed 24-year-old can do these types of reporting with a ton of “Google-Fu”. So now the question is: If we can find a free alternative from YouTube or Instagram of the same short, succinct coverage, who wouldn’t unsubscribe from these outlets that are supplying sloppy content?

As for readers, it feels like we’re always just scratching the surface wherever we look. The headlines won’t do it; the podcasters only arm us with opinionated takes, and those 60-second rants on TikTok only turn us into keyboard jockeys. So, where do we look if we want to get beyond the headlines?

Well, as it turns out, there are still great sources out there that deliberately go beyond the headlines with fact-based analyses. There’s just a higher barrier to entry because they take longer to consume, cost way more than the normal news cycle and, at times (not always), dry as fuck to read. These sources include The Economist, Chronicle of Higher Education, Financial Times and Foreign Policy. They’re the kind of stuff your grandfather reads over his Yorkshire tea at 6 am, but one quality article from these sources can save you hours of dancing around with dozens of crappy sources. Also, notice that sometimes good reporting is supposed to be a little dry because it’s virtually impossible to sensationalise something that has been studied from all angles. In Mason’s words: “If you’re getting excited or worked up reading something, chances are you’re being taken for a ride.” 

And this is where the first protocol comes in: when you’re searching for information, seek out a few high-quality sources even if they’re more cost/time-consuming to read. They can be magazines/newspapers, but they can also include quality newsletters, full-length books on a specific issue or independently funded media. Most of them have free subscription plans, and even the paid sources are quite affordable. So, when you’ve picked a handful of quality sources you like, now let’s get down to reading them.

Protocol #2: Embrace single-purpose devices

A common complaint of newsletter/magazine subscriptions is that there are too many articles and too little time to read them. This usually results in an inbox overflowing with unread posts and stacks of stale magazines on the front porch.

The solution is quite simple: invest in a single-purpose device that’ll give you a distraction-free reading experience. In most cases, our experience with magazines/newsletters is haphazard at best as we try to cram in a few reading minutes when we’re on the John or in a doctor’s waiting room. The problem remains: our attention is still fractured even when we’re subscribed to the best sources. In this case, we need to stop viewing articles/newsletters as time-killing buffers and find a way to compile them into a repository of insights that both excites and warrants our full attention (especially if we’ve paid for them).

Again, I’m going to give credit to Cal Newport for another great tip: compile all your magazine/newsletter subscriptions into a personalised weekly editorial. I used to have physical magazine subscriptions while I read newsletters from my inbox, but now I send digital copies of all the articles to my reMarkable Pro Move tablet. It’s a neat little tablet that allows me to highlight/annotate without switching between 5 different tabs. My reading experience becomes deliberate because now everything’s in one place.

This is the power of a single-purpose reading device: there is nothing else to do but to read. And while a paper tablet like reMarkable helps, you can get the same results from an old iPad, a Kindle or a dedicated Instapaper feed on your laptop as long as the protocol stands: make sure everything is in one place so as to minimise attention-switching. This is why smartphones don’t qualify as single-purpose devices. There are too many features on one tiny screen with no way to separate contexts.

Once you have this device set up, let’s find some time to read.

Protocol #3: Give yourself a weekend slow scroll

I got this idea from Emma Gannon’s newsletter back when I was on Substack. She would send out a weekly newsletter called ‘The Sunday Slow Scroll’ where she would gather interesting articles/insights throughout the week and curate them into a master newsletter. And personally, this was one of my favourite parts of her work. 

So, for our purpose here, I want you to go a step further. You can start by reading another writer’s curations, but eventually, try to curate your own weekend slow scroll with the tips I shared in protocols 1 & 2. And after that, set aside a morning/evening during the weekend to work through the entire list, slowly.

Like I mentioned earlier, most of our news/content consumption is compulsive. We try to squeeze in 5 minutes in our newsletter inbox and another 15 when we’re taking a shit. This approach is frustrating for two reasons. One: unlike novels/full-length books, long-form reporting is meant to be read in one go. We never feel like we've grasped the whole story when we break it up into 500-word chunks. Two: we never feel like we could keep up with the cycle of reporting. For weekly magazines like The New Yorker and The Economist, by the time you’re done with your reading list, your information is probably two weeks out of date.

When I started practising curating my own sources, I tried to read for 20 minutes over my coffee every morning, but it didn’t work because of the reasons above. So, I adopted a rule for Saturday mornings: magazines/newsletters only before lunchtime. This gave me 3-4 hours to get up to date with all the major events around the world with in-depth, nuanced coverage.

Now, this approach might seem excessive, but in the long run, it’ll save you a lot of time and prevent that crazy feeling that you get from reading too much news. On the one hand, it frees up mental space during the week so that you’re not checking the news feed every 5 minutes. Deep down, you know that you’ve covered the important grounds, and you don’t need another dozen TikToks to tell you what you already know. On the other hand, your information will always be up to date because you’ve compressed 10+ hours of shallow reading into a deliberate 3-hour chunk, opening up time and energy to work/read something else during the week.

Hence, when you have a good list of articles saved, don’t read them right away. Find a solid chunk of time on your days off and aim for depth instead of breadth.  

A common objection: self-curated sources = echo-chamber?

A common concern people have raised in the comments is: if everything is curated by me, then isn’t it dangerous because I’ll end up in an echo-chamber?

This objection is intuitive, but given the state of how content is curated nowadays, it’s also unfounded. In a recent episode on Cal Newport’s podcast Deep Questions, he explained that misinformation/echo chambers stem from machine-curated content instead of hand-picked curations. Though algorithms give us the illusion that they have curated a feed just for you! In reality, they’re just raw data bouncing between a two-tower recommendation model. It only measures reaction as it narrows its selections based on your engagement.

In other words, the entire game with these algorithms is to give you no space to even think about curation. This is how we end up looking up one thing on YouTube and wandering into a weird corner based on unsolicited recommendations. The end game is to keep you glued to the screen without intentions while giving you the illusion that the algorithm is serving you carefully curated content. As a result, biases start to disguise themselves as facts, and facts start to fracture into confirmation biases.

So counterintuitively, if we take curation into our own hands, we’ll end up with more space to see our biases clearly. We are free to pick out the strongest arguments/content from both sides and pit them against each other instead of taking impulse as gospel. This is called dialectical reading, where disagreements aren’t something to fret about or argue over, but interesting entry points for a deeper understanding of the issue.

And this state of nuance is impossible to achieve with algorithmic curations because it was killed long before we press play on a vertical video. So, if we really want to stand a chance against misinformation and clickbait disguised as truth, the best thing we can do is to take curation into our own hands while remaining critical, objective and radically honest with our thoughts.

Now, let’s summarise the three protocols before giving you the prompts to put them into action:

Protocol 1: Read Beyond The Headlines. Aim for a few high-quality sources instead of dozens of single-sided takes.

Protocol 2: Invest In A Single-Purpose Device. Gather everything onto a dedicated device/program to keep everything in one place.

Protocol 3: Adopt A Weekend Slow Scroll. Learn everything about recent events in a short, concentrated period instead of dipping in and out throughout the week.

(2) The Prompts

1: Make a list of some interesting magazines and newsletters you would like to read. What are some of the magazines you would like to read if you had all the time in the world? Is your inbox currently overflowing with unopened newsletters? And imagine how you’ll see the world if you could find a way to read them all? Then, come up with a list of quality sources you love. Write them out on a piece of paper for clarity.

2: Describe where/when/how you’ll read these weekly curations. After you’ve set up a dedicated feed/single-purpose device, get excited and describe how you’ll read them. Be as specific as possible. Is it at a café? Is it at home when you’re listening to music? Or is it on a park bench? Make sure you design an environment that makes you feel comfortable about your dedicated session of weekend reading. And after the first few weeks, gradually turn it into a weekly appointment with yourself to get to know the world.  

Bonus: What do you need to remove from your digital diet to make space for high-quality sources? If you need some help with a digital declutter, read part 2 of my series on attention.