How I Tame the Information Tide

Do you feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with the news? Do you find the current media environment leads to information overload? Do you spend too much time trying to keep up with everything?

In an earlier post I discussed how to deal with a more partisan media environment by reading widely across media outlets with different partisan slants to create a more balanced news perspective. In this post, I want to provide a more complete description of the workflow I use to try to tame the information tide (thanks, Doris Graber). I deal with information overload by employing a three-step workflow: filter > sort > read and react.

Step 1: Filter the news by having relevant information delivered to me

RSS is the backbone of my workflow and it represents the first cut at taming the tide. The primary benefit is that I don't have to visit multiple sites and apps to get my news, only one. (If you need a quick overview of RSS, try watching RSS in Plain English.) I subscribe to feeds from a number newspapers, blogs, and magazines—sources that regularly publish stories that I want to read. And those stories are delivered to me throughout the day every day.

You'll need a reader to compile and organize your subscriptions. Google Reader was a popular solution for that purpose, but Google has decided to pull the plug on July 1. I have recently switched to Feedly because the subscription process works exactly as it did for Google Reader. More importantly, Feedly works on multiple platforms—I use it in Firefox on my PCs and have apps on both my phone and tablet. Finally, Feedly allows me to organize my feeds into different folders—I have "sections" for national news, local news, sports, lifestyle, news for my profession, even comics.