This is a timeline of my media consumption from Wednesday, Jan. 15. I was watching my media all week, but decided because I was most active on Wednesday since I didn’t have work or class that I would track that one.
8:00 a.m.: Woke up and scrolled through Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to catch up on both social and news content I missed from the night previous and the early east coast hours.
9:30 a.m.: Turn on C-Span on my laptop and listen to the vote on impeachment documents transferred to the Senate while doing other work.
Also check The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico to read about the impeachment process in D.C. (I am a bit of a politics junkie).
10:00 a.m.: I watched a highlight on Youtube of the College Football Playoffs, which I was unable to watch earlier this week.
10:30 a.m.: I checked The Arizona Republic website, azcentral.com for local news. I recently finished an internship there and have continued to read the paper. I also checked The Arizona Capitol Times at around the same time because the legislative session in Arizona recently started and I wanted to see if anything was happening.
The storines of the day, were mostly about a bill regarding sex education in Arizona, as well as groundwater legislation.
12:00 p.m.: While I was making lunch, I listened to last week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, an NPR radio show, on the Spotify app. The show is great because, while it does make fun of the news, it showcases interesting stories from throughout the country that week.
1:00 p.m.: I watched the last episode of the new Netflix documentary Cheer, which follows a junior college cheer time, one of the best in the nation, around for an entire season and shows their struggles and successes.
3:00 p.m.: Spent time reading my textbook on campaigns and elections, not sure it’s necessarily media but I would probably loop textbooks in.
4:11 p.m.: Photo on twitter showing impeachment articles moving from house to senate.
4:17 p.m.: I read this story on azcentral about a popular bar in Tempe (where I live) had a location in Chicago that settled sexual assault lawsuits. I also sent the article over slack to my editors at The State Press to see if the news was worthy of a story by us.
4:22 p.m: Read another story on azcentral about Gov. Doug Ducey shutting down Lewis Prison in Buckeye. This story interested me particularly because as an intern last semester I wrote a couple of stories about Lewis.
4:30 p.m.: Got a bit distracted from work and watched this video of Bobby Flay making pancakes on Youtube.
4:35 p.m.: Back to writing this blog post, while I listen to the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast on the previous presidential debate in the background. They described the debate as not particularly exciting minus a few brief moments.
5:00 p.m.: Scroll through social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Watched this Youtube Video, which I found on Facebook, of presidential candidate Andrew Yang entering the New Yorker cartoon competition.
6:00 p.m.: While eating dinner, my roommate and I streamed Brooklyn 99 on Hulu and watched two episodes.
7:00 p.m.: I read The Yellowsheet Report, an Arizona political tipsheet run by the cap times. This writing style of the newsletter is what keeps me reading, it’s often sarcastic or even at times crude, but the news is always there and they make it interesting.
8:00 p.m.: From about 8 until I ended up going to bed, my media consumption was mostly social media, which I typically look through if I have a few minutes free or some time to kill.
According to an app on my iPhone that tracks my usage, I spent the most time during this period on Instagram, with Snapchat in second.
Analysis:
At times, I feel like my life revolves around media and consuming it, especially as a journalism major. What I think I found most interesting from this was how many news stories or things I find not by going directly to the sites, but on social media.
This assignment also made me conscious of how much time I spend consuming media, especially on days where I have more free time. I wonder if there’s a way to use my media time more productively without the distractions that inherently are a part of social media.
I look forward to analyzing my media usage throughout the semester, and I really enjoyed this assignment.
2/15 EDIT:
Honestly, I don’t think my habits have changed all that much since the class started. I have definitely read more on the topic I chose for this blog, and that opened me up to more research-based sites like Gallup and Pew, but other than that I haven’t seen a huge shift.
I will say I do read more now than I did before, and I’m also much more aware of what others are reading a sharing online. Overall though, while I have enjoyed and learned a lot in this class, my overall habits have not seen a huge shift.
