I’m a journalist and I’m changing the way I read news. This is how. | Nieman Journalism Lab
Around 1 a.m. on July 27, 2017, I woke up, opened my politics Twitter list, and lay in the dark watching (via tweets) the Senate’s failed vote to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. Around 1:30 a.m., Arizona Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote to save the ACA. For the next hour and a half I read reaction tweets and watched clips of McCain’s thumbs-down.
For the last eight years, I’ve spent hours with my children while simultaneously also on my phone. If I read bad news while I’m with my kids, my reaction to their normal kid behaviors is disproportionate; I find myself snapping at them over things that normally wouldn’t bother me. Sometimes, it’s because the news I’m reading is very sad, bad news about kids who are far less fortunate than my own three. In the moment, I can’t fully wrap my head around that disconnect — the fact that some children are suffering or dying while my own children are safe and are not, in that moment, explicitly acknowledging how lucky they are. Instead what they’re doing is acting like human beings, but what I’m reading on my phone is bringing out the worst in me.
When the news is good, I’ve also ignored the kids, because I’m busy reading the good news and want to gloat, to read more and more of it, to read reactions to it — happy reactions, from people who agree with me; sad or unhinged reactions, from people who don’t agree. The kids get more time on the iPad, or another episode, or a dinner of snacks because I’m sucking the good news in, even after it stops feeling good.
