Most people assume that I follow the news closer than anyone they know and are surprised when they bring up some state or national news that I haven’t heard about.
I get it. I own a newspaper, so all I care about is news.
Not exactly. Tracy news, yes. Walnut Grove news, yes. Currie news, yes. Milroy, Balaton, Lyon County — yes, yes and yes.
National news? Not so much. Just because I own a newspaper doesn’t mean news is all I care about. I love food, too, but I don’t sleep in my kitchen.
If something catches my eye on a national level, yes I’ll scroll and read about it. But I’ll quickly move on with my work-dominated life, because believe me, the aforementioned towns offer up enough newsworthy items and events to keep me busy eight days a week. I have to draw the line somewhere.
I never completely shut things down, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that news can happen when you least expect it. News doesn’t care what day it is, or what time of the day it is, or if you think you really need a day off. And when it comes to local news events, that’s fine. I know how to drop what I’m doing and work.
But when it comes to national news, I don’t embrace it like that.
This is why I am sick and tired of out-dated news alerts that sporadically pop up on my phone.
And I’m not the only one. According to an analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week; 43% of those who did not receive alerts said they had actively disabled them. They complained of receiving too many or not finding them useful, according to the research that covered 28 countries.
The use of news alerts has grown over the last decade, says The Guardian. Weekly use of alerts in the U.S. has grown from 6% to 23% of phone users since 2014 and from 3% to 18% in the UK, according to the analysis. The extraordinary power of the BBC News alert was underlined in the research, which suggested almost 4 million people in the UK will be notified every time the broadcaster sends one.
All these numbers beg the question: When is enough too much? When are we pushed over the line to make us unsubscribe? It’s become increasingly difficult to walk away from the news — or some watered-down, opinionated semblance of such (I call it garbage) — these days. The news follows us, either with those annoying news alerts, or something some idiot posted on Facebook or X that’s related to a news story.
You could shut your phone off, but what if someone needs to call you? Do you want to sacrifice missing an actual phone call to save yourself from a news flash? That’s not an option anyone would take, nor is it a very realistic one in this day and age. I would go to settings and shut them off, but that’s not ideal, either, because there is a certain percentage (albeit small) that I do want to know about, even though by the time it comes through your phone, it’s almost old news anyway.
I wish publishers of these news forums could disseminate between important news we need to know and crap like “foods to avoid if you want to lose some belly fat.”
But they can’t, or won’t, and that’s the rub.
