Stop spreading the news

Given my ongoing experiments with what I call retrospective reading (i.e. reading ‘news’ when it’s several weeks, if not months, old) I thought this was interesting. I haven’t stopped reading newspapers altogether, but I have certainly cut down very significantly and switched towards periodicals and books. Top tip: If you can’t stop your addiction, at least get rid of newspapers during the week and focus on weekend editions, which are more reflective and analytical. Anyway, this is from Rolf Dobelli, who is well worth reading.

News is bad for your health.

Out of the ­10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli. Photograph: Guardian/Graphic

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we’d expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, “The market moved because of X” or “the company went bankrupt because of Y” is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of “explaining” the world.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory’s capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is “learned helplessness”. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

Book link.

The benefits of being a slow reader

I’ve started doing something recently that seems to be having an interesting effect on me. It’s something I’ve started to mention to other people and they seem to be intrigued by it.

What’s the thing?

I’ve started reading old newspapers and magazines. I don’t mean really old (years old), but weeks and occasionally months old.

Why am I doing this?

It’s partly that I no longer have the time to keep up with the daily deluge of newspapers. Reading one or two daily newspapers plus half a dozen or more magazines and periodicals cover to cover every week just isn’t sustainable.

So, here’s what I’ve started doing to deal with the deluge. I’m still buying the same material (but with more of a focus on weekend editions of newspapers and monthly magazines and periodicals that have more time to analyse not just report), but I’m reading them in binge reading sessions backwards. I’m reading them a week or a month after they’ve been published.

What’s the benefit of doing this?

Reading news and analysis that’s old seems to mean that I can skim things much faster. It’s more immediately obvious what is nonsense, misjudged, ill-informed or, with 20/20 hindsight, absolute gibberish.

I can skim a whole newspaper and pick out the good bits in 60-seconds if the issue is old enough.

But this skimming must be done on paper. Skimming a newspaper or magazine is far faster on paper than scanning one online. On paper serendipity also kicks in. Online I’ve pre-selected sections that I’m theoretically interested in. On paper, I just look at the whole thing and occasionally find things that I never knew I wanted to know.

But the really key thing is that with old newspapers, periodicals and magazines I seem to see connections. The benefit of what I’m terming ‘media hindsight’ is that deep connections appear far quicker.

My mind is more relaxed too. I don’t feel as though I have to finish things fast. The pressure is somehow off.I’m also tearing things out, scribbling on them with a pen and stapling them to similar and connected ideas. Try doing that on a screen.

In short, I have more time to think and my thinking is more relaxed, less knee-jerk and more contextual. I’m even less stressed, less anxious about the state of world affairs and, dare I say it, a little bit smarter (which in my case isn’t difficult).

Every little helps as they say.

Is ‘FaceTime’ a good idea?

I was sitting on a train yesterday, reading a newspaper, when I noticed an advertisement for FaceTime video calling on the new iPhone 4. The idea of the videophone has been around for as long as I can remember, for at least thirty years, and here it finally is.  Fantastic. But I foresee a potential problem.

If you add video to audio you are adding another level of communication. Another layer cognitive processing you might argue. Thus, whilst it is wonderful to see the person you are talking to on the other end of the phone, surely the depth of our listening or understanding will suffer?

This reminds me slightly of a project I worked on alongside Mckinsey & Company about ten years ago. It was for United News & Media as they were then called (a FTSE 100 company). The brief was working out what to do with Express Group Newspapers, which they owned at the time. 

To cut a long story short, I asked someone called Theodore Zeldin if he’d like to get involved, not least because he knew the editor and I was convinced that there was a connection between newspapers and conversation, which was (and still is) a big theme of his.  However, Theodore was really busy and couldn’t make it up to London to share with us his thinking. So he telephoned into a meeting instead. And this is where it gets good.

Most big meetings involve written material or some kind of a visual presentation such as Power Point – all of which are another level of distraction. Because Theodore couldn’t make it (and because the iPhone 4 had yet to be invented) we were all forced to listen very carefully (he’s softly spoken too) to his voice on the telephone. I can remember almost every word he said to this day.

If you are wondering what exactly he said I’m not going to tell you but I can share with you the fact that he more or less invented the idea of user generated content years before anyone like OhMyNews came up with the same idea.

Newspaper Statistics (not what you think)

Newspapers are dying right? Wrong. Newspaper circulation grew by 1.3% worldwide in 2008 to almost 540m daily sales. Adding the free daily papers, the circulation increase was 1.62% – or 13% over the previous 5 years. Overall, 1.9 billion people read a daily newspaper and newspapers reach 41% more people than the internet. OK, in 2008 in the US there was a fall of 3.7% , whilst in Europe the fall was 1.8% but so what? The model isn’t broken. It’s just that some titles are badly run, have too much debt and are in the wrong regions.

Newspaper Strategy

Here are my 5 top tips for struggling newspapers in 2010.

 

1. Vision.

Stop trying to do everything. Have a clear idea of what you are, what you are for and where you are going. Focus on just one thing and aim to do it extraordinarily well. Keep debt to a minimum and avoid acquisitions. Trust is vital. So too is editing in the sense of helping people navigate a world containing too much information. Build a brand people can believe in.

 

2. Editorial strategy

Remove all mention of celebrity culture. Focus instead on real people. Celebrate the ordinary. Write articles about people that aren’t famous, powerful or rich. Write about ordinary people doing wonderful things that make the reader feel different, feel better or feel human. Also write about ideas. Avoid plugging things. Move away from anything that contains the word ‘lifestyle’. Become more visual. Use more photography and cartoons to tell stories.

 

3. Distribution

If the people won’t come to the paper take the paper to the people. Develop proprietary channels, especially innovative channels involving trains, buses, coffee shops, sandwich bars, hotels, shopping centres, pubs and vending.

 

4. Price

If you are intent on using digital channels make the online paper free but build in a cost for personalisation and functionality. With hard copies use price to build loyalty.

 

5. The internet

This is not your central issue. Focus instead on content. Embrace the internet but do not become obsessed with it. Do not try to compete with online head on. You have already lost the online war in terms of news moving online and to mobile devices. Shift your focus away from reporting breaking ‘news’ towards reflective analysis and commentary. If you are seeking to reduce costs consider moving editions online during the week but keep things on paper at weekends.