Too busy to read?

you should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type. It's a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers. __Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood and I'll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment__. The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.

publishers considered their readers to be their customers, and saw their goal as providing a product good enough to convince people to pay to read it. Day's innovation was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers. His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers' attention as possible to the advertisers. To do so, he lowered the price of the Sun to a penny and pushed more mass interest stories. "He was the first person to really appreciate the idea--you gather a crowd, and you're not interested in that crowd for its money," Wu explained in a speech, "but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention."

We know that the news predominantly reports the problems of the world, from systemic social issues of poverty and inequality to individual petty crime, with very little to comfort the reader. We accept that these are the types of stories we expect to hear from the news. This expectation has become so entrenched in the news industry that a television news programme can have 'more images of violence, suffering and death in a half hour than most people would normally view in a lifetime'.

by reporting on problems without reporting progress alongside it, it creates a lack of context, an imbalance and an excess where negative news reporting has moved from being helpful to becoming harmful. The hypocrisy seemed absurd to me: news organisations that pride themselves on shining a light on the world's ills have have actually been contributing to those ills as no one is shining a light on them.

This man wasn't an economist or a commodities trader, or in any profession that lived or died by the latest news. The time he spent with the paper and news programs on radio and TV greatly exceeded what he needed to be a knowledgeable voter and contributing member of society, or even to enhance his own personal interests. In fact, he was getting very little valuable information through his programming choices--or, rather, his lack of choices. So why did he spend nearly four hours a day consuming it? It was a habit.

Nick Denton told his writers the same thing nearly one hundred years later: "The job of journalism is to provide surprise."* News is only news if it departs from the routine of daily life.

This sensationalism can divert empathy toward wrong causes: cancer and malnutrition being the ones that suffer the most from the lack of such attention. Malnutrition in Africa and Southeast Asia no longer causes the emotional impact--so it literally dropped out of the picture. In that sense the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

by selectively reporting on mostly negative events, we come to perceive the world through a troubled lens and have a distorted understanding of reality. This distorted understanding, rather than reality itself, can then determine public opinion.

By having a more rounded narrative in my media diet that included a healthy balance of problems and solutions, I instead felt energised

But what if most of what happens is expected? Most things do not depart from the routine. Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be. And so the normal parts of life are omitted from the news by virtue of being normal.

The race to the top of search engines has inadvertently led to a race to the bottom in terms of quality journalism. Stories are decided on based on their 'traffic potential, revenue potential, turnaround time and at the bottom of the list editorial quality'.

Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that's possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he's receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed. Unless you're a breaking news reporter, it's usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events. Vetted reporting appearing in established newspapers and online magazines tends to provide more quality than social media chatter and breaking-news sites.

The latest news ... don't leave home without it The last move to make before leaving for the party - even after you've given yourself final approval in the mirror - is to turn on the radio news or scan your newspaper. Anything that happened today is good material. Knowing the big-deal news of the moment is also a defensive move that rescues you from putting your foot in your mouth by asking what everybody's talking about. Foot-in-mouth is not very tasty in public, especially when it's surrounded by egg-on-face.

First, if you want reliable information - pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: 'I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange, you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.' Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: 'You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service.' Now the deal suddenly sounds tempting to hundreds of millions of people. Don't follow their example.

I found this deeply worrying; the information we consume through the news becomes our basis for understanding the world. This then creates a filter through which we see things and influences how we feel, talk about and respond to global, local and even personal challenges. The overwhelmingly negative and sensationalised information I was getting from the news appeared excessively confrontational in its tone and it made me feel like the world was going down the drain and there was nothing I could do about it, except for switch off from it all together.

According to the story, "the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes" [emphasis mine]. I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.

Well, food is to the body what information is to the mind. The information that we imbibe will turn into emotions, thoughts, actions and behaviours. The consequences are less visible but just as potent. The news is one of the most powerful and most negative streams of information we inescapably consume. Watching the news affects our mood, our beliefs, our understanding of the world, our relationship to other people and our politics, but its impact remains largely unquestioned by the consumers who are affected by its content.

The news is not, in fact, a reflection of everything that goes on in the world, it is a reflection of everything that goes wrong in the world. -- C. John Sommerville

If you want your brain to perform at its peak, you've got to be even more vigilant about what you feed it. Are you feeding it news summaries or mind-numbing sitcoms?

There are six effective ways we can change our media diet in a way that will help us become more informed, engaged and empowered: 1. Become a conscious consumer 2. Read/watch good-quality journalism 3. Burst your filter bubble 4. Be prepared to pay for content 5. Read beyond the news 6. Read solutions-focused news

Does the media create or reflect opinion? Is the media a commercial enterprise that is led by profitability, or a noble one led by integrity? Does it report news that is in the interest of the public, or in the interest of its own success? What are the consequences of reporting such a negative picture of the world?

The reporting of the extraordinary is so ingrained in the news industry that when defining what the news is at its most basic level, journalists will say that the news is not 'dog bites man' but 'man bites dog' - that is, a dog biting a man is a relatively common occurrence, so it isn't news, but a man biting a dog is unusual, and therefore news. This perfectly captures the tendency for news stories to be about events that are infrequent, unusual and negative.

There is no denying that having a news industry that asks the challenging questions, highlights our failures, exposes corruption and scandal, makes us aware of problems and holds power to account in a democratic society is a good thing. The problem created by this kind of reporting comes from having too much of it.

People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention.

Thomas Jefferson, the third US president and leading author of the Declaration of Independence, said, 'The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.' I would have to agree.