My Media Consumption Evolution

February 10, 2026

I stopped using facebook in 2012 before they really got into new/media/video. Never really used any other social network so it's not been much of a source of media consumption for me. I have dabbled in Mastodon and BlueSky when they got lots of attention after Twitter was purchased. But I never used Twitter so they have never really fit into the flow of my consumption.

For a brief period after college and before moving in with my girlfriend (now wife) I used to watch the morning and evening local news while eating breakfast and dinner before and after work. Mainly because it was just something on in the apartment making noise. But I do feel like I had some sense of what was going on, generally speaking both at the local and national levels.

I became a heavy reddit user and that replaced most of my news. I was able to focus on just the things I cared about and if I wanted a broader view I could move to browser r/all which aggregated "top" content from across all of the major subreddits. This was a pretty good way of surfacing national and global events. I typically tried to avoid the comments on these posts as they were often highly opinionated and contentious rather than informative and constructive.

Over the last couple of years I've moved to trying to support independent news orgs and individuals. Starting with 404 Media. I remember seeing a few posts about the team starting up and the list of focuses they had largely aligned with my interests. At first I just followed what they published via RSS some was full content and some was paywalled. Not all of their content was relevant to me but I saw what they were pushing for with their FOIA requests and pressure they were putting on the overall media landscape was reason enough to become a subscriber. After that worked out I decided I would try to find other, similar sources.

Now I subscribe to a handful of independents and orgs like 404 Media. Aftermath which covers gaming and related culture. Taylor Lorenz's User Mag which covers tech and its intersection with pop culture. Garbage Day and their podcast Panic World which cover a wide range of topics around the internet and how it is impacting the offline world.

One of the things I feel like I'm really missing is something local¹. There are no local versions of this type of coverage that I can find. We only have a single local newspaper that is overpriced and basically just posts the weather and local sports scores along with ads every other paragraph. Dave Winer had a post about this topic that got me thinking about local news.

There will be no paywall, instead there's a toll system, like the EZ-Pass we have on roads in the US. How how we pay to ride the subway. We pay per article read. A user can buy a subscription, if they think it would be a better value than paying per article. No more paywalls that say "if you want to read this article you have to subscribe." That would be an essential part of the deal for readers.

No ads. Let's get rid of them. They suck.

-- Dave Winer

I think it's an interesting perspective that would give more power to independent journalists and bloggers as well as the opportunity for financial compensation. I think a place this type of structure could start is within journalism schools. Which might be the place we need to start to get this type of reset to work.

From college onward (when I got my first laptop) I've been a heavy user of RSS. Starting with Google Reader. Moved through Feedly, Inoreader, Flipboard, Newsblur. I could go on. Pretty much every RSS app/tool I come across, I try. The ability to pick exactly the sources I want and have that delivered to devices of my choosing and have progress sync'd is, to me, a much better experience than hopping around from site to site tring to figure out what is new and where I left off. That being said, I still do feel like I miss a bit of the web "feeling"? when I'm consuming everything in an isolated app that's stripped out all of the styling each site has. So from time to time I'll open the article and read it on the web as the creators intended. Maybe there's an opportunity to add some styling information to RSS and allow the apps to render that and give a bit more ownership back to the original authors.

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